BoxFree IT : Is Google Sheets Good Enough to Replace Excel?

Alexey Mitko for BoxFree IT writes:  At the end of last year Google added a host of new features to its popular Google Sheets spreadsheet app (part of its cloud productivity suite Google Apps). Are they enough to entice accounting professionals to switch from Microsoft Excel?

First, it’s important to note that Excel is still far more powerful than Google Sheets. Originally a fairly basic product, Google Sheets is narrowing the gap with Excel by including such features asoffline editing capabilities, improved function editing and updated conditional formatting. In addition, Google Sheets’ strength has always resided within its collaboration capabilities, which have been improved with the addition of filter views and optional power features called add-ons.

At time of writing, Google Sheets has only 32 add-on features and of those only Vertex42 Template Gallery is somewhat relevant for accountants. It’s not a very useful selection but add-ons are not terribly difficult to write (programming skills are needed). In time entrepreneurial accountants will replicate the useful tools scattered across spreadsheets and servers.

An accounting firm using Google Docs can also distribute their selection of add-ons through a private tab which reduces the number of spreadsheets in circulation.

To be clear, Excel is a robust product with functionality that has been built over many years. However, users tend to engage only a very small portion of Excel’s capabilities on a daily basis. Simple line additions, pivot tables and budgeting are perhaps the most common – tasks which Google Sheets is perfectly capable of handling.

Excel’s ability to perform complex financial modeling and advanced statistical analysis may be out of grasp for Google Sheets, but at this level of financial analysis best practice in modeling becomes important and accountants can use specialised software, such as Quantrix and IBM SPSS. Robust modelling is subject to the runaway effect where complex models become hard to check and understand.

Sequence versus Collaboration

Will accountants and bookkeepers start to shift programs? Not immediately. The issue is less about features and more to do with the way an accounting firm works.

Arguably, the Excel model better fits the way most accounting firms delegate the work. Most accountants work sequentially in their individual roles. There is constant communication between clients, accountants, managers and directors, but only one accountant works on a clearly defined task, which is then reviewed and signed off.

This model is quite different from the real-time collaboration approach advocated by Google Sheets. Imagine an accounting firm where managers are able to see the work in progress as it is being completed and instead of reviewing the work they would be guiding its actual performance (a version of this model can also be seen in Xero where accountant/client relationships are evolving thanks to real-time collaboration). Both models have their benefits and limitations. The uptake of Google Sheets, all things being equal, will be closely correlated with how the performance of work is structured in the accounting firms.

Overall the recent update to Google Sheets is a welcome one, but competition is not centered around functionality as much as around a deeper question of evolving way we do work.

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BoxFreeIT is an independent news site covering cloud software for Australian and New Zealand businesses which launched in July 2011. The site is published by Sholto Macpherson, a business technology journalist in online and print media for over 11 years. BoxFreeIT operates in accordance with the MEAA (Australian Journalists Association) Code of Ethics. The only Australasian site dedicated to cloud software, BoxFreeIT attracts 12,000 unique visitors a month and is adding 2,000 visitors a month. A total 65,000 unique visitors have visited BoxFreeIT in 2012.

The site has built up a strong following of accountants and bookkepeers exploring cloud accounting programs such as MYOB Live Accounts and Account Right Live, Xero, Saasu and Intuit QuickBooks Online, as well as SMEs interested in cloud software.

‘Excel-killer’ startup Anaplan just raised $100 million on a $1 billion-plus valuation

Business Insider/Times of India writes: Things are going exceptionally well for Anaplan these days, the startup that's taking on Excel with a cloud app. 

The company just closed a $100 million series D investment, led by venture capitalist DFJ Growth. That brings the total it has raised to $150 million. 

The company is now valued at over $1 billion, a source close to the company tells us. 

Human-resources cloud company on Workday was one of the investors in the round, as was Salesforce.com, which had invested in an earlier round, too. That means that Anaplan is backed by two of the most respected cloud companies in the nation. 

Workday is led by co-CEO Aneel Bhusri, who is also a high-powered venture capitalist at Greylock Ventures, where he had invested in one of Anaplan's major competitors, Tidemark. 

[Update: Workday PR contacted us and told us Bhusri is no longer a board member of Tidemark. We had been asking questions to sources about this, asking if it was considered a conflict of interest.] 

Other investors in Workday's huge round include Brookside Capital, Coatue Management, Sands Capital Management, Granite Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, and Shasta Ventures. 

The big raise might not be too shocking to anyone who's been following this market. 

As we previously reported, Anaplan went from generating about $10 million in all of 2012 to $10 million per quarter in 2013. And it hit $10 million per month as of January 2014, it told Business Insider. 

The company is trying to get people who run their businesses with spreadsheets to make the leap to the cloud. It offers a sophisticated financial planning and modelling tool that's as easy to use as a spreadsheet, but also does things Excel can't do, like letting groups work together. It also offers a bunch of preset tools it calls modules, which help companies track sales, capital expenditures, profitability planning, and workforce. 

For instance, with a few clicks of a button, you could see how adding more employees might affect sales and profitability of a certain business unit. 

Founded about eight years ago, it really started to flourish after it hired Frederic Laluyaux as its CEO (he'd come from SAP). 

Laluyaux said the Workday investment happened because both companies share a lot of customers. They were working to make their cloud products work better together when "Workday learned that we were doing our D round," he said. 

Laluyaux is happy to have Workday aboard. "Aneel's support and strong positive views on Anaplan are a testament that Anaplan is really on the right path," he said. 

Randy Glein, managing director at DFJ Growth, will join Anaplan's board of directors. 

"Anaplan is addressing a very large market opportunity," Glein told us. "The company has the wind at its back and is scaling rapidly, thinking big about the future." 

Next up, Anaplan wants to entice third-party developers to create prepackaged modules for its app. It also wants to let them tap into its cloud to add graphs and modeling to their own apps, Glein told us. 

Here's a video that shows the Anaplan app in action:

Intuit Picks SmartVault for Tax Document Management

Charlie Russell for The Sleeter Group writes:   Intuit is partnering with SmartVault to integrate the SmartVault document management system (DMS) with Intuit ProSeries and Intuit Lacerte, replacing the Intuit-provided DMS functions that have been a part of those products in the past. This partnership provides users of ProSeries and Lacerte with not only one of the best cloud-based document management systems available, it also provides them with a secure customer portal for exchanging documents.

Intuit has a number of different document management features in various products that it supports. They all work in different ways and keep their documents in separate storage vaults. If you look at the document management features in ProSeries/Lacerte, QuickBooks desktop and QuickBooks Online, you see that each of these systems works very differently and stores data in different ways. I believe that this creates a maintenance issue for Intuit as well as makes it difficult to expand the products to add new features.

In the case of ProSeries and Lacerte, Intuit made the decision to not offer its own document management system starting with the product for Tax Year 2014 and, instead, will be partnering with SmartVault to seamlessly integrate ProSeries and Lacerte with SmartVault.  [snip] The article continues at The Sleeter Group, click here to continue reading...

Holistic Accounting - A New Approach

Dave McClure for CPA Practice Advisor writes: In quiet conversations, the concept of holistic accounting is being examined and considered as the next major trend in client services.  In a nutshell, holistic accountant addresses the client as a complete entity and seeks to help in meeting all of their business needs.

This is hardly surprising.  A holistic approach has taken hold in the medical sciences, where we seek to treat the whole patient rather than just the current complaint.  In marketing, professionals refer to taking a holistic approach to a brand, encompassing all of the elements of the brand that make it more marketable.  The word “holistic” is currently the top term sought in the major search engines.

So within a few weeks we can expect to see a crush of new articles, conference tracks and white papers designed to help firms embrace the concept of “holistic accounting.”  While the concept and its implementation are steps forward in client service, however, the concept does come with some risks. [snip]   The article continues at CPA Practice Advisor, click here to continue reading.