2015? Why just yesterday it was 2014. 😉

We hope 2014 was a great year for you. If you’ve received one of our informal surveys we hope you’ll complete it and let us know how you’re doing and what we can do to make 2015 better. As established customers know, we like to get a sense of how the industry is doing and what we need to do to stay ahead of that curve.

As per usual, there will be a new version of Simple Accounting in a few short weeks. We encourage you to look in the What’s New! post to get ready.

Unlike most other companies, we have always tried to provide a road map of where we’re going with our products. We often hear people, in all kinds of industries, talk about ‘competitive advantage’. This is most often given as the reason for keeping future plans as quiet as possible.

For better or worse, we disagree with that idea. We have found that the last thing people want in accounting and management systems are surprises. Time and again you’ve told us that you want us to make transitions to new features as gentle as possible. And part of that is letting you know what is coming so you can plan for new hardware and training. So we post our intentions here often as much as two years in advance.

The downside of telegraphing our plans, is not so much about ‘losing competitive advantage’ but more the inertia of having a large customer base and (almost) 30 years of history. Let’s be frank. This industry and many of our customers have always been slow to accept changes in technology. We have stated more than once that we understand this. We do everything we can to be to make new versions of Simple Accounting as backward compatible as possible. We work quite hard to ‘pre-sell’ our customers on new features that require re-training from established processes. When a new feature makes it into SAFE it has already run quite a gauntlet from skeptical beta-testers!

Ironically, that general resistance to change represents real opportunity for you. If you have a technological advantage, you win over your competitors in an increasingly commoditized world.

But this is our thirtieth year in business so our philosophy seems to have had at least some merit!

There’s a lot of truth to the old adages “Out of sight out of mind.” and “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Too many of you only contact us when something goes wrong. So you’ll forgive me if I nag once again: We hope you’ll take a moment at the start of this new year to fill out a survey (if you received one) or just drop us a line and tell us how things are going (if you haven’t). We want to know what you’re doing. What you think of what we’re doing. We want to know what you’ve seen out in the industry that we should know about–and what you think we should do about it!

Even though it’s been almost thirty years, we’re still as passionate as ever about what we do and your ideas, in fact your success, are what drive us. Yes, I know that sounds corny, but in this case it’s just the simple truth. We can’t do it without you!

All The Best For 2015