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I posted a year or so ago that:

the distinction between personal and business finance is pretty blurred

It was a call for micro and small business accounting vendors to offer a personal finance service in the acknowledgement that most micro businesses have an increasingly blurred line between personal and business expenses. As I said at the time:

Almost all micro businesses I know use a personal credit card for business expenses – sure that can be solved via expense claims but that’s not really in keeping with the actuality. Similarly most micro businesses that require funding achieve it by using their personal equity to guarantee debt – again removing personal finances from this business finance model ignores this fact.

I was pleased to see then the other day that Xero’s (see disclosure) new personal finance offering really addresses this issue in the most logical way – giving users the ability to post business expenses incurred on a personal bank account through to the business.

It works like this:

As a personal finance user, you categorize a transaction as a business expense and then you’re given the option to send a receipt to whichever particular organization it may relate to (yup – believe it or not people are involved in multiple businesses):

 

You’re then able to choose the organization the invoice relates to and include some information in the description field:

 

You hit Send Expense Claim and now a draft receipt will be in your business organization:

Your transaction will also update inside Xero Personal to show that your claim has been sent:

So simple but so enabling – it’s little things like this that can save lots of time and effort for SMBs. Of course it would be even better if one could split expenses – ie 30% of my power bill become a business expense. So many use cases, so little time….

Friendly contacts have ensured that I’m part of the beta program – I’ll be taking it through its paces and, once it’s ready for roll out, I’ll post a detail review.

I wrote almost a couple of years ago now about MYOB’s (see disclosure statement) first foray into the world of SaaS. I wasn’t overly impressed, saying at the time that:

MYOB has the experience, the money and the clout to bring a product to market with the features that users need. Under this measure MYOB has failed, if it’s true that this has been a five year project, BBO is a failure.

Since then lots has happened – MYOB has been sold to a private equity firm. The product head for BBO, Stuart Bale was poached by (and subsequently let go from) Xero and meanwhile BBO has pretty much stood derelict and orphaned.

Come April MYOB are going to it again and will be releasing their MYOB Live Accounts product. The Sydney Morning Herald have trumpeted about the move but, as is often the way with traditional media, haven’t understood some of the subtleties that give a story context. They also quote MYOB’s CTO saying that the product is built on Microsoft Azure however I have it from a source within MYOB that this is not in fact the case.

So what can we expect form this product? An MYOB reseller newsletter that came across my desk this week gave some minor details – pricing around NZD35, a pared down offering focused on sole traders and the like and leveraging heavily the automatic bank feeds that are Xero’s main differentiator.

I’d expect to see, similar to the previous MYOB SaaS product, an offering that serves the invoicing and expenses parts of the business with little on the “richer” parts of the desktop offering (inventory, financial reporting etc). I’d also expect MYOB to leverage the excellent relationships it has with banks in Australia and New Zealand in order to cut a blow into Xero’s self-proclaimed position as “thought-leader” in this particular space.

I can’t imagine it having any real impact on that other Australasian SaaS vendor Saasu – of the three, the Saasu product is the most fully featured and I’d imagine MYOB’s product would come in well below this in terms of functionality.

Watch this space for a more detailed review once I’ve seen the product.

Zoho has just unveiled the next generation release of its invoice product. The two most notable changes are the inclusion of a nice business-logic dashboard, and the addition of expenses to the offering.

Generally the UI has been greatly improved – there is nice use of tabs as opposed to separate boxes for further information on a particular invoice (payments, history, emails etc)

The expenses module is what you’d expect – I was particularly please to see that it allows for billable expenses to be on-charged to customers – an eminently logical and time-saving feature that is inexplicably missing in other offerings.

I talked with Zoho evangelist, Raju Vegesna to get Zoho’s perspective on what these functional changes mean in the long term. Vegesna was quick to articulate that the product will not evolve into an Accounting app but that they did fully intend to keep adding features to this app though. 

Behind the scenes Zoho has included much-needed support for multi user access – currently there are two permission levels: administrator and staff. Hopefully with time more granular permissioning will become available.

Zoho has previously been more about integration with its own internal products that about creating open APIs to let the world integrate with it – it was a strategy directly opposite to that which the The Small Business Web folks are pursuing with their call for open APIs. Interestingly in this release Zoho has opened up the application with an API – it’ll be fascinating to see what third party integrations that delivers.

In the case of their own internal apps, Vegesna advised that Zoho Invoice will integrate with other Zoho apps tightly. CRM will be the first followed by Zoho Mail. Specifically the Email History feature in Invoice 2.0 integrates at a high level, but apparently it will go deeper with Zoho Mail going forward.

Interestingly Zoho recently (and pretty much silently) rolled out CRM & Quickbooks integration it shows something of a desire to play with the outside world, and to accept that integration with external apps (especially such stalwarts as Quickbooks, is an imperative. Zoho intends to also integrate invoice with Quickbooks – and in doing so will be going head to head with the other SaaS invoicing providers.

Finally Zoho intends to offer its invoice product to Google Apps users moving forward in a similar way to how they offer Projects, CRM & Meeting for Google apps.

All in all this iteration of Zoho invoice is a far more intuitive one, the addition of expenses really rounds out the product and makes it a viable option for freelancers and small service and product businesses.

(Disclosure – CloudAve is solely sponsored by Zoho, however I cover all accounting applications, have previously reviewed Zoho Invoice 1.0 and as such need to update my information. Suffice it to say this is my own opinion untainted by any commercial bias.

On another note, we’ve been planning to publish this at 6am PST, the planned release time.  But now that the news is out, there’s no point in holding back. Oh, the fun of embargoes)