Hi Mark

In view of solar accounts lucrative move to a subscription based online business model, I have struggled to decide if this will represent value for money going forward. Considering that Solar accounts USP was that it wasn’t subscription based or internet reliant it is now both these abhorrent things so inevitably I find myself comparing Solar to the many other products available. Below is a longstanding wish list of things that I hoped you would get around to developing in Solar accounts, but never really pushed for, respecting the fact that you didn’t charge for product upgrades.

So my personal wish list is as follows:

⁃	Bank Feeds

⁃ Improvements to Project workflow. New “Projects” list to be included on left hand side of window and managed in a similar way to “customers” such that there can be active and inactive (archived) projects. In the “Project” list, columns showing total expense, total income, profit, (and percentage profit would be nice). In all invoice/transaction etc dialogues a simple dropdown list offering active jobs, rather than the ponderously hidden and ever expanding list of jobs going back years.
⁃ HMRC compliant mileage tracking
⁃ Smart phone extension including receipt photo capture
⁃ Home screen to be replaced with a useful dashboard
⁃ Greater customisation of reports for better business analysis and memorised custom reports for easy recall
⁃ Better customisation of templates

I fully understand that those are personal preferences and I also know of your reluctance to share future developments, but given that the only apparent developments since the introduction of Solar Online18 months ago appears to be transaction notes which for some reason are invisible and internal emailing for which I can find no apparent advantage what so ever.

I wonder if you could be so candid on this occasion to share some thoughts on the future direction of this product. I have been a loyal customer for the last 6 years and wish to remain so, but feel that solar is losing ground to other products that are more progressive, offering innovative tools that are genuinely helpful in book keeping. I genuinely hope that you have plans to make solar accounts a more dynamic and flexible tool for small business now that it is subscription based.

Many thanks

Simon

Hi Simon,

I'll note your suggestions for future development and I understand it is frustrating to see us working on features that you personally don't need. But having an online version was one of the most-requested features since the very first version of Solar Accounts (and also one of the most time-consuming to develop). Having an inbuilt email system saves a lot of time for users who have a web-based email account like Gmail and are unable to download and configure a desktop email program like Outlook. The online version also can produce a customer activity statement and has better support for high resolution displays - again, these were features were requested by a significant number of users.

Currently our priority is 1) adding an 'offline mode' to allow you to work without an internet connection after you log in; 2) developing a feature to import bank statements. But unfortunately we cannot make promises about future development so I cannot say when these features will be available - sorry. We hope that in time as we continue development of the online version you will eventually find a reason to switch from your existing offline version.

Regards,

Hi Mark,

Given that Making Tax Digital (MTD) is only some 18 months away I would have expected Solar to be making more progress with the likes of bank feeds.

Sorry, if that sounds arrogant - I don't mean it to be.

I do not wish to move from Solar to another software provider but at the moment I don't see how I can justify paying a monthly subscription for the online version as none of my clients do any of their bookkeeping.

Some of them still hand write their invoices and I have been asking if they would like to be able to do them via a software program. At this time it has been a resounding NO.

If I could offer them bank feeds then I am sure I would be able to persuade them to change. They are going to have to change if HMRC have their way and I would prefer to use just one software for this - namely Solar.

So can we please have any indication of time frame for bank feeds?

Hello MM Bookkeeping Services,

I'm sorry but we cannot make promises about future development, so I can't give you a time frame for new features we plan to add to Solar Accounts. I can see that importing bank statements would save you a lot of time and encourage some of your clients to use software. (Although I don't think that the Making Tax Digital policy will sway them - they will just keep writing invoices by hand and ask that you submit the digital tax return on their behalf).

Regards,