Literature Review of Reckon

Question: Discuss about the Literature Review of Reckon. Answer: Introduction According to Osman, El Beltagi and Hardaker (2015) in the last few years, there were significant changes happened in the business scenario as well as accounting profession. The accounting software packages like Reckon is used by the small and medium business organizations help them to meet their current and future business requirement by analyzing their expenses and revenues from the business. Using the results from accounting software package, the organization can also develop business strategies in order to have competitive advantage in the market. The following report contributes to the history of Reckon one, development, adoption of the package, current market size of the package, leaders and competitors in the market. Furthermore, the report also comprises discussion on the challenges the product faces in the market and recommendations to improve the performance. History of Reckon Reckon is limited was established by Greg Wilkinson in the year 1987, and the company was selling accounting software packages in Australia that were developed and designed in UK. In the year 1993, the company first provided the personal finance software named Reckon Quicken (Manochehri, Al-Esmail and Ashrafi 2012). In the next year they released its first business accounting solution as Reckon QuickBooks. In the year 2002, the company tied up with Microsoft so that the solution can integrate with the Microsoft office package. After this, in the year 2013 the company launched the automated data entry application as Reckon Syndirect. In the year 2016, the company released the most awaited module of payroll management. This module is named as Game On. The accounting packages are made to meet the requirements of small, medium and larger business accounting process. Presently, the company is providing accounting support with its package to almost 600, 000 business organizations throughou t Australia and New Zealand. Development and adoption of Reckon Previously the company provided the traditional accounting software packages to its clients. In the year 2013 the company realized the change in the demand from the clients side (Geerts et al. 2013). After this, they launched the cloud based solution for which the clients have to pay for the services as they use it or on a subscription basis. Figure 1: The logo of Reckon (Source: Reckon Australia, 2016) The Reckon is a effective accounting software package, that ought to give an exact and far reaching comes about of operations, which permit brisk correlation amongst present and earlier years information, offers the monetary explanations to be utilized by potential creditors, financiers and administration, encourage recording reports and taxes paid(Manochehri, Al-Esmail and Ashrafi 2012). The Company also used the Hubspot so that it can attract more number of customers. In addition to this it also helped them to increase the rate of conversion from just a website visitor to a potential lead For the business organizations the use and implementation of the accounting software packages is related to tremendous investment and change in the different existing accounting processes. On the contrary, the Reckon provides a flexible payment options (Geerts et al. 2013. Most importantly, Reckon provides a 30 day trial for the new visitors or potential customers. In this way the organizations can check the compatibility of the accounting package with its accounting process needs (Robb, Rohde and Green 2014). Moreover, as the company provides different kind of accounting services like, reckon Loans, Reckon Smart vault, Reckon accounts desktop, Reckon point of sale and Reckon invoice. Using these tools the organization can have flexibility in the financial reporting process, designing the chart of different accounts of the business. Current market size of Reckon According to different surveys it is seen that, Reckon acquires 5% of the business of accounting software packages in Australia. The rate is lower than its competitors as the package provided by the company is not a compact one. Therefore the clients have to subscribe for different packages for every accounting process. Till now, the total number of organizations using the services of Reckon is 600,000 and the number of accounting professionals is over 6000. Figure 2: Market share of Reckon in Australian market (Source: Henny et al. 2013, p.192) As per the a given on its official site, 14 % of the Australian companies are registered by them and 70% of the top accounting firms selects its software solutions compared to other packages.in addition to the company claims that, more than 560,000 users shares their financial documents with their solution reckon smart vault that provides an online cloud based services in order enhance the efficiency of the workflow of their organization. Leaders in the market and reasons that gives them the competitive advantage In the Australian market there are several other accounting software solution package providers that are way ahead of Reckon. Some of them are, MYOB, Xero, SAASU and INTUIT. In case of the INTUIT, it provides optical character recognition for the bills in order to automate the data entry operation (Robb, Rohde and Green 2014). Furthermore, it also provides an ecosystem of large number of apps that helps in completing the accounting services on the go. Again in case of SAASU, the users of the solution can create custom limits for the transactions; the payroll module calculates the taxes automatically without the help of the human interference. In addition to that, this package is also chosen by the organization due to its ability of forecasting the cash flow of the organization. MYOB helps the organization by providing innovative work flow function (Smart bills). In addition to that, ability to include mobile payments in the business and invoice integration makes it an obvious competitor of the business organization. Xero provides cloud based services similar to the Reckon. In addition to this, it also eases the banking operation of the business organization as the solution has auto coded bank rules in it. Furthermore, the solution has large group of connecting apps to complete the different accounting process. It helps the accountants to do their tasks on the go using their smart devices like smart phones and tablets. Current gaps or challenges encountered by users or customers of accounting software In implementing and using the Reckon software package, it is important to store all the previous business data of the organization so that the integrity of the business can be maintained. This conversion of data needs a lot of time. At the same time, while entering or integrating the new Reckon package it is important to have ensure the accuracy and integrity of the financial data. Again as the data is stored in the cloud, therefore the business organization would not have any control over its financial data and it has to depend on the Reckons security mechanisms. This causes lack of confidence in the clients of Reckon and consequently affects the adoption of the package. Even though the services are provided through the cloud based services that needs lesser amount of hardware and software equipments but on the contrary to maintain the whole process, the organization has to hire technical experts that will incur more expenses for the accounting process. Reckon provides different packages for different financial process (like payroll module for maintain the salary of the employees, invoicing module for managing the purchase and sales of the organization etc. (Robb, Rohde and Green 2014). Therefore, the business organizations have to subscribe for the different modules and pay for each module they require. Maintenance and up gradation is another challenge in using the software solution package provided by Reckon. As the cloud based services are updated with time, then the hardware, software and network equipments used by the client organization must be upgraded which will again ask for a lot of investment in order to have compatible equipments to continue with the services provided by Reckon. Recommendations Even though Reckon is providing cloud based accounting solutions to the business organizations in Australia but it does not have the expected growth and market share in the Australian market. Therefore, some recommendations are listed below that can improve the performance of the business of Reckon. Providing project module: As stated above Reckon has launched the payroll module in this, but it still has not released its project that is important for the organization in order to determine which employee is working under a particular project and the amount of salary. Better security to gain confidence: The organization should think about providing better security to the financial data using different security techniques like encryption of the data. This will encourage the customers to select Reckon for their business. Better API: The solution of Reckon suffers from lack of APIs that is important for swapping the financial data with other cloud programs and integrate with them. Conclusion In the above report we have provided discussion on the history adoption market share and current challenges faced by the clients. As there are several competitors in the Australian market, therefore Reckon should think about providing tailored solution for different business organization in a compact package so that clients do not have to subscribe several times for the different modules. In this way the company can be able to acquire larger market share in Australia. References Boonstra, A., 2013. 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