The World beyond Tally

Online financial accounting packages are creating a niche for themselves and breaking the monopoly of Tally

BookMyLens is a photography equipment rental service that provides an easy and quick service for photography enthusiasts to avail all kinds of related equipments.

Headed by Goutham Shankar, BookMyLens provides high quality photography gear, offers doorstep delivery and pick-up, and personally guides in selecting the right equipment. With an increase in customer base, handling the day-to-day delivery and pickup has become very intensive. Added to this, hiring the right kind of talent has also become even more critical than before.

Understandably, everyday bookkeeping and accounting is also becoming a lot more complex as the business grew. "We needed a better way to manage transactions, keep track and have an easier way of regularly updating them. Managing inventory and pay cheques were becoming increasingly hard to deal with," admits Shankar.

When BookMyLens started gaining more popularity and business expanded, the team was quick to set in place systems and processes to streamline various activities. An evaluation of a few online/open source applications was carried out, before the team narrowed it down to QuickBooks Online. After using QuickBooks Online for a year, the firm has been able to smoothen out processes like dispatching invoices to customers, managing inventory, adding vendors and managing complete pay cheques and even linking bank accounts. "QuickBooks Online is well priced, allows multiple user login, and most of all is easy to use. The software has given BookMyLens the edge with features like dealing with taxes and multi-currency options and it empowers us to compile informative reports on the fly. More importantly, this software has helped us easily identify where there are delayed or unpaid invoices. Now our accounting and financial management is in a single place, as opposed to using endless files and documents," adds Shankar.

Accountants are one of the most trusted advisors for Indian businesses. They play a key role in ensuring the financial health of the firms. As the world leader in business and financial management software- Intuit, through its leading cloud based software QuickBooks Online, helps Indian accountants and bookkeepers serve their clients better by providing real time insights into their client's finances. Launched in October 2012, QuickBooks Online has been trialed by over 50,000 users in India. The early adopters have been small businesses from the services sectors such as IT Consultants, Lawyers, Advertising & Design agencies, Event management agencies, Architects, Interior Designers etc.

"In a recent survey conducted with QuickBooks users in India, it was found that nearly 90% of the respondents agreed that QuickBooks provides anytime, anywhere access. 74%of respondents highlighted QuickBooks' multiple-user login feature that made it easy for employees to access data.76% of the respondents agreed that they have benefited from the automatic data backup feature of the cloud-based product. Accountants are also playing a key role in recommending their own clients to migrate to QuickBooks Online. The accountant channel has seen adoption rate of 49% over the last six months," pointed out Nikhil Arora, VP and MD, Intuit India. Intuit is focused on small businesses and hence, QuickBooks Online is targeted at the small business segment. "QuickBooks Online has been developed for small business owners and hence, its biggest value proposition is that it does not mandate prior accounting knowledge for usage and is very easy to use. No complex accounting jargon is used in the interface terminologies. Moreover, QuickBooks Online provides business intelligence with simple graphical representations. These insights enable effective decision making for business owners on the go, no matter where they are," adds Arora.

But every new technology is looked with doubt, it was not far long that our parents was averse to internet banking. Now we cannot imagine our life without it. In India, small businesses are largely desktop oriented and have not fully explored the option of using cloud technology. Small business owners also raise concerns on network infrastructure and data security. "It's high time that we have to take accounting from that typical desktop application to the future where it belongs. That's what we are doing at ProfitBooks, that's our strategy," says Harshal Katre, CEO, ProfitBooks.

The concept of online software use is still new to businesses. Customers used to worry about internet connection but with increasing 3G penetration and broadband connectivity, the intensity of this query has gone down. Data security is prime concern for customers. "We are currently providing 256 bit encryption of data security while Indian banks provide 128 bit of encryption," adds Katre. The firm has clients from SME segment where the average employee size is 25. Some of its clients have multi-locational presence and employee size is around 50. The clients are almost equally distributed across small manufacturing, trading and service sector. The company is witnessing more than 100% quarter on quarter growth in customer acquisition. In order to make users understand the benefit of ProfitBooks, it offers a free 1 month trial.

Although the standard accounting softwares are built in a way so that it meets most of the business requirements, yet there are some organizations which might have specific needs, not met by the software alone. Herein, comes the necessity of customization. Profitbooks have customized plans for service based businesses like interior decorators, lawyers, chartered accountants and for businesses that deal with physical inventory like traders, manufacturers, resellers, etc and BUSY, another major player in the market catering for micro and SMEs sector has BusyWin (Windows-based BUSY) that offers the possibility of customization.

BUSY comes in three editions- Basic, Standard & Enterprise. Whereas Basic edition is available in 1 variant (Single-User) only - Standard & Enterprise editions are available in 3 variants (Single-User, Multi-User and Client-Server) each. It is sold and supported all over the country through an ever-increasing network of Channel Partners.

The power of technology is changing the overall Indian business landscape. "They want to take their business everywhere with them, they want real time data, they want to know how much business is done in last hour; and with great internet penetration they are open to new technology called cloud. Though this is transition phase we see great adaptability of Indian Business towards this," adds Khatre.