fbpx

Redmond Accounting Inc

brad sleeters

Cloud Rules @ Sleeter

Just returned from the 10th annual Sleeter Accounting Technology conference held in Vegas this year and guess what the focus was.  You got it – Cloud Accounting.  Seemed to be an ever-so-slight shift — less explaining about what the cloud means or how one works in the cloud or is it secure enough or whether it was going to take over.  Instead, we have arrived.  Reminded me of a session at Sleeter the previous year where the speaker handed out foam balls to the audience and said to throw them at anyone that mentions the cloud again.  Yeah, yeah, yeah – we get it.  We’ve all been using the internet since the mid-90’s.  Enough already.  Let’s move on.  And that’s exactly what we did this year.  The cloud has officially been accepted and we all went about our way learning new solutions and processes and meeting new colleagues.

And leading the way was Intuit with their brand new gorgeous QuickBooks Online.  Brad Smith delivered an eloquent keynote speech to a packed conference ballroom and then opened it up for audience questions.  Brad has often said that Intuit considers itself a 30-year-old start-up and we consistently see him keeping it real.  Brad re-stated Intuit’s commitment to an open API to allow 3rd party developers to continue creating integrations with QBO, even announcing the removal of the $5 developer fee.  Intuit’s product managers supported that commitment announcing new integrations with Square and Amex.  Intuit product manager also showed off many new and coming-soon features for QBO.

QBO app developers were also in attendance, including heavyweights Method CRM and Bill.com.  Paul Jackson, Founder & CEO of Method, introduced the term Frankensteining to mean a group of software solutions stitched together with processes to support a business’ various needs – from accounting to CRM to marketing to sales to scheduling to operations.  We look forward to a more cohesive system on one or two platforms with a tight, automated integration.  Paul also pointed out the advantages of a system being able to personalize a customer’s experience and the demand for that, led by big cloud names like Amazon and Netflix.  Renee Lacerte accepted another award for Awesome App for Bill.com.  Renee spoke about fraud prevention and Bill.com’s new open API for integrating with other systems.  (Update:  Bill.com announced the following week $38M venture capital funding.  Can’t wait to see what great features come our way with that resource.)