• LiquidAccounts and ClearBooks Update

     

    When talking about the SaaS accounting space in the UK, three companies get all the mentions – but beyond Xero, FreeAgent and KashFlow exists another couple of players that are working away at building viable businesses. It seems like…

  • ClearBooks Ups the Ante

     

    Interesting to read that ClearBooks , the UK based privately held online accounting application, has just secured a new financing deal for an undisclosed sum. Their press release announcing the deal is a marketing message – calling out Sage and Intuit, and specifically pitching itself as a “more UK focused service than online international competitors Xero Limited.”

    No mention of the other UK players like Free Agent Central or KashFlow.

    Further spin comes in the following:

    Clear Books is a rapidly growing company with customer numbers increasing more than 20% per month. It is quickly establishing itself as a leader in the growing SaaS online accounting software market in the UK. Managing Director, Tim Fouracre, said, “Our cash flows continue to reflect impressive growth month on month, but this additional financing will help us accelerate our expansion plans. One of our key objectives is to add depth to our development team to ensure we continue to develop the very best application. Our aim is to make both maintaining company accounts and doing the bookkeeping as easy as possible for small businesses. We are already making great progress on this front with our online VAT filing direct to HMRC and our new payroll module”.

    As I said, with no mention of the amount raised this is little more than a marketing release – that said it’s interesting to see ClearBooks so obviously throw some punches Xero’s way. Interesting also given the recent prediction of QuickBooks’ return to the UK

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  • Xero Makes a Breakthrough – UK Bank Feeds

     

    Automated bank feeds are something of a secret sauce for accounting sofwtare targeted to SMBs. Xero has managed to get a toehold in New Zealand, at least in part, because their strong relationships with the banking institutions enabled them…

  • Trusting the Cloud

     

    The cloud computing industry looks ready for some industry standards. This was highlighted last week when UK accounting vendor ClearBooks had its worst nightmares come true when it had database errors which led to both an unscheduled downtime and a significant loss of data for customers.

  • Now That’s Honesty – Clear Books Publishes SignUp Statistics

     

    SaaS companies are often reluctant to talk about numbers in their early stages. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard that “We don’t release customer numbers but we’re really happy with how things are tracking”. I…