I’ve spent some time recently analysing the software landscape for Accountant’s in Australia. Its been interesting, eye-opening and mind-boggling all at the same time.
My first key challenge has been to define and categorise the segment, which is the basis of this particular post:
How do you actually define the segment?
Practice Management seems to get bandied around as both the overall market segment, as well as a defined sub-segment for effectively client, job and task management.
So as to avoid confusion, I have decided to personally use the terms:
- “Accountant Software” to define the broader industry;
- “Practice Management” to define the sub-segment;
How do you define the sub-segments of the Accountant Software market?
You can see from the graphic above, in 2019 Accounting firms use a vast array of different and over-lapping applications from a myriad of different software vendors. In pulling together the graphic, which I emphasise is by no means comprehensive, but moreover a broad representation of the market, I’ve tried to bucket the various apps into some form of groups.
I started adding overlays on my graphic, which got ugly quickly… yuck.
I studied a number of the larger vendors websites, hoping for some consensus… alas no…
I reached out to a number of industry legends which I know and asked their opinions… I started to get some consistency in the sub-segment definitions.
I then threw up a post on Twitter and LinkedIn:
In the end I’ve landed on the following 10 segments:
- Generic business apps, used across industries (GSuite, Office365, Zoom etc)
- “Practice Management” – Workflow, Job/Project Management & Resource Planning;
- Client Accounting/Ledgers and ETL;
- Tax, Compliance & Workpapers;
- Marketing, CRM/CLM (customer relationship (and lifecycle) management);
- Reporting, Business Intelligence and Advisory;
- Document Management & Client Portals;
- Wealth Management;
- Audit
- Other
What do you think? Any alternate thoughts?
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Amazing visualisation! 2 comments. One, I’d love to see this for other countries around the world. And two, hopefully when you update it, you’ll add us onto it. Either way, this is a required diagram for anyone interested in the Australian Accounting space.