By far the most interesting in an array of “value-added” services that banks recently introduced to their businessowner clients is a fully-fledged, online accounting package, which FNB claims to be the first in the world and points the way to the future of accounting.
The idea was developed by chartered accountant Warren Bond and three co-owners of a small outfit known as Qwill Instant Accounting. The package is built around a business current account and will save hours of capturing and sorting of account entries. The user teaches the package to recognise certain entries, which it then automatically allocates to the correct legers.
FNB signed up Qwill two years ago and launched the package on its website just more than a month ago. Business owners with FNB current accounts can subscribe to the service for between R300 and R800, depending on their turnover and the number of modules they want to use.
But how keen business owners will be to take up the offer remains to be seen. The idea has to break through several habits. Firstly, business owners are used to pirating software — and if that doesn’t work, they reluctantly buy it. Secondly, software-as-a-service online is alien and there will be some resistance to having to add a monthly expense to business overheads. The idea, however, is that the subscription fee will save the business money because the owner will no longer have to pay his or her accountant’s staff to manually sort bank statement entries into an accounting package.
Another idea that will take some getting used to is the bank doing your books for you. Of course, that is not how it works — business owners and their accountants have full control over the books and only a limited number of actions is automated by the bank’s computers. But Qwill is close enough to the bank to conjure up that image.
Even if business owners like the idea, Qwill is sure to experience resistance from accountants, who are pretty much married to Pastel, the dominant market leader. Is it coincidence that FNB launched Qwill at exactly the same time that Pastel launched an advertising campaign with the slogan “nine out of 10 accountants use Pastel”?
One of the advantages of Qwill is that both the business owners and their accountants can access the books from anywhere, cutting out the need for sending financial reports to and fro. But accountants will have to learn the new package and not all of them will be happy that certain of their functions have been automated. Also, subscribing to Qwill will only make business sense if the accountant discounts the business owner for not having to capture the data.
Qwill will have to market aggressively to business owners and hope that they pressure their accountants into accepting it. But the problem is that many business owners, ignorant of most aspects of accounting, leave the most fundamental decisions to their accountants.
Qwill will appeal to those businesses that put most of their transactions through their current account. Cash-heavy businesses are less likely to bite, although Bond says the majority have point-of-sales systems that are not integrated into their existing accounting systems anyway. They still have to capture their daily cash deposits manually into their accounting systems, as they will have to with Qwill, until a stock-control module is developed.