Softline Pastel rounds out offering for start-up SMEs

By adding functionality to its My Business product without compromising its quintessential simplicity, Softline Pastel has rounded out its offering for very small and start-up companies - now enabling the production of a full set of formal accounts.

“Our first version of My Business, launched in March 2007, has proved extremely popular, selling an average of 400 copies a month - in spite of the economic downturn,” says Softline Pastel managing director, Steven Cohen. “So it has proved us right in believing that many people want accounting software that doesn't require them to learn the skill of bookkeeping or accounting, but does allow them to track their financials in a way that makes sense to them.

“The experience and insight we've garnered in our 20 years of providing accounting and business software to SMEs enabled us to create, from scratch, a solution that lets people who don't know a creditor from a debtor to still track 'money owed' to themselves and to their suppliers - and to see, as soon as they open the product in the mornings, who their top 10 customers are, what their top 10 products are, what the top 10 customers are in order of amounts outstanding and so on.

“In other words, My Business was designed from the outset to give people an immediate view of their businesses while allowing them to drill down to more detail if they wanted it.

“The first version focused on giving them that view in terms of customers and suppliers. Now we've completed the view by adding cash books, journals, assets and liabilities and all the other formal accounting functionality that will help SMEs with things like motivating for funding from financial institutions. And we've done it without adding complexity. A user of My Business version 1 could upgrade to My Business version 2 and not really notice any difference. We're still not forcing him to learn accounting terminology or principles.

“If, however, he wanted to put his toe in the water and, for example, set up a cash book, he could do it without breaking a sweat. In other words, My Business 2 is one of the easiest ways to ease yourself into running a business based on sound financial principles.”

Users can upgrade from the first version to My Business 2 without having to migrate data from one to the other. My Business customers who have a Pastel support plan, can upgrade free of charge.

“We'll not be changing My Business 2 again, except to bug fix if that turns out to be necessary,” Cohen says. “That's because My Business 2 serves a very specific market and we're not going to make the mistake of bloating it to try and attract the people who would normally use our more advanced products.

“It does the job its users will ask of it exceptionally well, and we're very proud of having created it. It's a step change in the way accounting works for the people who most need automated accounting but have never been allowed to have it, because software developers just didn't think hard and innovatively enough.

”It gives the business person accounting functionality that makes sense to him or her while still providing the business's accountants with all the information they need in the accepted, regulated format. That's pretty cool.”

My Business 2 has been freshly branded, differentiating it from other Pastel products. “We want it to be obvious to retail customers that My Business is not a scaled-down version of a larger and, therefore, for them, more challenging product, but has been built from the ground up with their start-up or very small business in mind,” Cohen says.

My Business 2 is available now from Softline Pastel, Pastel channel partners, Incredible Connection and Makro for R899.