Blog homeAs I write this I have a fresh installation of an accounting package sat open in front of me. I am trying to achieve what I think is a fairly straightforward goal - move sales accounting for TourCMS to automatic (so we can issue monthly invoices efficiently). Before I continue I ought to say I am not an accountant.
In front of me I have a panel of links, buttons and goodness knows what and I am trying to pick my way through it in order to understand what switches I need to change in order to make it work like I want. In fact I am not even sure I know what I want (just the basic concept of automating invoicing). The whole experience is painful - so painful infact that I have given up to write this post…. putting the job off for another 30 minutes!
Sure, I could just “pay someone” to do the work (and it may come to that - if anyone knows ModernBill please give me a shout!) - but as a small company - I don’t like paying for anything that I believe I should be able to do myself - and really the software should be designed in such a way that I “can just use it”.
The approach I am taking to solving the problem is going through each screen in turn (and there are hundreds of them) checking that each setting looks roughly right. If I knew the system I could probably do what I want in 10 minutes - but I don’t know the system. Also I have this nagging thought - does this software actually do what I want…. I am kind of still assuming that it does.
Why am I posting about this?
I am concerned about reports that come through to me that TourCMS is difficult to learn and get started with. Yikes.
It is easy to forget that as TourCMS has grown over the last 3 years, all new functionality has been added gently (mainly). We have brought with us a few core customers - all of whom fully understand the ins and outs of the system. Now, as we start to open it out to more customers, I can see we need to do some more work on the “getting started” problem. (We have started down this road by throwing humans at the problem - see the mentor scheme launched a few weeks back - but this is curing a symptom, not the cause).
The core vision with TourCMS is that we are working with small travel companies on a global basis. We believe that small companies don’t want to pay 10,000 GBP (20,000 USD) for a system. (and in many countries outside of Europe and the USA this is a vast sum of money to spend on IT). However we can only achieve this if we are fully web based. Instead of coming to visit you (with a salesman), and project managing your implementation (which is the only difference between us and a 20,000 USD system), you have to do the work yourself. (But you don’t have to install any software, or worry about database backups etc - we do all of that)
We have to ensure that as you are doing the work yourself, that everything is easy to setup.
Now that I have been brutally reminded of the problems facing people trying to set up a powerful system for the first time (with my accounting software problem) I am going to do my absolute best to ensure that TourCMS does not have that problem.
Watch this space.
Alex
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