Product Management Update

The Simply Accounting 2011 Beta program has officially wrapped up as of today.

Everyone was able to install and upgrade their company files without any problems. We also had some great participation and feedback on the new features.

The participants also had the opportunity to go through the new GST/HST EFILE that will be available in the June update for Simply Accounting 2010. Remember that the easiest way to get your June update is to use the Check for Updates feature under the help menu.

Alistair

We are sending out the second cycle of our beta this week. We had some great feedback on improving usability of new features from the participants and have changed our plans a bit in order to incorporate some of this feedback into the product. So far there have been no major issues, which is great to see. I am anticipating that this next cycle of beta will bring in more usability related feedback as opposed to technical issues with Simply Accounting 2011 Beta.

There have also been no issues with converting company files to the new release. This is great to hear as well.

Hope everyone is having a great spring and tax season.

Alistair

We have sent out invitations for our Simply Accounting 2011 Beta this week. We are currently inviting our accountant partners, the members of our Product Advisory Board, and our development partners. The Beta will be available March 8^th, 2010.

The Beta Program allows us to get early feedback on the design of the upcoming release, as well as help us catch and resolve any quality issues.

Why these customers?

We include our accountant partners, because they approach the program from the view of the multiple clients they represent. They tend to also know the product quite well and are able to provide good feedback on the state of the Beta cycle in many different areas of the product.

We are including members of the Product Advisory Board as they helped design the features and enhancements to the product. The Beta program will allow them to try out these features and enhancements in action.

We always want our development partners to be up to date with our pending release. The Beta program provides them the opportunity to ensure their own products keep working with Simply Accounting and are ready shortly after our release.

Why not everyone?

We want to be sure we can manage the program properly and provide the appropriate level of service to our Beta participants. If we find we can increase the number of participants, we will look into opening up the second round of the Beta to everyone. I will of course announce this here, but there would also be a link provided from our web site. Our second Beta cycle is currently scheduled to start on April 19^th, 2010.

Beta Feedback

I will be hosting a weekly Conference Call and Webinar (via WebEx and a toll free call-in number) with our Beta participants to discuss how the product is working for them and what they think of the new features. I will post here some of the highlights from those meetings so you can find out how the Beta program is going.

Thank you,

Alistair Ellis

Simply Accounting Product Manager

Simply Accounting offers a number of different features and reports to help business owners run their business. At the same time, we do know that sometimes businesses need more in-depth functionality than what is included in the program. This is where our third party partners come in. They have solutions that may offer more robust functionality and integrate with Simply Accounting to keep the accounting system up to date. Such add-on products include reporting tools, point of sale systems, EDI integration, etc. Check out our third party developers to see if there are applications which can be integrated with Simply Accounting and can provide you with a more complete business solution.

As everyone may already know, Simply Accounting 2010 was released this past October. If you are on a current SimplyCARE plan you should have already received an email with your Simply Accounting 2010 activation codes and instructions on where to download the new release. If you have paid to receive your updates on CD then you should also have received this as well.

When you are ready to upgrade to Simply Accounting 2010 from your current version, you can refer to the email you were sent in the fall, or follow the steps on the web site.

Canadian customers, select this site: http://www.simplyaccounting.com/How_To_Upgrade

US customer, select this site: http://www.simplyaccounting.com/How_To_Upgrade_US

The controlled release is a release of the final product to a limited number of users. This allows us to ensure the product is ready for market and will not have any major impacts to our existing customers.

We did receive some great feedback on the new features. The installation was commented as being smooth. The start up, reporting and posting performance has been a noticable improvement as well.

Some issues have been brought to light and any impacting issues have been addressed for the release being shipped this fall. The other less impacting issues will be revisited and addressed in the December update or in the next major release. Though this is not the most desirable results, it was best to find out before all customers were given the product.

We definitely appreciate the partipation of our customers in the controlled release program, and hope they have also found benefit in getting the product before everyone else.

Alistair

We had some great feedback from the participants this year. We also held weekly webinars to get participants’ input and opinions on different areas of the product. It was a good way to initiate conversations around how a feature was designed and how it could be improved. From a product manager’s perspective it was perfect as instead of reading about an idea on the forum and trying to get validations on the idea, everyone on the call was able to toss in their two cents and help formulate a more complete market perspective on the issue.

We will be building the last cycle of Simply Accounting 2010 next week and handing it over to our Controlled Release participants. Controlled Release is a program where a limited number of customers are given the new product earlier than the rest of our customers. The idea being to allow customers to use it in a real environment, their business, to ensure the product truly is ready for the entire market.

Thank you to all who participated in the Beta program and to those who are able to participate in the Controlled Release program.

We are now into our Beta Cycle 2 of the Beta Program. We have also sent out the SDK to our development partners, and we are looking forward to hearing their feedback on the improvements we have made.

A SDK is a software development kit. Software companies provide these kits to other companies that would like to create software that extends or adds additional functionality to the original product.

We already have a number of development partners and they can be found here. We are providing improvements to the developers to make it easier for them to develop their solutions to work with Simply Accounting. This provides more complete business solutions for those customers that would like to use Simply Accounting, but the product itself does not provide something more specific to their business. Such areas could be retail point of sales systems, advanced manufacturing needs, or more in-depth reporting tools.

I am sure Beta Cycle 2 will provide some good feedback, both regarding the product as well as the SDK.

The Simply Accounting 2010 Beta Cycle 1 is well on its way and we have received good feedback from the participants.

We had some good discussions on report performance and start up performance which I have brought to the attention of our development team to see if we can make improvements before the launch date.

Our Beta cycle 2 starts on June 1^st, and we are excited about hearing how our participants find the improvements we made for Simply Accounting 2010.

Our US accounting partners and product advisory board members will also be invited to participate in the Beta cycle 2. Again, we had not invited them for Beta cycle 1, as the Simply Accounting 2009 launch in the US happened the same week as Beta cycle 1 started and we did not want to cause confusion about which version they should be using and which version they should be testing.

We did WebEx’s for our Beta this time. (A WebEx is an online meeting where people dial in to listen to the call and can log in with their computer to see what I am doing on screen on my computer) I do believe they have been helpful in gathering feedback from the participants. At times one participant will comment on something they found and this will trigger other participants to pipe in about their similar experiences.

I will be having our first WebEx for Beta cycle 2 on June 5^th and I am sure I will have some good tidbits to report back here.

Thank you,

Alistair Ellis

 We are two weeks into the Beta program, and so far we have had some good feedback. The installation process has been changed and everyone has found the installation to be easy and have had no problems. We have had several participants convert their data files and are going to run parallel sets of data to ensure the program is working properly. This is great to hear and requires a lot of work on behalf of the participants. It is difficult to replicate real life data in house so having participants use it the way they would day to day really does help in either solidfying the quality of the program, or revealing any issues we could not replicate in house.

We are having weekly WebEx meetings and these have been well attended and have provided good feedback as well. It is good to have people on the phone and be able to show steps and features and get thier feedback verbally, and not just rely on the feedback they provide thru the Beta forums.

A couple of design issues came to light during the Beta and are going to be reworked for Beta cycle 2. One of these was related to how we handle the versioning of the Connection Manager and what version must be installed on which computers when using the current version or older version of Simply Accounting. This did not seem to be an issue during our initial design, but in fact can be a problem for some users in networked environments.

I will keep you updated as the Beta program progresses.

Alistair

The Simply Accounting 2010 Beta program starts tomorrow. We have a number of customers signed up to participate in the beta program, and look forward to their feedback.

We have several conference calls scheduled over the next couple of months and we will be summarizing the highlights of these calls here for everyone to read.

Thank you,

Alistair Ellis

We know that one of the concerns of any business with employees is being able to keep track of all the information for an employee up to date and in one place. One of the objectives we set for ourselves here at Simply Accounting is to always look for unmet needs for Canadian small businesses, and try to find solutions.

To this end, we looked to our sister company in the UK, and found a product called “Sage 50 HR”. It’s a human resource product that allows a business to track employee information such as training, certifications, education, absenteeism and tardiness, disciplinary actions and follow ups, as well as appraisals. This tool enables your business to quickly see what is going on with your employees; are there appraisals due? Are employees going to be taking courses? Are there certifications up for renewal? Who is on vacation over the next month? This product helps answer those questions for small businesses in the UK, and is very popular and well reviewed.

With effort from both the UK team and our own team here in Canada, we did some localizations for CRA terminology such as SIN and for Canadian addresses. This initiative was headed up by our own Paul Ellis (no relation J), another Simply Accounting Product Manager. He did a great job in ensuring that this product from the UK would meet a Canadian business owners’ needs.

We hope this new tool will help those of you who need to find an easier way to manage/organize employee information. You can find out more about the Simply Accounting HR Manager at www.simplyaccounting.com/hr.

Alistair Ellis

As mentioned on March 16, Simply Accounting is releasing a Product Update for Simply Accounting 2009 on April 2^nd, 2009. This update includes some product enhancements, but does not include the April 1, 2009 federal tax table changes.

If you have already installed the Product Update released the week of March 16, 2009, then you do not need to install this update.

Important Note: You MUST be current on your SimplyCARE with Payroll subscription in order to get tax table updates. If your subscription has expired and you would like to be able to get the payroll tax updates that take effect April 1^st, 2009, then you can call the customer sales team and renew your subscription.

If you do not need the new payroll tax updates but would like to get the product enhancements for Simply Accounting 2009, you can download the product update (without the payroll tax updates) available on April 2^nd, 2009 as a download.

You will be able to access the Product Update with Payroll Tax Updates or the Product Update without Payroll Tax Updates from here.

We have sent out invitations for our Simply 2010 Beta this week. We are currently inviting our accountant partners, the members of our Product Advisory Board, and our development partners. The Beta will be available April 15^th, 2009.

The Beta Program allows us to get early feedback on the design of the upcoming release, as well as help us catch and resolve any quality issues.

Why these customers?

We include our accountant partners, because they approach the program from the view of the multiple clients they represent. They tend to also know the product quite well and are able to provide good feedback on the state of the Beta cycle in many different areas of the product.

We are including members of the Product Advisory Board as they helped design the features and enhancements to the product. The Beta program will allow them to try out these features and enhancements in action.

We always want our development partners to be up to date with our pending release. The Beta program provides them the opportunity to ensure their own products keep working with Simply Accounting and are ready shortly after our release.

Why not everyone?

We want to be sure we can manage the program properly and provide the appropriate level of service to our Beta participants. If we find we can increase the number of participants, we will look into opening up the second round of the Beta to everyone. I will of course announce this here, but there would also be a link provided from our web site. Our second Beta cycle is currently scheduled to start on June 1^st, 2009.

US Customers:

Because we are just about to release the 2009 version of Simply Accounting in the United States, we are going to wait until the second Beta cycle to invite our US customers and Partners to participate.

Beta Feedback

I will be hosting a weekly Conference Call and Webinar (via WebEx and a toll free call-in number) with our Beta participants to discuss how the product is working for them and what they think of the new features. I will post here some of the highlights from those meetings so you can find out how the Beta program is going.

Thank you,

Alistair Ellis

Simply Accounting Product Manager

Simply Accounting is releasing a Product Update for Simply Accounting versions 2008 and 2009 on March 19^th, 2009 due to the federal budget changes that take effect April 1, 2009. This update will contain payroll tax changes as well as product enhancements. In particular, it addresses issues with Records of Employment and starting a New Fiscal/Calendar Year. 

You will be prompted to get this Product Update through the auto-download function in Simply Accounting or you can retrieve it through your Simply Accounting “My Account” on online.

If you are a customer that has selected to receive updates on CD, then the Product Update CDs with the payroll tax updates will be shipped out the week of March 23^rd..

Important Note: You MUST be current on your SimplyCARE with Payroll subscription in order to get these updates. If your subscription has expired and you would like to be able to get the payroll tax updates that take effect April 1^st, 2009, then you can call the customer sales team and renew your subscription.

If you do not need the new payroll tax updates but would like to get the product enhancements for Simply Accounting 2009, we will make the product update (without the payroll tax updates) available on April 2^nd, 2009 as a download.

You will be able to access the Product Update with Payroll Tax Updates or the Product Update without Payroll Tax Updates from here.