Calgary – Stop #5 on the Simply Accounting 2010 Listening Tour

Wow! This was a vocal bunch. We started at 9am sharp and the discussion was non-stop for the rest of the day. Nice work Calgary—apparently you have a lot to say! The Simply Accounting team always gets excited when our customers are engaged.

I am still surprised by the number of attendees that have their own bookkeeping or accounting consulting practices that are not on our Sage Accountant Network program—we uncovered at least 6 attendees. If you have fee paying clients please check out the benefits of this program here: www.simplyaccounting.com/partners/joinSAN/benefits.

There was some great discussion around connecting small businesses to students across Canada. For those that don’t know, Simply Accounting is used in over 3,800 secondary and post-secondary schools across Canada. Graduates of these accounting programs may be looking for internships as well as full-time jobs after they graduate. To connect students with the many small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers across Canada using Simply Accounting, we built a web site called sageforstudents (www.sageforstudents.com). The web site also helps students with resume creation, cover letter creation, and general information on the accounting and bookkeeping fields.

Carol was in good spirits (is she ever not?!). She loves Simply Accounting but is also not shy about providing candid feedback! One of her comments directly impacted her customer experience—she commented on our support and service agents asking redundant questions after the call to gather feedback on her experience. She is completely willing to help, but she suggested we need to revisit the questions on the survey as some are unnecessary in her opinion.

There were a number of “new to Simply Accounting” customers in the room and we heard they need help getting started and learning the basics. One of the best ways to learn more about Simply Accounting is actually right in the product. If you switch to enhanced view on the Simply Accounting home screen and click on the tab called Learning Centre you have immediate access to a number of training modules for free as well as a number of anytime learning classes. You also have access to classroom training registration on the same page. We also provide the anytime and classroom training tools at Sage University (www.sageu.com/simply).

The day was phenomenal and the engagement hit a whole new level when Leyla joined us on at the podium to demo a feature! We like to keep these sessions as dynamic, fun, and interesting as possible and this was no exception. Thanks Leyla…can you come to our next stop?

East Coast here we come…Halifax you better be ready!

Jamie