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Article by Nigel Harris.
Customers of Digita software products gathered in Stratford upon Avon last week for the company’s fourth annual conference. To strains of Queen’s “I want to break free”, and against a backdrop of the company’s new “breaking free” advertising image (spotted the theme yet?) Digita MD Jerry Rhill opened the conference with some upbeat statistics – 45.8% increase in sales in 2005, MS Windows accreditation, CNET Technology award, etc. But after three previous conferences delegates needed more than that to impress them.
Digita had announced five new products in 2005 – and already delivered some of them, with the rest following in 2006. Luckily, Jerry reckons that accounting software producers are going to be tied up coping with the launch of Microsoft’s Small Business Accounting over the next year (more of which elsewhere), giving Digita plenty of time to continue working on their own products!
In fact, Rhill claims that Digita employs more people developing software for accountants than Sage, MYOB, CCH, etc, although he did concede that they don’t have as many people in sales and marketing …
Their main focus at the moment is Practice Management – not that they are pulling back on the development of any of their other products, Rhill assured us, having invested £2m in R&D last year across the company. PM should arrive later this year with all Digita users in the form of the first – and free – module, Client Manager. Client Manager will be the first visible evidence of Digita’s unifying Marvel project, announced two years ago and being developed behind the scenes in all of the company’s applications. Client Manager is destined to become the starting point for all Digita applications and the central database for standing client data across all Digita products. It won’t be exclusive though and will link with other open, SQL-based PM systems to avoid duplication of data – Star, Rapport and Practice Engine have already designed links with their data.
In due course, Client Manager will be joined by CRM/letter writing, time and fees, workflow, resource allocation and document management modules.
Simon Hurst noted that “over the past two years the ICAEW's IT Faculty have been working with the major software suppliers to firms of accountants to agree a standard format for the dynamic exchange of data between their applications - XPS. The agreed standard is based on the use of XML. The development was led by Digita and, not surprisingly, the company has based the integration of their own products on the new standard. By showing how Digita’s Client Manager manages the exchange and synchronisation of data across different Digita applications, the demonstration provided a foretaste of how the new xPS standard could form the basis for integrating applications from different suppliers using similar techniques to those used by Digita's client manager.”
This year’s conference marked a consolidation in Digita’s position in the marketplace and a maturity in its product offerings, which continue to meet the needs of both the smallest and largest customers. The promise of a practice management product looked like the last element needed to take Digita from being a tax software house to a one-stop shop for accountants. In reality however, the implementation of Marvel and XPS strengthen the company’s reputation as a key – but not necessarily exclusive – component of any ‘best of breed’ solution for accounting firms of any size.
As Simon Hurst added, “Perhaps we really are getting closer to enabling accounting practices to choose what they believe to be the best individual applications, regardless of supplier, without sacrificing the benefits of a single, integrated client database.”
