As with democracy, a free market only functions properly when more than one significant player participates in the space.
Healthy competition leads to optimised performance across the board, be it product, price, performance or service delivery, and at an even more base level, free markets always demand a choice.
Orangeworks Accounting Software was launched in November 2006, after 14 months of intensive development by a team that boasts more than 16 years of accounting software installation and support.
Running off an optimised Microsoft SQL Server database, Orangeworks now offers South African users of accounting software an alternative in a market that has almost become a monopoly.
Thus, the goal from the outset was to address the high levels of user frustration in the market. Although varied in nature, any user of accounting software will recognise the overriding objectives of the Orangeworks development, namely, and not in any order of priority: affordability, security, speed and stability.
If you want the old adage - time is money - quantified, ask an accountant. From a performance perspective and according to many accountants, it seems there is an exponential decrease in the processing power of their accounting software as the size of their database increases.
It is not unusual, for instance, that the creation of sales reports can take up to 48 hours, a situation that is often deemed to be acceptable and unavoidable.
Fortunately, times have changed and through the utilisation of new technology, this type of situation can be easily avoided. In one case, Orangeworks developers have been able to process a report in 47 seconds that previously had to be run over a weekend. The message is clear, if you do want to compare the processing speed of different accounting packages, large volumes of data must be used to give a true indication of performance.
In today's world of unscheduled power outages, these events become a nightmare for accountants. Transactions that have only been processed in part when a power failure occurs, often causing massive data disruptions/corruptions, to the extent that consultants often need to be called in to restore and recover the situation.
This may take anything from two hours to more than a day, and, of course, is an expensive process. However, this situation can be avoided if the software utilised was programmed so as to only update balances once a transaction is completed in full. Thus, it would be possible to do an automatic roll-back once the power is restored, with no data loss or corruption. This is precisely what Orangeworks has incorporated into its product.
For accountants, security and integrity are key. Their professional codes demand this from them and they, in turn, demand it from the software they use. While protecting the business rules, we expose the structure of our database to facilitate third party integration, for example, when specialised customer software needs to be integrated with the accounting system. With multi-user access and security protocols built-in, users only gain access to modules that are relevant to them and to which they have been assigned the rights to use.
One of the highest user frustration areas in the market is the 'hidden' extra costs that are associated with accounting software. Annual upgrades and service agreements, the cost of add-on modules and the cost of support, all add up to a never-ending outflow of money that was just not part of the original value proposition.
When the costs and frustration associated with change and the lack of options are then included, a rather unsavoury picture emerges of the SME accounting software market. Orangeworks sets out to address these issues in a very simple way, by adopting an all inclusive monthly user fee model of R125 per user, with no hidden costs.
However, the real cost of change lies in time. With this in mind, Orangeworks boasts a unique conversion utility that converts accounting data from other leading packages into the Orangeworks solution. It could take as little as five minutes, and some massively transaction-intensive databases have been converted in one hour. That time includes all historical data, transactional data, as well as all opening and closing balances. There is no doubt that Orangeworks as a choice is worthy of further investigation and evaluation.
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