Reaction To Online Accounting Report

• Tim Fouracre
• Friday, 11 June 2010
• 5 comments
• Announcements

We have had a rather Over The Top reaction to our UK Accounting Software Market Report from one “industry expert” in particular.

It’s a real shame because the article written by accmanpro is full of inaccuracies and more alarmingly some rather aggressive accusations. What’s more disappointing though is that this project was a genuine attempt to get involved with a group of young students to produce an interesting report that would be beneficial to the online accounting industry.

Originally we had planned to redact the report to remove all reference to Clear Books specific action points, but in keeping with our normal approach to business we published the report in its entirety.

Now to set accmanpro straight on a couple of points.

“Their goal is to explore the online accounting market, its size, how quickly it is growing and to compare it with the traditional accounting software market…It turns out that was at best a misrepresentation and at worst a lie.”

All vendors were emailed by me and told, “All those who particpate will receive a copy of the finalised comparison report. And to be completely open, the students are doing a separate section specific to Clear Books which you will not be receiving, but this is not relevant to the comparison or the data you provide anyway.” In the end we decided to just published the entire thing.

“It now turns out that ClearBooks is a JBS client.”

We did not pay the students [Edit: or anyone at the University ] - they are students after all! They were our clients in as much as we set their objectives and that much was obvious from my original post.

“you can be sure that ClearBooks agenda figures into the equation”

Untrue. We set the objectives and let the students get on with it. We gave them access to data and customers but had no impact otherwise. It’s not in our interest and this is where a fundamental point is missed about the nature of our business. We are interested in feedback to improve the system not in any hidden agenda.

“Furthermore, while the report singles out Xero, Kashflow, FreeAgent, Winweb and FreshBooks it says nothing about ClearBooks financial performance.”

We have been open about our performance since we launched so there is nothing afoot here. As a reminder our user numbers are here [Edit: To calculate our financials you need to perform the simple calculation of user numbers x average subscription price]. Fair enough that Clear Books wasn’t included in the report, but I guess the students expected us to know our own numbers! As I have already mentioned, Clear Books had no input aside setting the objectives and marking a presentation at the end of the project.

“That might be because there is no entry under that name at Companies House. I could go on but we’ll leave it there for the moment”

This is now starting to get ridiculous. Try searching for ”Clear Books Limited” instead of ”ClearBooks”.

“ClearBooks knew the research was underway, knew the terms under which it was being conducted and probably provided considerable assistance in framing the research. It doesn’t take a genius with knowledge of web stats more than 2 seconds to figure out that setting up a bot to drive traffic would be the obvious next step.”

I had to laugh out loud at this one! The truth of the matter is that we had a very large survey conducted which was responsible for the spike.  As outlined here 37,459 people took the survey but in the end more than 50,000 did. Again, we had no input on the students’ research.

[Edit: Look at this screenshot of our monthly unique visitors from google analytics to see that we did actually get 30k unique visitors in the month of May despite the spike caused by our survey in April].

“It is far from clear whether Google ranking alone let alone page views is any indicator of popularity or – as the report states – ‘fairing well.’”

A lesson in SEO is required here.

“In all the years I have been conducting and poring over research, I have never seen a radar diagram of the kind that is shown at bottom left.”

Apart from the perfection arrow being pointed at the wrong diagram, am I the only one that can see that, yes, Clear Books did very well in some areas but also worse in others? I hope I am not sounding like a broken record but again we had no input on these studies whatsoever… we are too busy trying to develop an awesome online accounting app and fending off rogue articles.

“Given they were MBA students”

Not that it is really here nor there but they were actually MST students, a slip up I made and corrected in my original post.

“The bigger problem is that ClearBooks will use the kudos of an academic institute to add gravitas to something that I see as of questionable value and worth.”

Kudos to us then, I suppose :)

Showing 5 Comments

1. 
   Tim

   Fair enough Dennis – that is your prerogative.

   The gauntlet is laid for the next attempt. This report, in my opinion, is a step in the right direction.

   2 years ago
2. 
   Dennis Howlett

   Let’s assume for one moment that I take all your comments at face value and say – OK – you’re right. Which by the way I don’t. If that’s the case then my basic premise holds up. This is a poor piece of research at best.

   2 years ago
3. 
   Ben Kepes

   The bottom line here is the question of whether flawed (but at least “in the wild”) research is better than no research at all.

   Personally I believe that, despite some flaws, the report is a foundation upon which can be built more independent and robust research in the future. Yes the students made some fundamental mistakes both in approach and methodology, but as someone once said, let he who is without sin cast the first stone… or comment in this case…

   2 years ago
4. 
   adrian

   sorry – have to disagree. flawed research is misleading at best, dangerous at worst.

   It’s not about a blame game – it’s about taking student led research and adding it to a canon of emerging studies in a very important emerging business market.

   but if you need student led research, there are probably other more pertinent problems in-house.

   as a SaaS consultant, those things are always taken into account,

   2 years ago
5. 
   Brendan McLoughlin

   What a shame there are now yet more false accusations leveled at Clear Books that we ignore feedback and comments about the report. This is simply not true either. The whole way we hold ourselves out to the market is in the spirit of openness and transparency. The reason we commissioned the report was to get more information about the market out in the open.

   We have commissioned this research in good faith and despite the fact that we have had little involvement in what has been produced any reader will be aware it was commissioned by us and will take this into account when making a decision.

   More important to me is that commissioning this report alone demonstrates Clear Books is the kind of business that will commission research and is interested in furthering the development of the whole market rather than focusing purely on what we are doing we are looking around for best practices and adopting them as well as listening to our customers which I believe is why our customer growth is accelerating faster.

   We certainly haven’t done this to provoke such a reaction from this new industry and our competitors. We will of course learn from this reaction but we do believe that things should be out in the open in an emerging market to encourage business adoption and confidence. If they are all the businesses in the report we commissioned at set to benefit because it will become clear a trend toward SaaS in accounting is real.

   If that involves taking a bit of an attack for taking the lead then we are more than prepared to do that. I hope as Tim says those attacking us reflect and this is the start of more openness in a new industry which I think everyone agrees has great potential.

   I am an investor in Clear Books Ltd.

   2 years ago