TaxCalc Blog

Thanks for the comment, Tim.

30 seconds is the average support wait but I’m afraid it’s true you will sometimes wait longer.

With regard to the extra cost of CloudConnect, we don’t feel this is unreasonable as we are taking on the burden of the infrastructure and data management. Whilst it is tempting to imagine that providing a Cloud platform is free, this illusion is created by products that have it costed in from the start or suppliers who suffer the cost from their profit margin in the expectation of a substantial increase in unit sales to compensate.

You make the interesting assertion that such a service should only be browser-based but I would be keen to learn your rationale for this. I say that as the feedback we took from customers (existing and prospective) was that they were overwhelmingly more concerned with performance, familiarity and functionality than having something that was styled like a website and could be used on a smartphone.

Xero and FreeAgent, amongst others, are widely used and highly regarded as cloud packages but they are very different propositions from back-office practice software like TaxCalc. Their delivery method works well for the less intensive bookkeeping needs of the small business, where the ability to raise an occasional invoice ‘on the hoof’ has value.

TaxCalc, however, is a production system used more intensively by operators who are used to entering data at speed and enjoying a rich interface displaying features that they are very familiar with. We received little indication from the practitioners we consulted that they envisaged doing client work in a public space or on an iOS/Android device.

This approach of a single code base puts us under no pressure to forcibly move customers to our Cloud option, now or in the foreseeable future, as we are not duplicating work in the way that suppliers who start again from scratch are.

This in turn gives our customers choice as to when, and if, they change – purely driven by the style of working they prefer, as the presentation is identical. It also means migration is a just zero-loss database relocation exercise. Finally, there are material security benefits which we believe are appropriate for a profession handling client data rather than just their own.

In any event, the reaction we got at Accountex last week was extremely positive so we hope to have a significant body of practices implementing CloudConnect on an operational basis in a short time and sharing their views.