I don't know if this is a geek thing or something the average user would do, but I'd really like to see more, full-sized screenshots of the app before I sign up. Not being able to see more of it means I'm more inclined to click away from the site.
1. I tried clicking all over the screenshot bits before signing up, but it went nowhere
2. Got a bit confused by the shares bit. I set up 1 share of value 1 pound, and then ended up with a balance of -£1. Actually, this now makes me realise that I should have paid £1 into my account for my share... so it's correct, but still a little confusing, perhaps a "why" link would be helpful.
3. There were some visual glitches with the help box in Firefox on Mac while adding a Sales entry.
4. I have my own numbering convention for my invoices. I should be able to enter my own invoice number, particularly when entering historical invoices.
5. When adding several line items to an invoice, it should automatically duplicate the tax status of the item above.
6. When there's only 1 account set up, the "Cash paid into account:" field should default to that.
7. I forgot to select the customer after typing it into the "add" box (I forgot to click add, basically). 1) the error should be more visible, 2) the field should be highlighted when i've typed something and not clicked add, so that I know there's still something to be done there.
8. The help is quite annoying. It should be hidden by default, I reckon.
Good so far though! I'll be coming back to continue setting up my accounts there. I've been looking for something like this. I'm not sure about your pricing, however... I would just keep the single-user account and print things out to send to my accountant, so you wouldn't make any money from me. However, I also wouldn't pay for it in its current state yet, so it may be worth keeping it like this for the time being until you figure out a better pricing model (or perhaps you'll find that people will sign up for it as is). Maybe you should base the charge on the turnover of the company? Free under £50k of yearly turnover... £5/m between £50-100k... £10 between 100/200... etc.
I think this is a pretty good idea. There's certainly a market out there for easy-to-use accounting services. You can get a sizeable revenue stream by offering some kind of consulting service where you help small organizations with their accounting tasks.
Only thing is there may be a problem getting people to store information about their businesses etc online.
App is mostly functional but doesn't live up to the marketing hype. Surprised you're accepting payments this early. The lofty promises of "no more accountants," "safe from the tax man" and "it does everything you need" strike me as careless if not legally binding. Unclear why the word "online" is needed 5 times on the home page - seems obvious enough this thing is a web app. Signed up for the free "forever" account. The language is starting to drag - work on copy editing. Maybe simplify the 'Select Package' headings - e.g. just say: "Single user account | Free | [Select]" or something to that effect. Consider adding a success page after that form - better yet just log the user in.
Setup let me bypass all elements so I posted to payroll - and I think that broke your algorithm because now the (ks-Info-Neutral) div at the top of every panel says: "An error occurred, please try again."
Invoiced a customer, which wasn't easy. Stymied because I didn't specify a tax. Good thing I remembered where to set that constant - had to back out, re-entered Setup then added a Tax Item...which should have worked but didn't - until it occured to me maybe I should give it something called a Parent Group. Boom, but now I notice the tax rate isn't transferring from the Setup pane. That's right, the Invoice displays 0% even though I entered Tax Item in Setup as 3.4%. Oh well, it works - and that concerns me. On to the financial statements. It appears I owe my creditors negative 1 million dollars. Haha so does that mean they owe me? Need some commas in there to separate digits into threes. Nice drilldown on the P&L. Open in Excel link broken. Hiding Help - oh this is wild: Help is a different feature than Help! with an exclamation mark which logs me out and takes me to an unbranded site.
Caveat: I've built some corporate tax software for a US state revenue dept and managed expense+reporting tech evangelism at a corporate card company. That said, my work has been tangential at best to Bionic Books and I'm not a CPA so take my comments with salt.
Thanks for looking in so much detail - and in most of these cases you're right, I need to get this sorted. Help vs help particularly :) The sales tax setup is not straightforward; your feedback on this is very interesting. Perhaps I should just offer this to the UK for now where there are std sales tax rates. A few of the commenters here picked us up on the homepage and I'll be changing that quite a lot.
I was really annoyed that I did not even see screenshots of the app and you were already asking me to pay for app. Why are there no screenshots on the frontpage?
And you really don't need more features, it seems already a bit full right now.
Very frankly, this is a tool for a real mom & pop store, and not for a web business. Put it in adobe air or one of those offline browsers and you can sell it for 300 pounds a piece as CD software. It will be more profitable than trying to convince people to use it online.
Personally, it's just too complicated to be useful to me. But I know that such software usually looks that way (like all those old school VB software).
I dunno, I'm not really qualified to judge as all I need for my accounting is just a simple 3 column spreadsheet.
Tough sell: I just don't feel compelled to sign up.
Sign up is free, right? Why not shift to gradual engagement - let me play with the app, enter a few invoices, add a few clients etc. and then when I want to save my work have me sign up & make an informed choice about package.
Thank you everyone for your thorough investigations and valuable comments. It's pretty tough doing everything single handed and it's extremely useful to have these opinions and such detailed feedback. Thank you again.
I'll work on sorting out as much of your recommendations as I can over the next few days. If you are interested in keeping up with my progress then have a look at http://bionicbooks.wordpress.com.
Think the design itself is quite good. Like you said, "bit rough around the edges" for example clicking a new tab should not center the tab on the screen. Your using vertical-align: top; but it still is centered. Maybe its just Firefox 3??
Why are you storing my raw password? Stop that! Most of your users are using the same password for their Yahoo Mail account, which is effectively their bank account. What you have now is a brand new application which hasn't been reviewed for security that is building a database of bank-account-equivalent passwords, which you will lose entirely to the first person who finds an SQL error on your site.
The convention is for your email address to reset your password, mailing the new random password or a code that can be used on your site to enter a new password. Unfortunately, the convention you adopted betrays the fact that you're not storing passwords safely to begin with.
If you're using Rails, start with bcrypt-ruby for your passwords. If you're using PHP, try PHPass, which is also bcrypt. Django or Python, try py-bcrypt.
Not even your administrators should know what your users passwords are.
