Accounting software moves onto iPhones and BlackBerrys

This autumn, one of the business software industry's biggest pipe dreams has started to come true - accounting on the go using mobile phones. John Stokdyk reports

For several years now, Exchequer users have been sending text alerts to remote devices using its Sentimail system and Microsoft NAV reseller/developer Anglia Business Systems has been supporting reporting and transactional systems on Husky handhelds since 2005.

But the variety of mobile operating systems and the limitations of small screens and keyboards held developers back from realising their hopes for mobile accounting. The BlackBerry and iPhone have seen off those issues and are beginning to be taken seriously as client devices for accounting applications.

In September, Intuit introduced support for BlackBerrys and iPhones on its online version of QuickBooks. Users can check contact and debtor details, bank balances and run balance sheets and P&L reports from their smartphones.

At around the same time, UK-based accounting software house CODA said that its CODA2go on-demand accounting system could do the same. CODA2go is one of the first business applications to be built on Salesforce.com's "platform as a service" architecture and this is what made the iPhone and BlackBerry interfaces possible, explained CODA group marketing director David Turner.

"It was all about the platform," he said. "Force.com did the integration work to make Salesforce.com work with the iPhone and BlackBerry and that interface let us deliver CODA2go with very little work. We haven't put huge investment in it, but tweaked things to allow it to work."

New Zealand-based internet accounting provider Xero has also added iPhone and BlackBerry support for some functions in its application and been "surprised" by the number of accesses from mobile browsers.

"At the moment it's limited to browsing functions: contacts, accounts receivable and bank transactions," said Xero co-founder Rod Drury. Based on the positive response, Xero plans to add employee expenses, invoicing and a send statement facility to the BlackBerry/iPhone client options.

"It's not the whole applications, but there are things you can do on the move with it - You won't do your full accounting on a BlackBerry, but it gives you a window on the key things - who owes what and who's paid," Drury explained.

So, do the pioneers think that mobile interfaces are the future of accounting? "It's more than a gimmick," Turner reckoned. "In the past six months there's been a huge increase in businesspeople carrying iPhones, BlackBerrys and Windows phones. There's definitely a role for them with people out on the road - for example business managers, sales and customer account people will use them to order status, accounts, credit limits and so on.

"Clearly no-one's going to do order entry or transactional accounting on a smartphone. It's not an interface for displaying spreadsheets or or huge volumes of data, but for quick queries or looking at summarised reports, it's incredibly convenient."

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