ITS NOT GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE
How does an accounting practise go from running a relatively reasonable system that works and in this instance, I refer to ProSeries? The firm is now faced with a choice of doing an upgrade either to SKY or to one of the competitors, and the competitor comes in and without really giving us an opportunity to pitch Sky, they go the competitor route?
Maybe this is a price issue, maybe it is because one of the competitors has a fantastic working paper system and the firm thinks they are getting the same quality.
We have had a few of these situations where clients have changed. The change is a huge effort with much trauma, therefore its really difficult to come back. Of course, the people within who made or helped make the decision have to protect their decision that they made! They do this by hanging in there at all costs. Sometimes they leave the firms because they can’t take the pressure!
We had the situation where a relatively small 2 partner practice changed because of the pressure of the audit manager. The Partners called us in May 2017 and said "we cannot take this anymore, we are really struggling with our Debtors", but in fact the whole system and we want to come back to your software.  Of course, we allowed them to come back and catch up as they started again at the 1st January 2017 redoing their work from the time they changed because they could not rely on their current data.
These are the kind of things they told us they encountered.

1. Data conversion is traumatic and took a long time to sort out.
2. The Debtors is not comparable to any South African Debtors system.  You cannot process a refund.  You can’t do write offs. Invoicing is a nightmare and very slow.
3. It is definitely not integrated. They tell you that it is integrated but it is definitely not integrated and there are numerous errors with the so called integration connections.
4. They can’t do quick fixes so if you find a bug you live with it.
5. When you do an update you have got to update each program type separately.  Secretarial, Time, Tax etc individually on each terminal and this takes hours.
6. They do not have a Cloud system, other than one module but claim they will soon have more. They do have a Secretarial Cloud and then off course they have a Time Cloud which is international and not developed by the same developers so where is the integration!
7. The reports are sub-standard.  The reports in no way compare to the reports that we have in ProSeries. We were told that the tax system is vastly inferior to Tax Manager.
8. There are many other issues which I won’t bother to mention.
9. Oh yes and the person who forced the decision left the firm.

So please if you find yourself in this situation do your homework before you make these kind of decisions, really have a good look.
I am not saying that we are perfect, but we certainly are now reaching a point where we are closer to perfection than anyone else.  Listen to what our clients say.  Have a look on www.accfinsoftware.com for the webinar with Andrew Alt of Charteris Barnes.

Dear Client
 
You all know that over the years I have been preaching to tax practices on how to reduce their risk exposure. 
 
We have introduced something new for both ProSeries and SKY users in regard to the Tax Mandate.  It is an e-Filing term and condition that you get a signed mandate from every tax client that you do work for.
 
The mandate to use may be our mandate which you are welcome to change if you want to.
This is going to work with our digital signature system. Your client will be able to sign the mandate electronically and the signed document with the signature will be returned to your system electronically.
 
Please indicate your interest by responding to this e-mail and just say YES I am interested and we will get back to you with the set up.
 
Please note that this is a precursor to the provisional tax run in August 2017. This system will save you many hours of labour.
 
To find out more about digital signatures please click on the link below.
 
http://www.accfinsoftware.com/digital-signatures.html
 
You will find a short video and a webinar on the legal situation of digital signatures.
 
Regards
Mark