Halifax – Stop #6 on the Simply Accounting 2010 Listening Tour

Just ducky! That’s how Dave felt about the stop in Halifax and I think that’s how I’d sum the stop as well: just ducky! Dave is a long-standing Sage Accountant Network member who flew in from St. John’s. Now that’s commitment to the program!

The day started off with warm coffee and a warm welcome from our Halifax customers. We learned that the citizens of Halifax are some of the nicest people on earth. This is what Guy told us—he said it’s one of the best things about Nova Scotia. He also said he called support and they answered his call in less than 30 seconds! Good things come to nice people!

One of the things that stood out at our stop in Halifax was the number of bookkeepers and accountants that were helping charitable organizations with their books. There were several suggestions about improving Simply Accounting with charitable related functionality. We have heard this consistently at each stop and we will be looking to address these concerns in an upcoming release. In the meantime you should know that Sage has a full suite of non-profit solutions from fundraising to fund accounting that may be of interest to some of you. Check out www.sagenonprofit.com for more details.

In the afternoon it was the “Alistair Show”! Alistair was in town as a ringer and did an awesome job absorbing all the feedback and answering questions about the product. He managed to control most of the afternoon despite a microphone that didn’t want to cooperate. After some of the Q & A, Alistair showed the group a demo of HR Manager and this sparked a ton of interest. For those that attend any stop on the Listening Tour we give away a copy of HR Manager to every attendee! www.simplyaccounting.com/productsServices/hr. It is a great tool for tracking employee information like vacations, absences, certifications, disciplinary actions, and you can also set reminders for key employee events. One of our attendees, Paul, likes the product but made a great observation about synchronization of events and reminders from HR Manager into MS Outlook. We’ll be looking into that one.

As I have said before, this tour has been a huge benefit to Simply Accounting. We have been taking voracious notes and collectively we have over 15 pages of suggestions about our products, our services, our support teams, and our web site. The list is amazing! We have started to prioritize and have actually actioned several of your suggestions already. Although not product related, one of the items on the list is to find out who Amber’s dog is name is named after. A free edition of Known Locally (www.sagespark.com/knownlocally) for the first person that emails me with this information!

On to the nation’s capital…see you tomorrow Ottawa!

Jamie