No one plans on software purchases ending with furiously typing a misspelled, ALLCAPS rant on a user forum… But what do you look out for to stop this?
Here at bluQube, the words “It’s not at all what we expected,” are heard too often from our new customers…
Lots of software buyers have told us exactly that when explaining why they needed to replace recently purchased accounting software.
Nobody plans to have their software purchase experience end with them furiously typing a stream of misspelled, ALLCAPS rants on user forums, but there sure are a lot of those out there.
When new customers come to bluQube, we find that there are a few main reasons why.
It could just be time to change, maybe a falling out with a supplier through extended and over priced implementations, but most of the time it’s due to a business out-growing their software.
When there is too much manual input and re-keying of information…
It takes an age to report, meaning by the time the meeting has come around – the data is out of date and probably inaccurate!
We hear lots of stories from clients who thought they were buying X but ended up with Y, so here’s our top list of things to be aware of…
- Surprise limitations on user licences. Not every user license is a full access license. Different vendors have different licensing models so make sure you know what they’re quoting for.
- Unexpected annual support costs. Very often the first year of support is bundled in with the initial cost of licensing software. The bundling of support costs can easily skew expectations for ongoing costs and total cost of ownership.
- Database and required software licensing. If you’re only tallying up the licensing costs for the actual accounting software, you might have some more software line items to add to find your true costs.
- Lack of integration. Integration might mean that you need to manually trigger a process to export data from one program to another and plan for data inconsistencies between updates. Find someone who offers True Interoperability.
- Poor support. Long waits, communication issues, inexperienced support agents, or limited support availability hours can all turn even simple problems into major inconveniences. We pick up the phone within two rings.
- Know their methodology. Implementations should be fixed price so you’re not strung along for months and being charged for it! You also need to find a partner to work with, you shouldn’t just be left to it.
- Records limitations. Certain product offerings will cap the number of records that can be stored in the software, in order to keep users from running into slow response times. Users who approach records or file size limits generally face a choice between upgrading their software or removing data from the system – which isn’t possible with UK auditing standards! Find a cloud that can expand and contracts as you do.
If you want to find out what it’s like to work with an accounting software partner, opposed to a supplier, check out how we helped Oscar and Ruby here and get in touch! With bluQube, there’s a better way… 08456 44 77 88