We often get asked this question.

My first reply is often "Why do you need to use Sage (or Xero)?"

The answer inevitably is "because my external Accountant says I have to use Sage" (Or Xero).    

At the end of the day, this question should be "Will my External Accountant be able to use your system to do my Accounts?"  the answer of course is a 100% Yes!

But, why do we provide our own integral Accounting System rather than saving us the hassle of writing our own?

The reason is explained by many of the customers who come to us who are already using these systems.  They often cite the headache of the integration as being a key cause of wanting to change.  

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These dealers are asking "do you have your own Accounting System?"

What hassles ?

Well integration can be thought of like two systems with a large wall between them.  Information is moved one way (from the DMS system to the Accounting system) by throwing it up and over a "wall".

There are several issues here :-

1. The data from the DMS system is collated and summarised before sending to the Accounting System
2. The integration is one-way, the accounting system sends nothing back to the DMS
3. Once sent there is no link between the source information in the DMS and Accounting information

This means - for example - that if you are in your Accounting system and see an invoice in Debtors, and ring the customer. .. The customer will inevitably ask "What is the invoice for?" or "can I have a copy".  To do this, you need to then log into your DMS to then type in the invoice no to get a copy.

It gets worse!

The other issue is that these Accounting Systems are by-definition very generic.  They aren't motor trade specific.  

You can think of them as a toolbox full of hammers..

Sure you can hammer in a screw, but surely a screwdriver does the job better.

Dealing with Motor trade specifics like Margin VAT reporting, recording Preparation Costs onto a deal and keeping these as a cost of sale and handling warranty claims....

Before we write a software module, we always balance the cost of writing the software with the benefits of just using an "off the shelf" software package.

The questions we ask are twofold.

1. Can we  do better with a fully integral solution ?
2. Should we be spending our development time elsewhere?

An example of where we don't write our own software is Payroll.   We could just write our own, but we can't better the standalone Payroll packages, and the benefits of integration are minimal (though we do have integration with some payroll packages).

With Accounts though, we felt that the benefits of writing our own solution was very high and worth our time and effort.

And yes, it does have every feature that Sage (Xero, Quickbooks etc) has but there is no integration - it's integral.  

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The advantages of this are massive, and we want you to benefit from them .

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So, we put our energies into our own Accounting Software rather than lesser integrations with other solutions.

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