Competitive Position

Accounting practices who are evaluating the competive product position need to be aware of some very important differences between us and our competitors.

Accfin Professional Series	Competitor 1	Competitor 2
Tax Manager	Equivalent	Equivalent
Tax Advisor	None	None
iTax Connect	Equivalent Early stage	Equivalent Early stage
Secretarial Assistant	Equivalent	Equivalent
Time Right (Drs Wip)	Equivalent	Equivalent

In this field there are three main competitors who all claim that they have an integrated suite. For this purpose I have just mentioned them as Competitor 1 and 2. There are also other competitors who  have stand-alone tax calculation products. There are at least three stand alone calculation products in the market. There are also smaller players who are trying to get into the back office accountants market but so far there is none that will take the place of the top three.

What makes Accfin's product offering better

Two Years Ahead of Any Competitor

Do not be taken in by the nonsense hype that you have been told by our competitors. Here are just some very important facts that you need to know;

1. Accfin grew out of an accounting practise more then 20 years ago. We are the only company to be totally focused on what we do.
2. Accfin was the first company to devise tax and company secretarial management software in South Africa.
3. We were the first company to produce an electronic provisonal tax form that was copyrighted.
4. We were the first company to produce an electronic company secretarial form in South Africa.
5. We were the first company to make use of a bar code scanner to speed up data capture for tax and secretarial systems.
6. Currently we are the only company that eFiles a Tax Return straight out of a tax preparation package Tax Advisor into the SARS eFiling system.
7. Currently we are the only software vendor in tax field that is accredited by SARS.

The Software is Totally Integrated

Accfin runs one executible program file which contains all the modules. If the user has any one of our modules loaded they have access to any part of the system within the same module, if given the necessary rights of access.

What does this mean - very simply by having the program loaded 1 user has access to the 5 modules listed above by simply clicking a button. In terms of your hardware infrastructure this means one person only runs 1 session on the network instead of 4 separate sessions. This reduces substantially the network resources used as well as reducing time on downloading software updates. ie Down load 1 program instead of 4.

By making use of our intellistal update facility, updates can be provided in minutes by dropping the program file on the server which then automatically migrates down to each work station on the network. How simple is this.

Even though our software is totally integrated, in our larger practice environment we have more then 50 users who could be logged in at any one time. Imagine this 5 people in the tax department working as well as 5 people in the company secretarial department working all simultaneously as well as various administration functions taking place in time sheets, invoicing and receipts etc. And no one worker is being affected by any one else on the system.

The Speed of Software Change

Currently we work in an environment where the speed of change or updating the software is highly volatile because of the continuous changing of laws. When it comes to changing the software to take care of the new  tax and company secretarial law quickly and by so doing we kill our competitors.

One or two updates a year just does not cut it anymore. The litmas test is if you are using a competitors system - what guarantees do you have that you are up todate. Eg. Does P2 2010 comply with the new provisional tax law effective 1st of January 2010. I will put money on it that no competive system is up to date. Does your system now print 2 columns on an IRP6. If not it does not comply.