Published on the 22/05/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Reckon’s journey to the cloud inches along with the company this week showcasing Reckon One, its first home-grown cloud product which will be available in beta from July…
While more than 70 percent of Australian businesses which have some form of accounting system continue to use an on-premise software package according to analyst Telsyte, a growing cohort is taking to the cloud. The advent of cloud-based accounting systems from the likes of Xero, Saasu, MYOB and NetSuite is driving the change, and the anticipated arrival of Reckon One is expected to accelerate the trend.
Pete Sanders, general manager of Reckon’s business division, said that the target market for Reckon One is organisations with 50-100 employees although he did not discount the tool being adopted by much larger enterprises.
Although the beta version of the tool is expected in July there are as yet no firm dates for the general release of the cloud-based system. Reckon has, however, revealed its pricing will start as low as $5 per user per month.
Reckon currently has the second largest installed base among Australian accounting software users, but with its licensing arrangement with Intuit ending next February the company has developed Reckon One itself, and owns all the intellectual property in the product. However it is far later to the cloud than most of its rivals and a tool to allow Reckon users to migrate their data from their on-premise version of the software to the cloud won’t be available until the final quarter of the year according to Sanders. The company will also wait until the third quarter to release an API allowing third party developers to integrate their software with Reckon One.
Chris Ridd, managing director of Xero in Australia, which has been a front runner for cloud-based accounting welcomed the additional competition in the market, but questioned whether Version One of Reckon’s cloud system would stand up to more established cloud-based solutions. Xero also has an important ally in the shape of professional services giant Deloitte which in April announced it would offer its clients the opportunity to move their ledger across to the Xero platform and that it expected as many as 2000 clients to make the transition by July – just as Reckon’s beta debuts.
