Now that we are on a two week schedule I get a few more responses to the survey. I do not think 50 to 60 responses constitute a statistically significant sample, but it does give an indication that is worth noting.
I asked you how you invoice you customers. 85% of you answered from your accounting application. 9% said you use a specialized invoicing application, and the remaining 6% said you used "other". I have to nullify one of the "other" answers and actually add it back into the accounting application group because it was a limited accounting application, but an accounting application just the same.
What surprised me most is that no one, not one, invoices your customer from your CRM. I would have thought that someone out there would have built a Force.com or a NetSuite application that sends an invoice to the customer. But I guess not. More about a way to accomplish that later.
I also thought that I would have seen more responses using applications or services like FreshBooks, an online invoicing service.
When it comes to accountants, you guys are hard to change. I am working with one right now, I want to add monthly billing instead of annual invoicing. Ughhhh. I get the idea simple transactions are cleaner. But still, isn't it about what the customer wants? Or does that change because it is accounting, GAAP and all I suppose. I digress, but I leverage this point to make the point that when it comes to accounting, innovation is not moving at the speed of light.
Getting back to invoicing, there is a lot of common sense that goes into invoicing from an accounting application, but I was reading some information on the FreshBooks site and talking to my friends at CloudTrigger. CloudTrigger uses Conga Merge to create an invoice from closed/won opportunities out of Salesforce.com. The point of both of these solutions is the invoice can be customized for each customer. Granted Conga is a more general merge utility and FreshBooks is specific to invoicing, but they both have some distinct advantages over sending invoices directly form accounting. It may be worth look.
New Bjacaruso Survey
One of the things that stuck out in the survey is the trust issue. Accountants are risk adverse by nature. I started thinkng about that and the question for this survey came easily.
A lot of services are now being offered through the Cloud now, accounting is coming, CRM has been there for a decade. But are you really ready to trust the cloud with your business? Besides the possibilities of outages, the fact that in the cloud model you data is normally stored somewhere else.
Do you think Cloud Computing is ready for prime time?