Accountants are the main channel for new age accounting software developers to distribute their software. All the new great features are not designed for document processing on the large scale that bookkeepers require, they are designed for accountants who deal with a client once or twice a year (exceptions only prove the rule). Bookkeepers deal with clients on a regular basis and require different functionality. Current accounting software is not for bookkeepers, because: accountants don’t want to do data entry, most clients don’t want to do data entry and bookkeepers are doing so much more than just punching in the data and software developers are turning their features away from bookkeepers.
The client is encouraged to do as much data entry as they can and a lot of the clients don’t want to do anything bookkeeping related, and that is why some functionality of Xero is rarely used. People don’t want to enter accounts, GST codes and descriptions for their expenses. Because they are inconsistent and constantly stuff it up. Xero pushed it for years as a revolutionary feature to sell the product and 4 years down the track I have never seen a company that actually uses it.
Accounting software is going further and further from being able to efficiently process all documents in one place. With multiple add-ons and storing devices the documents are getting more and more scattered. Accountants and business owners don’t store ‘source documents’ within cloud files, it takes extra time. As a result ‘source documents’ are now all over the place: multiple hard drives and USB sticks, multiple email accounts, hard copies in folders where some of them are fading away, and again multiple third party apps. At the end of the day, it is the business owner’s responsibility to provide ‘source documents’ to prove the transaction and accountants are only providing advice on information provided to them. So accountants rarely push clients to accurately store all the documents. They possibly think, there is no need to make their lives more difficult than it already is in business…
Most processing third party applications (e.g. InvitBox, Receipt Bank, GeoOp, ShoeBoxed) are not storing documents in Xero or QuickBooks Online or MYOB cloud files. They store it on their own servers, giving you only the link to there. If you stop paying them then you have lost access to a possibly significant part of your documents. Many people don’t realise that till it is too late… Retrieving them from there properly is very time consuming and not as easy as most of us would think.
Even ICB wrote an open letter to Accounting Software Developers on behalf of the bookkeeping profession: “We are looking for you to create logical business processes in your software that support us in creating the best, most efficient business processes for actually conducting each business (not just recording the transactions after, but during business at the time). While you do this, please don’t just rush us half-baked solutions into your product.” Bookkeepers are starting to feel more and more excluded from the software that they are being offered.
At the end of the day the client owns all the documents, not the accountant or bookkeeper or a software company. The software needs to be an efficient tool for processing and storing of documents. If Accounting Software Developers are not going to turn their face to bookkeepers, we will get chaos with our clients documents being scattered across dozens of third party applications over the years.