Accounting, Future

MYOB Acquisition spree – who’s next?

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Yesterday’s announcement of MYOB’s acquisition of ERP provider Greentree, won’t be the end of MYOB’s buying spree, according to their CFO Richard Moore. Moore, courtesy of Yolanda Redrup’s AFR article, states:

we do have a list of potential acquisition targets and we’ll keep reviewing that list in the coming months

This got me thinking, who else might be on that list? Based on what we know in the public arena, throw in some gut-feel and some muck-raking, here’s my guess at the MYOB shopping list:
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Accounting, Future, Technology

My titbits from Xero’s AGM

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I had the pleasure of attending my first Xero AGM this morning. With the share price up 6.5% today, I wasn’t the only one who got swept up in the positive vision, confidence and passion that was presented!

Whilst there wasn’t a lot of new information above and beyond the already released Annual Results (which I wrote about in my subsequent article), I took a few tasty titbits away that I thought were interesting:
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Consulting, Sales, Technology

How to compete with Status Quo

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Why carrots motivate donkeys and whips drive racehorses

In my role as an advisor to a number of app developers and service providers, I am regularly quizzed on the question of speeding up sales to SMBs.

“We have the best _________[insert product/service offering] on the market. Our existing SMB customers love us/it. Everyone we talk to loves it. But the challenge is getting new customers to act in a timely way, en masse… how do we speed up adoption?”.

In this article, I share my thoughts on how to compete effectively with Status Quo, as a key success factor in accelerating growth, particularly within the SMB space.
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Accounting, Fintech, Technology

Intuit Q3 Results – QBo in focus

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This morning (Aussie time), Wednesday May 25, Intuit released their Q3 update to the NASDAQ. Acknowledging its a quarterly update, rather than full year results, it doesn’t say much, but there is some interesting commentary particularly in the conference call, rather than the Fact Sheet, that clearly lays out Intuit’s strategy for QBo into the future.

Just a note upfront: Intuit is a much bigger company than QuickBooks Online (QBo currently accounted for only 3% of revenue in the quarter OR $78m of the total quarterly revenue of $2,304m), but when looking at industry trends and for a comparison with Xero, this is my focus.
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Accounting, Fintech, Technology

Xero FY 2016 – my unfettered opinion

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Building a global business $30 at a time

I jumped off a plane last Thursday morning after an overnight flight back from Asia, turned on my phone and had throughout the day a flood of SMS; Emails; LinkedIn Inmails; Facebook Messenger messages; Tweets and voicemail messages all asking my opinion on Xero’s full year results.

At first it was – how awesome, some people want to know what I think – they’ve actually been reading my blog. 🙂

Then, wow, how awesome is the Xero brand?! People have so bought into the company and what they are doing that they care about stock market announcements – something most don’t concern themselves with in their day-to-day lives.
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Fintech, Technology

The 7 things I’m looking for in Xero’s FY results

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This coming Thursday the 12th of May will see Xero release its Full Year results for 2015/16. As a shareholder and eager amateur commentator, I’m quite keen to see what they have to say.

Those of you that have read some of my previous articles (like 7 Xero Xero k and Xero+Q3=?), will know that I have raised concerns regarding Xero’s growth trajectory since the release of their Q3 cash flow report.
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Accounting, Fintech, Technology

Getting SaaSy Part II

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Assessment of listed (International) AuNZ SMB Accounting Tech

In Part I of Getting SaaSy, I assessed the ASX and NZSE listed SMB accounting tech players competing in the Australian and New Zealand market. For purposes of comparison and relevance, in this installment I’ve assessed the two major international players Intuit and Sage, plus, by popular demand I’ve had a look at Netsuite, whilst not really targeting AuNZ SMBs, they are the longest standing accounting tech SaaS cloud player in the world.

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Accounting, Fintech, Technology

Getting SaaSy Part I

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As part of my ongoing mission to contribute to the thinking on the SMB Accounting tech industry for the broader market, I thought I would sit down and provide some analysis and commentary on the relevant, listed players in AuNZ. I start with the ASX and NZSE players MYOB ($MYO), Xero ($XRO), Reckon ($RKN) and JCurve ($JCS) and will publish part 2 next week, for the major international listed entities operating in AuNZ Intuit ($INTU), Netsuite ($N) and Sage ($SGE).

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