Sage signed up for a Pearl account today. Welcome Greg, have a look around! It makes me wonder what’s up the sleevies of the Big Green Giant, and how they are going to catch up. After an initial foray into the web based accounting market, we’ve not seen much progression from them (other than ex Sage staff applying for our developers job openings!).
How fast can you develop a mature web ERP app is the question? What’s the time to market from ground zero? At what point do you launch your product in “beta” version, if you do at all? We’re where we are after more than 8 years of development, experience and mistakes. We’ve been putting 200% effort into the product rather than pre-launch hype, which is why you may not have heard much about us yet. Admittedly, we’ve really ramped it up in the last 24 months, but even so – 24 months is a fair while, but look carefully at what Pearl can do and you’ll see why.
Replicating an offline system is one way to get out there fast, and that looks like what Sage were planning at the start of ’09 – but we’re seeing plenty of users ditching Sage for lighter, more basic systems. Software like Sage Line 50 has a huge number of superb features, but because it’s been around for ages and ages, it’s also got lots going on that can intimidate a less exprienced user. One of the reasons that the web based apps out there are picking up users two-a-penny is because they are SIMPLE.
Now simple is good because it’s easy to learn, looks clean and feels great to use. But try and pack in a load of features that are pretty essential to a larger SME (eg decent stock control, batch product management, full ecommerce integration) – and it gets pretty tricky to keep it simple… so the challenge is to keep it simple whilst powerful.
Pearl has tackled this problem in a number of ways-
1/ User Interface
We’ve released the new Pearl UI, in preparation for the launch of Pearl Express at the start of May. It’s colour coded, clear and gives you access to every page on the system within two clicks whilst not baffling the user with too many options. Everyone loves it! What do you think?
Colours in Pearl
2/ Colours
Throughout Pearl you’ll see the ability to colour code things like order statuses, customer labels, and events. At a glance you can get a good feel for what the screen is trying to tell you without needing to actually read it. It’s also handy for preventing errors – for example if your order is in red (“ready to ship”, perhaps), then you’re not going to inadvertently send off another quote.
3/ Multiple subscription levels
Pearl Express – the free version of Pearl – is a reduced functionality package with a fraction of what Pearl can offer, yet it still has more features than many other apps out there. Users can get used to Pearl without being overwhelmed, and then move up to our other price plans as their company grows, all the way up to the higher end of SME, with 50+ staff and £10m+ turnover, all managed in the same application: no data transfer, no learning curve – just the same system from day one.
4/ Configuration options
So you don’t need stock control? Just turn it off. Same for time billing – there’s no need to clutter the screens with features that you don’t need. The inline configuration screen allows the user to make these choices and set their system up exactly as needed.
So where does this take us? We’ve got experience with multi user, multi departmental, multi site clients in a huge variety of sectors, and clients that have more than 1.5 million product lines, as well as Mr. Bob who’s running his building company using Pearl just for book keeping. If you can make it simple for Bob, then with a bit of sneaky design, Mr. Corporation is simply 100 Mr. Bobs all tapping away happily at the same Web2.0 web based app.
It’s taken us the best part of a decade, and we’ve still got a fair way to go in some areas. My punt is that it’s not going to be an easy task for Xero, Kashflow and some of the others to move from the “accounting” space into the “business management” space. A number of companies have gone for the merge (Tactile and Freshbooks for example) … but with web based apps moving so fast I have a feeling that’s only going to end up being another systems fragmentation dead end. That’s why we built Pearl. One system. No limits. (hey, isn’t that someone else’s tagline?)
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