Published on the 19/02/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Accounting software company Reckon will this month make available its cloud based system Reckon One – but it’s got its work cut out to sell it…
MYOB and Reckon between them lay claim to the overwhelming majority of the desktop accounting software market in Australia.
Previously Reckon held the exclusive rights to sell Intuit’s Quicken and QuickBooks software in Australia, but as of this month that has ended.
Although Reckon has access to the source code of Quicken and QuickBooks for 99 years, it has written its own desktop system, and last Monday held what it describes as a “soft launch” of its first cloud-based system, Reckon One, which should become widely available later this month.
Users will be charged $5 a month for the core platform, then $3 each for the invoicing, projects and bank feeds modules.
According to Pete Sanders, managing director of Reckon, the company has “aggressive targets” with regard to sales. Reckon currently claims 600,000 customers – the vast majority of which run software on their own computers.
Just 25,000 customers use Reckon’s hosted version of the system.
With Reckon One the company is going to be pitching against not only long-term rival MYOB which has a cloud solution, but also Intuit and Xero which have all stepped up their Australian marketing efforts this year.
Speaking at the Techleaders Forum in Queensland this week Sanders acknowledged that the “accounting software space is going through a major disruption”.
He acknowledged that “our competitors have done a great job,” and that the challenge for Reckon was to create a “famous accounting software brand”.
“Intuit is the gorilla in the room,” Sanders said, but added that the major challenge would be overcoming Xero, which had had a “runaway success in the rest of the world”.
Sanders, who is considering offering a free migration service to customers of alternative accounting software vendors, believes that from a technology point of view the modularity of Reckon One will be a major ally in winning new customers, claiming that made it more compelling than Xero.
What it can’t offer yet is a broad ecosystem of third party applications that can plug into Reckon. This has been a priority for Xero, which has used its open API strategy to encourage third parties to develop add-on software for Xero users.
