UK Accounting Software Market Report

In  keeping with our open approach as a business, I am pleased to unveil our UK Accounting Software Market Report. For a copy please click here: UK Accounting Software Market.

If you would like to use this report or quote from it, you may do so providing you reference and link to the Clear Books website www.clearbooks.co.uk.

Last month I posted a plea to online accounting providers asking them to volunteer as much information as possible about their businesses. A big thank you is due to the following vendors who obliged:

Thanks also extends to the following industry commentators:

These were the contributors cited by the research team so apologies if anyone has been missed out. In particular gratitude must go to the three students from The Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge who put together this report over a period of just one month. These students were set objectives on the premise that they were acting as consultants to Clear Books, and were then left to carry out their research independently.

As far as I am aware this report is the first ever serious piece of consolidated work on the online accounting market in the UK. That’s not such a surprise in our young industry.

The interesting snippets that I picked up were:

What did you pick out? Do you agree with the research or do some facts need setting straight? Let me know…

About the Author - Tim Fouracre

I've always been interested in computers and finance. I started out as a PHP developer and later qualified as a Chartered Accountant at KPMG.

Programming and accounting came together when I co-founded Clear Books online accounting software back in July 2008.

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Showing 5 Comments

  1. David Terrar

    I’ve been trying to get hold of your researchers, and I’m told I can speak to them on Monday. Like at least 2 of the other people they spoke to for input, they failed to represent their connection with your company when they canvassed me for my contribution, and didn’t give me the chance to see what they were attributing to me, or the rest of the report, before publication. I need to read it carefully, but the research looks very flawed in places. My guess is that you’ll get ngative feedback from a number of the commentators that the report quotes. .

    2 years ago

  2. David Terrar

    Hi Tim,
    When it comes to online accounting SaaS solutions, I’m not independent. I’m a partner of Twinfield, one of the solutions in your report. I had plenty of email dialogue wth the researchers, who told me I would see the report in advance of publication. An oversight on somebody’s part, I guess, but still disappointing. I wasn’t watching your blog as your researchers never mentioned the ClearBooks connection.

    2 years ago

  3. Tim

    Hi David,

    I can only re-iterate the point I made in our reaction post – that we contacted vendors by email and told them that we were doing this report so our competitors were in the loop. We also published an article on our “call to vendors”.

    I am sorry if you as an independent analyst didn’t get an email from me or missed our blog article.

    2 years ago

  4. Tim

    Yes this does look like an oversight. The original email went out to those online accounting apps founded in the UK – KashFlow, FreeAgent, Liquid, Crunch etc. So I must admit Twinfield were not on the list and the students must have widened their net.

    We originally planned to take out all bits relating only to Clear Books (e.g. recommendations, appendices etc) and then send that redacted version to the vendors. When we made the decision to simply publish the whole lot it didn’t seem worth the effort. We decided the best way to disseminate the information was to put live on the blog.

    We weren’t expecting a backlash! Hopefully you will agree that this type of report does have a use and a place. The ball is rolling for the next team of researchers to pick up the gauntlet… as we’ve had our turn :-)

    2 years ago

  5. Ben Kepes

    Tim – I’m not such an egoist that I will jump up and down about this but yeah, it would have been nice to see an advance copy before publication. I’ve not been through the report with any great detail (w/end here and I’m going tramping) but I will do so next week…

    In either case, it’s important to see the big-picture here. Flawed or otherwise it’s good to see more content out there about the SaaS market – but, as I say, I’ll have more to say after I’ve ruminated over the report

    2 years ago