Softline Pastel, developer of South Africa's leading accounting and business software (with 180 000 customers), has broken entirely new ground with its latest product, My Business - which strips out accounting terminology and thereby enables business people with no knowledge of accounting to use it.
There are, for instance, no "creditors" or "debtors" in My Business. The package refers only to "payments" and "receipts".
Also, the package's functionality includes only that required for very small businesses. There's no general ledger but there is invoicing, stock, purchasing, and cashbook capability.
Softline Pastel managing director, Steven Cohen, says development of the product, two years in the making, was possible only because Pastel has over 18 years' experience of creating accounting applications for the SME sector.
"When we started, the rush to computerise accounting functionality had just begun and everyone was focused on providing progressively richer functionality. All of us competed on features. Accordingly, today, accounting packages have more features than the average, small business will use.
"Being as close to the SME market as we are, we understand the realities facing entrepreneurs. They're never going to become accountants, so why force them to learn what is, essentially, a foreign language - and feel inferior along the way?
"We realised that simply cutting down one of our existing products was not going to help that kind of entrepreneur. So we built My Business from the ground up. We threw all the conventional rules about accounting software out of the window and worked, instead, from the intellectual property we've gathered for ourselves over the past 18 years about the way a small business runs.
"We couldn't have done it, though, without having come full circle in the world of accounting software. It's easy to look at a simplified product and say 'I can copy this'. But to originate it, to be the first to break the rules - strangely enough - takes a lot of experience and wisdom."
My Business forms part of a product roadmap developed by Pastel some years ago to mentor people entirely new to business (and accounting) about controlling the finances of a business.
My Business is the second step on that mentoring path and follows on from Pastel Invoicing, the product Pastel introduced at the end of last year. It enables a very small business to progress from using technology to automate its invoicing processes to automating related processes such as stock tracking, bank reconciliation, and tax reporting.
Other features include Suppliers, Item Quantities, Cost and Adjustments, Bank Accounts, Sundry Accounts, Cashbook Processing, an Income Statement Report, and a simple Assets Register with an Assets Register report.
Extremely user-friendly dashboards that ensure a bird's-eye view of the company at all times, include due and overdue supplier invoices (ie, to be paid), purchase orders due and overdue for delivery, due and overdue notes, top suppliers by purchases, top suppliers by balance owed, purchases history graphs with full drill down to the supplier invoice level, and supplier ageing totals graphs with full drill down to the supplier invoice level.
"Accounting really doesn't get easier than this," Cohen says.
"Also, knowing that although most people use only about 10% of, say, Microsoft Word, they do use 100% of that 10%. We've supplied about 2% of all possible accounting features with the confidence that the small businesses this product is aimed at will use 100% of that 2%.
"In other words, they'll get enormous value out of the package. And when they've grown enough to move to greater functionality, the upgrade path to other Pastel products is easy."
My Business is available now from Pastel channel partners and at Incredible Connection and Makro, at an introductory, limited-offer price of R699.
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