Toronto – Stop #8 on the Simply Accounting 2010 Listening Tour

It was great to be back in Toronto and we had our biggest turnout yet! There were also a number of attendees that traveled a fair distance to get there—Sudbury, St. Catherines, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Burlington. Thanks for coming and making this such a great session.

We had a great mix of “new to Simply Accounting” customers as well as long standing customers who wouldn’t dare use a competing product because of the lack of audit trail. Clearly this is one of the key reasons we have remained #1 in Canada. Your financial data is something you really don’t want to take chances with. Simply Accounting has always been a trusted application.

Some of the key takeaways for me include:

1) Vickey loooooves Billingboss! It’s a free online invoicing tool designed for small businesses to invoice customers through the web and receive payment online. It’s free. No strings attached. Check it out at www.billingboss.com.

2) Galit suggested we need to clarify our definition of “consultant” to our customers who are looking for help. Galit is a Sage Accountant’s Network member. We also call these members consultants as well as business partners. Bottom line is that there are 10,000 of these SAN members across Canada and they are a resource to customers and we have too many names and not enough clarification on their relationship with Simply Accounting.

3) There was more talk about HST given we were in Ontario. Almost all attendees had some concern around the upcoming changes and were interested in what we were doing to help them through it. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, customers can change the default tax code on all customer and vendor records with a single click. Anna made a great point about having the HST wizard come back with the next product update. Great point! We are going to look into that.

4) All the small things. Don’t forget about all the small things is what Sue’s stressed. There are so many little things that can be tweaked to improve the new customer experience. We jotted these down as we did with all the great suggestions today. If you didn’t get your idea through to one of us, there is another place that you still can! Please go to the Learning Centre and click on the “give feedback” link. We read every single submission that goes in here and take this feedback seriously.

And the moment you have all been waiting for…a link to a free magnifying glass tool. Go nuts! www.magnifier.sourceforge.net

Thanks Toronto. It was a great day and we look forward to coming back soon!

Jamie