Held Into Account

Robert Knochel, president of Quality Computer Services (QCS), an MSP in Pittsburgh, says a great deal of manual labor still goes into handing off data from his Tigerpaw Software PSA solution to an ePeachtree accounting tool from Sage Software. Likewise, Dave Moorman, president of DynaSis, a 14-year-old Roswell, Ga., VAR in business as an MSP for seven years, has simply accepted the fact that spending an extra eight to 10 hours a month moving batch files of accounting data from Connectwise to Sage's MAS 500 accounting system is the easiest way to do things.

One solution provider, Howard Cunningham, president of Macro Systems, Fairfax, Va., tried using Microsoft CRM as a PSA platform but discovered it didn't have an adequate billing mechanism, he said. So, it was back to spending man-hours transferring billing information from Connectwise to a Sage accounting system, he said.

All midmarket PSA vendors say they are there to assist customers that ask for help with accounting integration. Connectwise President Arnie Bellini says any partner who's had problems with accounting has been helped. Autotask says there are very few problems with accounting integration to its PSA product because it's tuned best to QuickBooks, and 90 percent of Autotask's customers use QuickBooks.

Tigerpaw Vice President James Foxall points a finger at the accounting vendors. "Accounting vendors are difficult to work with," he said. "We can't get free-of-cost versions of their products to write to, so we do it custom for our customers. I mean, it's just not within our means to spend $50,000 a year buying accounting packages to figure out how to write to their interfaces. That's one of the areas that completely disappoints me."

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

The accounting software vendors may not be all that motivated to help the PSA industry, because they, too, are eyeballing a larger slice of PSA market share, said The Norwich Group President Anne Stanton, who used Sage's ACT customer management software as an example. "The ACTs of the world are coming out with CRM products, so in the accounting software world, what you see driving accounting software purchases is more and more the CRM model," said Stanton. "Add CRM to accounting and you end up beginning to move toward small-business ERP solutions—the complete accounting-does-everything solution."

For evidence of this, one need look only as far as the Sept 15. move by Sage to acquired the mobile division of Corum, a Concord, Ontario-based business partner that specializes in CRM. Sage says Corum's mobile CRM technology is integrated with Sage CRM SalesLogix and will be available for all Sage CRM, SageCRM.com and ACT customers.

One Sage partner noted that the Corum deal follows Salesforce.com's purchase of Sendia's mobile CRM platform last spring and SAP's acquisition of Praxis Software Solutions. "Apparently, continued strengthening of CRM is a focal point for all the midmarket accounting vendors," said Bob LaGarde, chairman of LaGarde StoreFront, a Sage ISV that offers integrated solutions for Microsoft Great Plains and Navision, Sage MAS 90/200/500 and Accpac and SAP BusinessOne.

SalesForce.com launched its AppExchange Mobile platform last April after its $15 million acquisition of Sendia. SAP's deal with Praxis enabled it to provide e-commerce and Web-based CRM capabilities for Business One.

Microsoft, with its CRM 3.0 software product, is not yet a viable threat to the majority of midmarket PSA vendors, said Stanton. MS CRM wasn't originally released as a midmarket solution, and with 3.0 Redmond still has yet to produce a viable midmarket offering as far as ease of use and price. "But," she said, "Microsoft will catch up, oh definitely."

PAULA ROONEY contributed to this story.