Posts Tagged ‘Business Data’
Startup Finance: Xero Powers Accounting in the Cloud
January 18th, 2010
Startup Finance: Xero Powers Accounting in the Cloud
When New Zealand-based entrepreneur Rod Drury began researching his market he could hardly believe what he was seeing. As seen in Drury’s comments last week on the state of the online finance ecosystem, only a handful of players like Saasu and MYOB were targeting small business clients. While Drury saw that a number of cloud-based personal finance companies like Mint were gaining traction with users, small businesses had been stuck with the same tired desktop accounting software they’d been using for the last ten years. Drury built Xero with the intent to help small businesses manage their accounts in the cloud.
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When asked why the cloud is so important for accounting services he explains, “In the past small businesses rarely shared their business data with accountants as the majority of billable hours were spent simply extracting the right information.” Says Drury, “The fact that your entire business can now look at your accounts in the cloud means that the accountant can finally act as a business advisor and improve your cash flow.”
Xero also works with a number of banking institutions. This means that rather than waiting 5 business days for a bank to reconcile your accounts, they’re up-to-date with your daily transactions.
There are currently 12,000 companies working with Xero (including ReadWriteWeb) and the company recently launched integration with invoicing service FreshBooks and CRM-tool Salesforce. For between $19-39 dollars per month startups can access their accounts from anywhere and reduce the anxiety around the accounts payable and receivable process. To try it for yourself visit xero.com.
Editor’s note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month long look at how the Internet has transformed finance. Up until April 15, the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we’ll be looking at how finance software has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping online finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.
Posted in Read Write Web | 
Tags: Accountant, Accounting Services, Accounting Software, Banking Institutions, Billable Hours, Business Advisor, Business Clients, Business Data, Drury, Finance Companies, Finance Series, Freshbooks, Gaining Traction, Invoicing, Last Ten Years, Myob, personal finance, Salesforce, Small Businesses, Startups | 
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MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?
November 19th, 2009
MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?
Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter, a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com.
MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud, an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com.
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MindTouch Cloud is meant for a business community to create their own dashboards. It allows users to collaborate with a familiar wiki environment with the capabilities of an enterprise platform.
It’s also another example of how enterprise technologies are increasingly designed so the average business user may perform tasks that have traditionally been the domain of the IT department.
What differentiates MindTouch from Sharepoint and other services is its emphasis on the data. Users may collaborate across multiple enterprise systems and web applications.
MindTouch Cloud is an enterprise mashup service. Business critical information can be exported from enterprise systems and mashed up to create reports and build applications. It has the requirements for the enterprise, including authentication using LDAP, single-sign on security. Role management is built into the service with the capability to create new users, roles and groups.
Compare that to Salesforce Chatter and you see some similarities in how applications can be integrated to create an intelligent dashboard environment that fits into an enterprise environment.
MindTouch does need some work on its user interface. But it has all the features that can make it a valuable service for a business looking to build dashboards that can mashup enterprise data and external applications.
This is MindTouch’s first cloud computing effort. Pricing starts at $7 per user per month.
Posted in Read Write Web |
Tags: Business Data, Business User, Collaboration Space, Dashboard Environment, Dashboards, Data Users, Enterprise Environment, Enterprise Platform, Enterprise Systems, Enterprise Technologies, External Applications, Role Management, Salesforce, Security Role, Service Business, Sharepoint, Twitter, User Interface, Valuable Service, Web Applications |
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