Few inputs on availing basic business services like accounting & ERP from Startups . (Of course for startups)
How many startups understand the pain of starting up
Tuesday August 01, 2017 , 3 min Read
We are a small start up based in Kerala, working to create a bunch of innovative, herbal and organic products for babies and Moms. With the introduction of GST and for those people who wants to maintain a clear track of accounts, it is quite imperative to have a robust accounting and ERP software. I have a small retail business running now (a kind of brand shop or a lab for me to understand various other products in the market) and we required barcode scanning as part of accounting /invoicing software. We took trial of Zoho, intuit, Profit books and other one based in Chennai for 15 days (All three other the Chennai firm do not support barcode scanning as of now, In Zoho it is restriced to strings of more than 10 characters only). Full fledged trial of a C.A owned cloud based accounting software (with import formats for old data) was not available. Zoho,Intuit & Profit books offers 5 days (10-6pm) kind of classic customer service during the trial period itself. The other one also provided detailed demos. But didnt show the formats for importing old data and told that it will be taken care of.
User interface of the software based in Chennai is good. They are also a start up (got funding from Google MD in personal capacity) in 2012 and even got office in Malayasia. Since they support barcode scanning , i took subscription paying almost 4 times of what intuit quick books charges. But the first 15 days - they changed the colour fast and remained almost REACHLESS
No support from their customer "Success" team. Formats provided by them to import previous data will not work. They behaved in totally different way in the after sales. They postponed addressing our issues to First half, then to second half and days passed. Even today (after 15 days), it is not working as expected. And no one including the TOP management is bothered to intervene.
" Can we rely of our own breed of Start ups ?" Or they will ruin our business and put us in trouble. I am totally puzzled now.
OR it is wise to invest little high , We may require some extra plugins (apps) like barcode scanning tool to operate with intuit etc. I always believe that if the customer support executive in a start up do not have same maturity like the CEO, she will give wrong message that START UPs are "REACHLESS", even if they look nice in spaces like your story, start up events etc.