Saturday, December 05, 2009

Software Bowl Championship Series

The end of the college football season is near. This weekend marks the start of the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) selection with the conference championship games beginning. There are a lot of great teams out there that have worked very hard to get to their conference championship games and the day is sure to be a very exciting one. Many of the coaches that have been in the driver’s seat all year have to continue to coach at a high level to ensure that their teams don’t get complacent and think that they are entitled to the champion crown (as I write this post Pitt is beating the favorite Cincinnati).

The same can be said for many of the small business accounting software vendors that are vying for the small business accounting market. Now that Microsoft has withdrawn their offering from the small business accounting market, the major player Intuit’s QuickBooks may feel that the battle is all but won. If I were the head coach for the QB team I would have to tell the troops to hold on one minute and don’t get complacent. There is still a great deal of competition out there (the major competition is Sage’s Peachtree Accounting) and although QB is a great product, they still have problems with executing software updates (see R9 update issues) and compatibility issues with the new Windows 7 operating system.

Makes a small business owner wonder if there is a small business software title that can execute processes virtually flawlessly and not give the small business owner problems every year. I did come across a SaaS product (software as a service) that may provide small business owners with everything they need to operate their business from anywhere and efficiently. I will be test driving the product called WorkingPoint and provide a little more insight into how well it works versus a problematic off the shelf software product. More on that next week but until then back to the football games at hand.

B. N. S.

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