Edmonton – Stop #4 on the Simply Accounting 2010 Listening Tour

Another great stop on the tour and while we kept the conversation tailored to Simply Accounting it was hard not to speak about the elephant in the room: the Oilers. What is going on?! I won’t dwell on that though.

Each stop has presented us with new ways to improve our business and Edmonton was no exception. We are also hearing some recurring themes around training and education. Marge suggested that we don’t necessarily need someone from the Simply Accounting offices to provide training, but rather, we need to do a better job of connecting users to Simply Accounting trainers across the country.

There was a generally positive sentiment with Simply Accounting support and service agents. Yah! There were also a number of customers who were very satisfied with our chat support as well as the knowledgebase to help them with their questions rather than phoning in to speak with a live person. Double Yah!

There are many more takeaways from the day, but here are a few that stood out for me:

1) Reporting in Simply Accounting has been an area where we have needed improvement and have been working hard to address this. In Edmonton, Hugo provided the crew with a sneak peak of Simply Accounting Intelligence. Wow! The feedback was very positive. Gordon, who has been a vocal about improving Simply Accounting’s reporting capabilities actually did a little dance in his chair and uttered, “I am soooo happy!!”.

2) Joanna made a comment about a Simply Accounting Mac version. She alluded to our dominance in secondary and post-secondary schools across Canada (Simply Accounting is used in over 3,800 schools across Canada), and asked why we don’t provide a Mac version. Great point. We are going to address this need through an online version. In the meantime, something that is not very well known is that Mac users can run Simply Accounting if they use a product called parallels (www.parallels.com).

We had a solid day in Edmonton and then went to West Edmonton Mall in the evening. This place is HUGE! We had a fun dinner, checked out the rollercoasters, the indoor wave pool, and the hockey rink. We then watched Avatar in 3D! There were mixed reviews on the film, but we all agreed on one thing: Lisa’s incredible ability to imitate the avatar bird call! Ask her to demonstrate it…it’s hilarious!

Looking forward to a great day tomorrow in Calgary. See you there!

Jamie