Blogs

It’s been my pleasure in the last month to be staffing the CODA 2go booth at the salesforce.com Tour de Force events in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Boston. Its been great to field questions, discuss customer requirements and demo an early, pre-release version of the CODA 2go on-demand accounting application.

CODA 2go is a brand new on-demand accounting system developed from scratch on the Force.com platform - the salesforce.com development platform.

We’ve been quizzed on all aspects of CODA’s history, product development process and functionality but for sure a recurring question has been ‘Is CODA2go integrated with salesforce.com’s CRM?’. The answer of course is ‘Yes’, but somehow somehow integration in my mind conjures up images of shuffling data to and from separate databases or maybe providing hot links between separate applications.

So rather than just ‘integration’ between CODA2go and CRM I think a better description is ‘co-existence’ : the two applications share the same data, security model, reporting tools, workflow engine, etc and as such act as modules of a common suite rather than as separate applications.

You’ll see this co-existence evident throughout the CODA2go application and this will provide huge benefits to existing salesforce.com CRM users. For example:

• Providing a complete 360^o view of an Account: CRM users can not only see sales, marketing and call center history, they can also view invoices and full payment history from the familiar salesforce.com Account tab.
• Tasks, events and approval processes relating to accounting functions can be managed and viewed in exactly the same way of those activities in CRM
• Users can create and manage reports, search lists and filters using their existing knowledge of the CRM application.

So I’ve changed my answer to the question ‘Does CODA integrate to salesforce CRM?’. The answer is ‘No, other applications may integrate with CRM but CODA2go co-exists”!

After my last post, I got a note from Kevin Roberts, our VP Business Development in the US:

“Yes, the ‘Tour de Force’ salesforce.com roadshow commenced last week with events in Atlanta and Chicago and we were there. At both events, there was a packed audience (standing room only!) at the keynote presentations by Marc Benioff and Polly Sumner of salesforce.com, where CODA’s Jeremy Roche discussed the benefits of the Force.com platform for professional developers and ISVs. Salesforce.com’s Adam Gross conducted a live demonstration of a pre-release  version of CODA2go on stage on our behalf, where he walked through the order-to-cash process showing all the neat features we’ve been building into the software. 

CODA also had a stand in the ‘Developer Zone’ where attendees could see close up a pre-release version of CODA2go in action and chat with Jeremy, Steve Pugh and myself. Huge interest and genuine excitement from analysts, potential partners, existing salesforce.com customers and companies large and small.

We’re expecting an even larger turnout this week in New York (Wednesday 16th) before we visit Boston on April 22nd.”

Less than four weeks until the official launch of CODA 2go at Dreamforce Europe, the Salesforce.com user event in London, and the level of excitement is growing, both internally and externally.

This week our CEO Jeremy has been in the US, appearing on stage with Marc Benioff at the Tour de Force events in Atlanta and Chicago. Next week he’s back on stage again in New York. The level of interest in CODA 2go has been massive, with Salesforce users excited by the opportunity for a finance system not just integrated with their CRM but on the same technology platform.

In the first of a series of planned interviews and briefings, Jeremy spoke with Business Week in the States on Thursday; the press coverage will only grow as we get closer to the launch.

As for the launch… well, ‘watch this space’ as they say. Not only is the software looking great, but we’re developing some stunning videos and materials to help people to better understand the solution….

At CODA we’ve been closely following the recent announcements from Steve Jobs to make the iPhone a groundbreaking mobile device for the enterprise. As development on CODA 2go continues we can see huge benefits for customers by exploiting the strengths of both force.com as a platform and the iPhone as an advanced mobile client. Apple would seem to have addressed the major obstacles that have prevented iPhone adoption in the Enterprise and, if that’s the case, we can take advantage of the rich, full browser capabilities that is core functionality of the device.

So how does this apply to the world of financial accounting? Read the rest of this entry »

As the launch of CODA 2go, slated for Dreamforce Europe in early May, approches, we are now growing up the ‘go to market’ team by recruiting a dedicated team of sales, marketing and web professionals to cope with market demand.

CODA’s new international accounting system, CODA 2go, will provide companies of all sizes with financials on demand built natively and hosted on the salesforce.com platform and fully integrated with the market-leading CRM (customer relationship management) system . Early interest has been massive, particularly from existing salesforce.com users.

The new recruits will join a dedicated team within CODA focusing on the on-demand market. The extreme flexibility of the design of CODA 2go will enable it to address the accounting system needs of a huge range of customers – from those with just tens of employees to those with tens of thousands.

The first release of CODA 2go, built on Force.com, salesforce.com’s Platform-as-a-Service, will address the end-to-end sales invoicing process. It enables users to create an invoice from within the CRM software at the click of a button and post the transaction to their sales ledger, simplifying the sales process. Users will be able to turn sales orders in their Salesforce CRM applications into cash more efficiently, manage customer accounts better and reduce working capital requirements

It’s now confirmed that we will be launching CODA 2go at Dreamforce Europe, salesforce.com’s big user and developer event in London in May.

 Jeremy Roche, CODA’s CEO will be on stage for the keynote with salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to make the announcement, and that will be followed by a breakout session where attendees can see the first accounting system developed on Force.com, for the first time.

We’re certainly pumped up about this opportunity, and the team at salesforce also seem very excited by our new development. Can’t wait to get feedback from the audiences…

We announced a couple of weeks ago that we had already completed development of the end-to-end sales invoicing process for CODA 2go.  Hitting that milestone was a real validation of our approach to developing the application - the combination of CODA’s 25+ years experience in developing international accounting systems, combined with the Force.com technology platform, is allowing us to deliver a robust on-demand finance application at a good speed.

Sales invoicing represents a successful first development phase, and there are more process areas to come before we get to the first release of the product, but it now gives us some product to start talking to beta clients about.

Meanwhile the platform keeps improving (see our comments on the Salesforce announcements) and our experience with the platform is growing. The level of drive and excitement inside CODA is stronger than ever, and only matched by the anticipation in the market. 

As always, watch this space…

When we at CODA started to look at creating an on-demand (SaaS) accounting system, it was clear that it would allow us to address the needs of much smaller organizations than we have ever done with our traditional ‘on-premise’ software and service model.

That was exciting for us, but also a challenge since we’d not operated extensively in that area of the market before. We focused on what’s different about the needs of smaller companies. And we quickly came to an important conclusion – organizations may be small, but that doesn’t mean their needs are simple.

Realising that even small businesses demand sophisticated functionality was actually great news for us… because CODA’s been supporting companies with highly complicated requirements for decades. With the on-demand approach, we have a way of delivering it to smaller user bases efficiently and simply. We just need to make sure that the software is so easy to set up and use that it doesn’t require armies of accountants and technical people.

Surely that’s not rocket science?

So when we announced CODA 2go, we made a simple, bold statement:

“CODA will do for accounting what Salesforce has done for CRM.�

By which we mean, we’re going to deliver enterprise level accounting sophistication to small and medium organizations.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it!

Well, watch this space…

Back in September last year, CODA’s CEO Jeremy Roche stood on stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user conference in San Francisco and announced that we would develop a world class accounting system on Force.com. It was a big moment for us, and around the world we quickly met the question – why partner? And why Salesforce?

What we launched that day was a strategic partnership to develop a new, on demand financial management application, called CODA 2go. It will be aimed at organizations of around 25 employees and above, and will take the best of CODA’s existing design including the unified ledger and multi-everything capabilities.

You can see from our developer blogs on this site that we’re well under way with the development and making great progress. Which partly answers one of the questions - we partnered because we felt that was the best way of producing a proven, robust architecture that was designed specifically for the SaaS market – in an acceptable timeframe.

Read the rest of this entry »