For more cloud humour, see this cynical explanation of the cloud using an analogy of the Cloud Cafe. I’m still not sure what the sweeties man was all about.

Whilst we have a procedure document detailing how support requests should be dealt with, I thought it might also be useful to distill this into to 10 golden rules. I’m publishing them here so that customers and trialists know what they have the right to expect from the support team.

Perhaps if you’re starting a business where there’s an element of support then you could take and adapt these for your own uses too.

1) Be Responsive – Keep the Customer Informed

We’re well known for being very quick to answer support emails, whatever the time of day or day of the week. We need to keep it that way. If when you first look at a support request you can’t answer it right away -perhaps because you need to do some investigation or you need to speak to someone – let the customer know. It’s not ideal that you can’t give them a solution straight away, but at least they know they’re not being ignored.

2) Be Honest

Don’t try to fob off a customer. If they’ve found a bug or we’ve cocked up, acknowledge it and deal with it. Trying to pull the wool over their eyes wont work and breaks Rule #3.

3) Show Respect

Yes, we sometimes get asked what seem like a silly question. But if we’re not making the process intuitive enough or the solution easy enough to find, that’s our fault – not the customers. So don’t patronise customers.

Occasionally we might get someone be rude or hostile on a support ticket. Help them and they’ll calm down – and usually apologise.

4) Don’t Doubt What the Customer Tells You

I know that what the customer is saying has happened is technically impossible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a problem. No one is going to send us a support ticket and lie for the sake of it. Don’t assume it’s a PEBCAK issue. Work with the customer to get to the root of the issue.

5) Answer ALL Questions

It’s so frustrating when you email a support desk with 3 questions and their reply answers 2 of the questions and totally ignores the 3rd.

Yes, we’re busy. But not taking the time to deal with things properly in the first place is going to make us even busier. Check and double check you’ve answered all questions asked of you before you send the reply.

6) Be Sure about the Question and the Answer

Don’t guess. If you don’t understand what you’re being asked then ask for clarification. An answer to a question they didn’t ask helps no one.

Don’t guess the answer either. If you’re not 100% sure that the information you’re giving is accurate then check with someone or test your solution.

7) Be Clear in your Response

If you’re telling someone they need to activate the laser guided missile function to resolve their problem, tell them HOW to activate it. It’s better to not assume anything and give a comprehensive answer than to be vague.

8) Keep Your Promises

If you tell a user you’ll let them know when a feature is available or that you’ll get back to them tomorrow after checking with someone – make damn sure you do it.

9) Be Human

Your mother didn’t give you the name “Support”, so don’t sign off as “Support”. Use your real name, be friendly and own the problem. People prefer to deal with real people rather than someone that sounds like a computer.

10) ?

I’m leaving 10 open for you, the reader, to suggest. Based on your experience of our support desk and other support systems, what really frustrates you? Use the comment form below to submit Rule #10.

I’ll update this post in a week or so with one of the suggestions

Over the weekend I moved into a new house. in a few of the rooms there was an odd device plugged in to the sockets. I had no idea what it was.

The label on the back yielded no clues. It just referenced a website that specializes in indoor water features.

So I posted a picture of it on Twitter and got some humorous responses:

Andy Barr from 10Yetis suggest it’s Mini-stig. That shouts “vrooom” when you walk past it.

HostOrca thinks the Geordie mafia (aka Sage) got to my house before I did and it’s actually a bugging device.

And PaulH says it could be a wall mounted TV for tiny people.

Excel_Expert says it’s an air freshener and the different lights are for different fragrances.

There were also a few boring “CO2 detector” (albeit one to terrify children according to getwired) and “Motion Sensor” suggestions.

My favorite was GuyGregorys suggestion that  it’s a Stormtrooper

Ed89 almost managed to convince me it was a device for monitoring your power usage, and the colored lights indicate how acceptable your current usage level is.

But the truth was discovered by GarryMumford, GlennBookingBug, GirlCheese and our very own CTO TimMcOwan – it’s actually an ultra sonic rodent repeller.

Forgetting for a moment the room for human error in using a spreadsheet, it is in fact a perfectly good tool for simply keeping a record of the income and expenditure for this type of business.

So, should Kelvin just use a spreadsheet? If all he wants to do is record basic accounting data, it’ll probably suffice. What those that recommend a spreadsheet seem to overlook is the fact that your accounts are much more than just the data needed for the tax man at the end of the year.

Your accounting data is the underlying information about your business and if it’s recorded in a proper accounting application like KashFlow then  you can get so much more useful information from that data.

As an example: with a spreadsheet  Kelvin would have a hard time analysing where his new driving students come from – ie, how they hear about his services. With KashFlow you simply tag each new customer with the relevant source of business from your list of sources. This means you can, in just a couple of clicks, see instantly what sources of business work for you and which don’t.

Income By Source

This is just one of the many non-accounting type reports that can be generated from your accounting data and give non-accountant types insights into their business.

Additionally, the services Kelvin sells and the business-related purchases he makes can also be tagged so that when it comes to self-assessment time, the majority of the work is already done and the numbers for most boxes on the self assessment form are calculated. Thus reducing the bill he’ll get from an accountant at then end of the year.

An accounting application will give you the tools you need to reconcile your accounting entries against your bank account to make sure everything is entered correctly.

Yes, in theory a spreadsheet can also do all of the above. But the more you want the spreadsheet to do, the more laborious data entry becomes and the more room for error.

In summary, I think it’s quite short-sighted to see accounting as just something you have to do to keep the tax man happy and therefore opt for the most basic option possible for inputting data without considering the importance of getting useful intelligence back from that data

The marketing manager mentioned their “viral coefficient”.

I had to raise my hand and ask what a viral coefficient actually is. The embarrassment was only slightly lessened when the majority of other people in the room confessed they’d never heard of it either.

Embarrassment quickly turned to shame once it was explained to me. It’s such a simple concept and one I really should have known.

I’m operating on the assumption that some readers of this blog may not be familiar with the concept either. So to save you embarrassment , here it is:

A viral co-efficient of 1 means each of your customers in turn brings you one more customer. It’s as simple as that. So a coefficient of 0.5 means every other customer brings you a new one. 0.1 would mean one in ten customers bring you a new customer.

So the goal is to achieve as high a number as possible. I’m told Facebook has a viral coefficient of 12. So each user brings in 12 others. A nice position to be in as once you pass 1, your users/customers grow exponentially.

So here I’m going to share some numbers with your from our performance for 2009 and some of our strategy.

If you’re starting or growing a SaaS business then it might be useful for you. If you’re a customer or partner then it’ll hopefully give you an insight into what we’ve been up to and what our plans are.

The 2008 numbers for comparison

In 2008 we turned over around £250k and made a very small profit. We were based in a cheap office in Essex and there were only around 4-5 staff. A quick look at my blog from the beginning of 2009 shows we started the year with 2,500 customers.

The 2009 headline numbers

We ended 2009 with well over 5,000 customers and turned over around £500k. So essentially the business doubled in size.

Despite the extra income, we didn’t make much more of a profit. There are now nearly 17 of us in the company and we’ve ditched the office in Essex and have a lovely place in central London.

Revenue split

Only 60% of our income in 2009 came direct from end-users that pay us monthly subscriptions for using the main accounting software.

The remaining 40% came from the partners that we work with via our Partner Programme. These are mainly accountants of which we now have over 220.

A few percentage points of the revenue is from our add-on automated PayPal accounting service.

Where’s the money gone?

Of the £500k we brought in throughout 2009, close to 60% went on salaries and sales commission, about 7% on rent and the remainder is made up of lots of little expenses like hardware, desks, staff training, utility bills and coffee – lots of coffee.

Our phone bill for the year was close to £8k. We have an 0800 number so we pay for all the inbound calls, but the bulk of this was actually outbound sales calls to accountancy practices.

What surprises me is how little we spent on marketing. Far less than 10% of our total expenditure. And a sizeable chunk of that was on a single exhibition.

Growing the eco-system

A big part of our strategy is growing an eco-system around our accounting API.  This has grown a lot in 2009. We started the year with less than 10 integrated applications and now have well over 20 with many more on the way.

Really Simple Systems CRM have just started beta testing their integration and we have some cool stuff in the works with Receipt Angel.

The only hiccup we’ve had is with our FreshBooks integration. They were understandably unimpressed with the orginal version of my blog post announcing the integration because it had a sentence that pointed out one of the obvious reasons for integrating – that you could migrate entirely from FreshBooks to KashFlow if you needed a full accounting system rather than just a great invoicing app. So they decided not to list us on their site with all of the other apps that are integrated with them.

Having other applications integrated with us brings a number of benefits. We get exposure to the customer base of the integrated app, our existing customers get more benefit and KashFlow becomes a more compelling offering for potential customers.

It also helps to ensure customers stay with us. We don’t believe in vendor lock in so make it very easy for customers to leave us with all of their data  if they want to. If they’re using a number of applications that all feed accounting data back to KashFlow then it’s one less reason to leave us.

We”re continuing to add lots of new functions to our API so developers can deliver more usable products to their customers.

Our iPhone app is on the way very soon too. I promise!

White Label and Resellers

We’ve quietly launched a white-label version of KashFlow already and you’ll see a couple of well known names (including a FTSE100 firm) releasing web-based accounting software this year that is actually KashFlow under the hood. We’re also working hard on the reseller channel and getting some great (poncy buzzword alert!) synergistic partnerships up and running.

Resellers in other territories

We’re not currently planning on actively marketing in other countries – there’s still plenty  to do in the UK market. But we’ve been approached by many companies that want to resell KashFlow in all sorts of countries from Iran to UAE and the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

It’s something we originally shied away from. Localising an accounting package isn’t fun. If you’re planning a global SaaS business now go with CRM instead of accounting!

But with the necessary localisation work now done, we’re about to finalise agreements  with resellers in two foreign territories.

Needless to say, we expect great things from these partnerships.

What I expect for 2010

We have a good office and plenty of room to grow in to. The expensive hiring of experienced people is done too. So I’m not expecting our fixed cost to increase by much. Although a lot of our new costs were only brought in towards the end of the year, so expenditure will increase in 2010.

We may need to increase our infrastructure costs if our user base continues to grow as it has for the last few months. We now average over 60 trial sign ups every day and we’re working hard on converting those into paying customers at higher and higher rates.

With everything we have going on, I’ll be disappointed if we don’t more than double our turnover to significantly > £1m this year.

So given I expect to double income and keep expenses relatively flat – what to do with the excess money?

We’ll probably start by hiring more developers. It’s important that we continue to innovate and add the new features our customers are asking for.

We’re also already on the look out for an addition to our support team. The vast majority of our new customers come from word of mouth referrals, and this is largely down to the great job the support guys do. So investing in support staff brings in more business.

We really should also be spending a lot more on marketing. People I speak to are always surprised at how little money we actually spend on marketing considering our relatively high profile in the accounting software space.

So it’s exciting to think what we could achieve with a solid marketing plan with some money behind it. The goal is to become the default choice when it comes to accounting software for small business and startups.

I hope that this was useful to someone besides the competitors that seem to be multiplying like rabbits!

We judge what we’re offering based on its value rather than on what the rest of the market is doing.

This has resulted in a big difference between how we work with accountants and how other accounting software companies do. Namely, we charge £799 a year whereas others will invite accountants to be a “Partner” at no cost.

Despite this, we appear to have a bigger network of accountants recommending KashFlow to SMEs in the UK than any other online accounting software provider.

So with the launch of our new Partners website it’s probably a good time to explain why…

Your commitment to us

It’s easy to get someone to commit to being a Partner if there’s no financial cost for them. You’d say “Yes” just to get us off the phone or out of your office. But we don’t just want you to go through the motions, we want you to get your clients using the software.

The more of your clients that use the same software the more you benefit from all the advantages of using KashFlow in your practice and the more time you save by having them all present their data in the same way.

As David Brent might say, we want you to have “skin in the game”. If you have money invested in the solution, you’re more likely to actively onboard clients.

Our commitment to you

We don’t get you onboard and then leave you to it. You have an account manager that works with you on an ongoing basis to ensure you’re getting the most out of the software, that you’re all set up to attract clients from our existing user base and to ensure we continue to develop the software how you want it developed. We give you priority telephone support.

That all costs money.

We’ll be spending more money on our partners in other ways soon – but that’s all under wraps for now.

Savings

As a partner you buy your client licenses from us on behalf of your client and you pay less than half what they’d pay if they came to us directly.

Whether you mark up the cost to make a profit or not is up to you, but we can’t let just anyone get access to that preferential pricing or it becomes pointless

Value

We believe what you’re getting has significant value attached to it. It’s not just the ability to buy licenses at a discounted rate or co-brand the software or even the ability to switch on and off features and reports. We also give you a control panel containing tools that make managing, controlling and monitoring your clients so much easier.

We have Partners that tell us that just the new clients they get from being listed on our accountants directory is worth many times the annual Partner fee

Apples and Oranges

Just today a potential partner sent us a link to another web-based accounting application that charges a fraction of what we do. We suggested he take a closer look at their offering, beyond the price tag, to see the differences.

With KashFlow you’re getting an award-winning, feature-rich application that for years has beat all other accounting products – both web- and desktop-based – in independent surveys. With others you’re not.

We occasionally get asked to price match a quote you may have had from another supplier or even to totally change our business model to work in a different way.

We can’t deliver the above by massively reducing our prices, and we don’t want to skimp on service as it wont do either of us any favours.

The model we use works as we’ve proven time and time again with existing partners. It’s not practical for us to come to a different arrangement with each individual partner – deviating from the norm costs us even more as it doesn’t fit in with our standard processes.

Does this model work?

Yes, for us and for you.

We have numerous case studies where accountants speak about how the software is benefiting them.

Despite the fact we charge £799 a year and others give it away for free, we currently have over 200 accountants as members of our Partner Programme whilst our closest competitor has 30.

I hope that explains why it is that we charge an annual fee for our Partner Programme. But if you have any questions or want me to clarify anything, please do feel free to ask using the comments section below.

The same is true of the Apple cult.

The iPhone is good, but it has its downsides and falls over on some pretty basic functionality. But of course the fanboys don’t talk about it until you’re lured in and deemed to be one of them, and even then it’s in hushed tones.

I’ve been a BlackBerry fan for years and I never thought anything could replace my beloved Curve. The main thing that had put me off moving to the iPhone was the keyboard. I can bash out an email pretty quickly on the curve keyboard and didn’t think I’d be able to achieve the same speed with a touch screen.

Call it a mid-life crisis (at 31), a desire to be cool, maybe the desire for a decent web browser or perhaps even just a case of app-envy – but I decided to give the iPhone a try.

Let me firstly say my concerns about the keyboard were unfounded. Once you get used to it you can be just as fast as you can be with a BlackBerry. I made the mistake of trying to use the keyboard in landscape mode thinking it’d be easier as it’s spread over more space. It doesn’t help though. Your thumbs have to travel a greater distance. If you’re coming from a Blackberry then you’ll find it easier to stick with the familiar narrow keyboard.

It’s a really nice bit of kit but here are some of the limitations I’ve found that might be useful to know if you’re considering the switch yourself.

Lack of sound settings

On a BlackBerry you’re used to being able to configure the ringtone and volume for every little thing independently. So you can have one tone and volume for messages and another for calls. Not so with the iPhone. One volume level for everything.

Lack of choice on ringtones

Being used to select any MP3 for my ringtone, I was disappointed to find I can’t do that with the iPhone. I’m aware you can mess around with a file in iTunes to get your own MP3s as ringtones. But it’s a bit of a kerfuffle.

Not a standalone device

I can’t remember the last time I had to attach my Blackberry to a computer. There was no need. Email, contacts and calendar synched over the air to our Zimbra mail server and everything else could be done on the phone itself. With the iPhone you really need to have a computer with iTunes on it to set it up and maintain it.

Single indicator and options for all mail accounts

On the Blackberry I had a product called NotifySync that hooked up to my Zimbra server for personal mail and I used the native mail client to monitor support emails. I managed to get a similar arrangement on the iPhone by setting up two email accounts. However, the indicator telling me how many emails I have is now useless as it includes new emails in all accounts. There’s not a way to have it just show the count for selected accounts. The same problem exists with the alert settings for each account – whatever you select applies to all mail accounts.

No flashing light

With the Blackberry, I could set it to have the small LED flashing if there was a new email. No such option with the iPhone. You either have to be audibly alerted to new emails or periodically pick it up and activate it.

No options for “Home” screen

The thing I miss about the BlackBerry is it’s “Today” view where you can see immediately your next couple of diary entries and unread emails aty a glance on the main screen. No such option with the iPhone. Just pretty square icons.

Accessory compatibility

I prefer to have a charger in the office and at home so I don’t have to carry one around. I had a docking station at home that charged an iPod so I foolishly assumed this would also charge the iPhone. It doesn’t. Despite having the same physical connection the iPhone complained that the “accessory” wasn’t compatible with it and couldn’t be used to charge it.

Disclaimer

I may have missed the options for some of the above – if so please do correct me using the comments section below. I’m aware some of the issues might be resolved by “jailbreaking” the phone too.

There are plenty of good things about the iPhone too – so I will be sticking with it. But the truth needs to be told!

Patrick is still with us and doing a great job – but we’re still growing very fast and need more hands on the support deck. So we’re hiring again for a second support person to join our ever growing team.

The role is very much as originally advertised:

We’re growing ridiculously fast here at KashFlow HQ in London (SE1) with customer growth percentage well into the double figures every month.

The team has grown very quickly from just two people not very long ago to thirteen today.

We now need to hire a smart, articulate individual to join our customer support team.

Being a quick learner and being able to communicate well by email is much more important than any type of industry experience, so the role may be well suited to a bright school/college/university leaver. If you have an interest in a career in IT or accounting then this would be a great starting point.

This is an excellent opportunity to start your career with a fast-growing technology company. And you’ll learn more about accounting than you ever wanted to!

If this sounds like something you might be interested in please send a CV with covering letter to careers@kashflow.com

The salary on offer ranges from £12-18k dependent on your experience.

I can’t stress enough that enthusiasm and ability to learn is more important than qualifications or experience.

No agencies.
Our usual notice applies: If you are an agency and you call/email about this role anyway, then I reserve the right to include you in a future blog post about recruitment agencies who can’t read and can’t be any good anyway or they wouldn’t have to phone people who explicitly said “No Agencies”.

The Approach

We were lucky with our timing. There weren’t any other web-based accounting apps worth mentioning at the time and we weren’t under the level of scrutiny new entrants in this market place are today.

So we took our time and asked our customers to tell us what they wanted added. Once we’d covered the main bases we’d only add new features it if they passed 4 tests:

1) Customers must be asking for it – so not just something we think would be cool to have
2) It mustn’t distract from the simplicity of the software
3) It shouldn’t remove any existing functionality
4) Wherever possible it should be off-and-onable, defaulting to off so as not to confuse or distract customers

Rule 4 can cause a problem as people taking an initial look at the software today can be fooled into thinking it doesn’t have many features when in fact there’s probably no other accounting app, online or offline, with the depth of functionality we now have.

This is why we tell people that if they think it can’t do something they need, they should get in touch with support as it probably does do it.

The Result

The result is that we now have an application that’s got lots of features that are of genuine use to small business owners, rather then lots of confusing menus full of jargon and options you never use – the main thing that put me off other programs available when we started.

We’ve kept our approach the same over the years; actively soliciting suggestions and sticking to the rules above. You’ve not let us down. We have a list of great feature requests and we’re constantly improving the software based on those suggestions.

Until relatively recently we’d pick the features we (myself and one other developer) were going to work on and just go for it. This meant we’d get new functionality released very quickly and this kept us ahead of the emerging competition.

And now

Now we have thousands and thousands of customers and a team of developers (they rarely let me touch code these days) we needed to implement a more methodical approach to developing the application. So this is how one of your suggestions goes from initially being received to being live in the software.

Your suggestions

The suggestions we receive from you are all logged on a database, nothing is discarded no matter how silly or complicated.

Once every 4 weeks I sit down with the development team and let them know which suggestions I want implemented over the next 4 weeks.

The way I decide what I want them to do is based on how many people are asking for a particular feature and how complex it is. I’d be lying if I said I don’t take into account who’s asking for it too. We have some Partners who spend tens of thousands of pounds a year with us and I’d be silly not to give more weight to their requests than I do to others.

They go away and develop the features on a development server we have in the office. Once they’ve finished, the new features are copied to a separate test server we have here and it’s tested by non-technical end users. Assuming the features work as planned they then go on to the “live” system where you get access to them.

This works really well and means we can still get new features out quickly and regularly.

The down-side is that if you make a suggestion for us, it’s virtually impossible for us to tell you how long it’ll be before it’s available. It may be a great idea and we plan to add it in the next development cycle. But as requests flood in each week, the list changes all the time so your suggestion may get put back if other requests become more popular or more pressing.

Pricing

An observation. The basic invoicing tool we launched with cost £13.99/month. Since then, despite going from a basic tool to a full accounts package that’s winning awards all over the place, and spending 100’s of thousands of pounds developing the software and infrastructure, we’ve only upped the price once – to £15.99/month. And that was only for new customers. If you joined us back when it was £13.99, that’s what you’re still paying.