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More success for Cloud pioneer Interactive Accounting!
Interactive Accounting had just recovered from being awarded "2011 Xero Partner of the year" (see our blog post from 1 August further down), when they made page 52 of The Financial Review, the pinnacle of all Australian financial publications.
Interactive Accounting, under the leadership of its dynamic CEO, Guy Pearson, CA, strongly believes in and pursues Cloud computing for all their accounting services. For its Superannuation services the up and coming company deploys industry leading online compliance solution superMate in integration with our leading data automation & integration platform RSDataWeb.
Our congratulations and best wishes go out to Guy and his fantastic team! Keep up the great work you are doing for your clients. Many thanks for your generous support in practice testing new RSDataWeb functionality.
Posted by Wolf Schumacher
SuperMate launches Omnibroker, powered by RSDataWeb
superMate, the leading fully web based SMSF compliance solution, today announced the availability of Omnibroker, the automated data feed solution for SMSFs.
Omnibroker is powered by RSDataWeb, the cloud based data automation & integration solution by RewardSuper. Among many other automated data feeds RSDataWeb automatically sources share trade confirmations from any stock broker in Australia and makes them available to compliance solutions, such as superMate by Supercorp.
Posted by Wolf Schumacher
The Cloud is here to stay!
This month has seen a few very important endorsements for deploying and using the cloud for business. For example, in Australia, BGL Corporate Solutions announced their plans to introduce web versions of their widely used software offerings. It follows Supercorp who are already in the space with their superMate product. RSDataWeb interfaces with both firms' products.
SAP, the largest business software vendor worldwide, very recently released online deployment plans and partner programs at their annual Sapphire conference.
In June this year, Amazon Web Services APAC will be touring Australia with their offering of cloud infrastructures, giving Australian web infrastructure companies a run for their money as Amazon provides cloud hosting services geographically close by.
Additionally, innovative accounting firms look at partnering with software vendors that offer accounting solutions in the cloud for their business and private clients, such as Xero and Acclipse/Saasu.
These developments are great endorsements of the path RewardSuper has been going with SaaS / Cloud Computing since it was founded in early 2009. While it means that more offerings and potential competitors will come into our market, it also means that our Accounting and Advice market will even more readily accept Cloud Computing as the right way to go. It will also mean that traditional non-cloud vendors will most likely be in dire straits going forward.
Unfortunately, this month also saw some nasty surprises, which some industry observers directly related to cloud computing. There were computing problems a few big banks had; there was a blackout with web sites powered by Amazon and a number of other incidences made the news.
In assessing these issues, one has to remember, though, that most Australian banks run extremely complicated, very old legacy systems and that, contrary to any company internal computing problems, cloud computing incidences typically receive extraordinary attention by the media. Add to this unfounded rumours of a "cloud bubble", which was started in the media with Microsoft taking over Skype. Rest assured, the cloud economy is very different to the DotCom bubble ten years ago.
From our viewpoint as Cloud application providers we can say that private and public clouds are secure, exciting, scalable and the wave of the future. No business should miss out on this great opportunity of saving money and open up to new and advanced online business opportunities.
Author: Wolf Schumacher
Updated BGL upload document for RSDataWeb
Recently BGL Corp Solutions published their updated interface description for uploads from RSDataWeb. When you, as a BGL client, have access to the BGL Wiki you can view the attached RSDataWeb upload document along with instructions for other data providers.
Using RSDataWeb for the automatic capture of a wide range of cash and investment transactions and our automatic transaction reconciliation guarantees that the whole process of transaction automation and integration becomes a very simple, quick and affordable one. Fully coded transaction data can be exported with the click of a button at any time to BGL Simple Fund and other supported Accounting packages, such as Supercorp's superMate, APS Desktop Super, Handisoft Ledger and Financial Synergy's Acurity online.
Please get in touch with us for more details. Find our contact details here.
Author: Wolf Schumacher
Data integration in the context of SMSF industry integration
(click image to zoom)
Our valued blog contributor and SMSF specialist Aaron Dunn very recently published an excellent overview of the SMSF industry in his highly respected SMSF blog www.thedunnthing.com. His chart depicts various categories with its major players. What the chart doesn’t show is the dataflow between the players.
This blog post discusses elements of the transactional dataflow between SMSF industry players.
Network thinking is not prevalent in the SMSF industry
For years “straight-through processing” has been a catchword in the Financial Services Industry. While a lot has been achieved over the years, the SMSF industry players and adjacent data generating industries are not thinking and acting in networks (yet). Too many entities still think they can do it all themselves and leave their Accounting and Advice clients alone with barely integrated compliance solutions (aka accounting software) and a few data feeds. What is missing is true network thinking and acting and using web-services technology which is readily available today but unfortunately not used enough. The industry is stuck with on-premise accounting software and vendors who try to bolt on web features to their existing products; some being more successful than others, though.
RSDataWeb, the “Switzerland” of accounting and advice systems
At RewardSuper we’ve understood that the Internet has dawned on the SMSF industry and that network thinking and acting are the way to make it stick. Not only web services technology but the willingness to actively exchange data electronically without manual intervention is the way forward. With our RSDataWeb solution, we are at the bleeding edge of this new technology adoption. We team up with forward thinking companies in the industry to automatically hook up client authorized data streams such as share trading data, and feeding the resulting cleaned and fully matched data into the compliance systems of choice, such as BGL Simple Fund, Acurity, superMate and others. In the industry we are all in this together with trying to deliver the best possible data as quickly as possible and untampered by manual interventions into the books of SMSFs (i.e. trial balances).
Integrating the SMSF accounting data value chain
The key to data integration and resulting high data quality is for the players in the data value chain to let their systems talk to each other across all process steps. No manual interventions such as keying in contract notes data into compliance software, which represent broken links in the data flow (see picture). While the process flow should be automatic to represent true integration, there needs to be ongoing control of the process by the process owners. In the example of an SMSF conducting share trades, there are three types of owners: trustees, who decide and effect trades, stock brokers, who execute trades on behalf of the trustees, and accountants, who also act on behalf of the trustees by making sure that the trades are correctly represented in the SMFS's books.
The example process has two integration points
(1) The broker’s order system automatically produces trade confirmations (aka contract notes) for their clients, the trustees. With RSDataWeb the contract notes are automatically picked up and reconciled with the cash book.
(2) RSDataWeb automatically codes all reconciled transactions and delivers them to the respective accounting system.
Both integration points need to be carefully monitored by the accountants (via automatically produced exception reports), who are in control of the process from step 3 onwards. An automated, integrated and well controlled process delivers the results, which the trustees the Auditors and the SMSF regulator rightfully expect to see.
Author: Wolf Schumacher
Our Thoughts on the Cloud - The Good, The Bad & The Beautiful
The Dot Com boom/bust of the 90s illustrated and over-hyped the possibilities of the Web without the infrastructure, technology or experience to make it a feasible venture. As a result, the use of the Internet for business was deemed a failed experiment (with the exception of email, online banking and websites that validated a company’s existence).
Let’s fast forward to the mid naughties and along comes the development of APIs, no longer does a company have to develop an all in one solution, but a piece to a collaborative puzzle that each consumer is starting to be able to piece together. Sure, there are now many passwords to remember, but to have the exact functionality you want, or that functionality be in development, this is a small price to pay.
So, below is a summary of why we at Interacctive Accounting have chosen to aim to be 100% based in the cloud:
The Good -
- Cost savings by no longer having to continually upgrade storage facilities for electronic or physical data,
- access to your data wherever there is an Internet connection,
- always having points of contact to answer customer questions in a respectable time frame, and
- programs/tools used on the web are cheaper as they don’t have as many fixed costs as software companies in the past
- Reliance on 3rd parties to safeguard your data, however, customers and the market demands security, as a result, this is a very high priority. Just ensure you’re tool has redundant backups of your data and adequate security
- What if the Internet crashes? Everything on the Internet is actually stored on a server. Somewhere.... Let’s not focus on a “doomsday” scenario.
- APIs are constantly expanding between online products,
- Instead of hiring a data processor to repeat a mindless task, you can replace the need for this with a cheaper online tool (For Interactive Accounting this means no off-shoring),
- The efficiencies allow for teams of experienced people, given the efficiencies of data processing,
- Real time advice is actually possible and not just a tag line,
- Clients have access to their data wherever and whenever they need it,
- Overheads for service providers are able to be reduced and thus it benefits the end consumer,
- No backups required (if you actually do them) and, lastly:
- Online products do not have disks for upgrades, you simply have 1-2 hours downtime per month (usually @ 4am) and all of a sudden, the functionality has been increased at no extra cost to you, the user.....
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Author: Guy Pearson, Founder and CEO Interactive Accounting in Sydney.
Interactive Accounting is currently implementing RSDataWeb in conjunction with the soon to be integrated SuperMate accounting package.
