Its getting harder and harder to recommend your service with the lack of a mobile app. In fact I no longer do on any of the forums or FB groups and often turn customers to other providers. Is this something that is ever going to happen, I need to decide if I hold out for it or move on altogether.
Thanks
Personally I have no issues about using a browser on my phone but it really is time to make the site fully responsive.
Hi Gavin,
Thanks for your input. Our long standing position here is that building and maintaining a native iOS and Android app (at least to a decent level) will inevitably lead to an increase in subscription fees. Iām not sure how welcome that would be to the broader user-base? Hiring the right expertise to work on something like this is very costly and bear in mind we charge a third of what many of our competitors charge, if that trade off is important for your business then I canāt recommend staying with QuickFile.
There is also the question of how much of your accounting would you want to do on 5" display? There are certain functions like receipt capture where mobile is clearly the best solution, but then is it worth investing Ā£10s of thousands to try to come up with a better document capture and archiving tool than Dropbox?
Many accounting software apps are very paired down versions of the web app. Personally I believe (at least for QuickFile) itās better to work on a responsive web design that scales seamlessly to different devices, thatās an area weāll be looking into very soon.
Fair enough, I guess its the type of clients you have, most of mine are trades so they are out and about. Most will say an app is necessary, they want to invoice on the job and get paid. If they are charging an houly rate it makes sense to them to do as much admin on site whilst they are getting paid rather than a few hours on a Sunday catching up. so I end up pointing them to quickbooks, I guess you are not aiming your product at these people as still plenty of office based businesses who quickfile would be perfect for. I personally use quickfile as I am in the office enough to do so.
Low cost is far more important to me than an app. It works ok in a browser on a mobile in any case.
Theres arguments for both sides of the coin, for example someone mentioned their clients want to do most the work themselves on site, I however find most of my clients donāt, and that is why they pay me.
My clients are not interested in tagging bank transactions. At the very most they want to be able to generate an invoice, get it paid, perhaps even just upload receipts, all of which is possible now anyway.
Plus Iām certain that you could use urls to point to the right areas of the account, and just get your clients to use those. In fact itās not hard to build your own app and include these urls as buttons.
I agree though that the cost to create a proper app will only increase subscription fees, and I can imagine there would be a flurry of people complaining they donāt need it as well.
With me, my clients are normally trades men/women. They want to do the job, invoice and get paid before they leave, most have moved on from paper NCR pads and expect to be able to do it electronically now. I know they can do it on a mobile but its not anywhere as easy as the quickbooks app. I just recommend quickbooks or quickfile depending on the needs. I prefer quickfile but most are happy to pay for quickbooks to get the app so I have to work with that.
Perhaps we should determine what are the core business scenarios that need mobile support.
For me the most likely is simply a client asking how much he owes me. (In the music business this will probably be in the bar at a gig)
Very rarely I may wish to raise an invoice while on the move.
Anything else would wait until I was at the laptop.
Could you not use something like phonegap?
Cheers scott
An alternative method for creating a new client/invoice that @Gavin_Phillips mentioned in his post Zapier - doesnāt make new client primary contact ābug, solvedā is an intergration using Zapier and Google Sheets/Forms.
If an intial template was available to work from this has the potential as a mobile app to capture the data onsite.
I would have no interest in a Phone App, I find these highly over rated and often limiting, especially financial Apps.
I can see a case for a āspecialityā app for Invoicing or maybe Expenses captureā¦ but all real accounting I would suggest needs a decent sized screen.
I am a trade user and use quickfile predominantly on my phone using the Web browser without issue. When I first started using thought itās was disappointing not to have an app but now Iām not sure there is any need for an app. I find the whole system easy to navigate on my phone.
As an enduser, with some background in IT I can manage doing the camscanner, dropbox, quickfile dance, but it isnāt all that slick.
I have suggested quickfile to a few friends who do the same sort of freelance work as me, but none have adopted it because they find that aspect too fiddly.
Soā¦ I am happy with it as it is, but it may be the case that you could get a much larger user base if there was a slick app.
Could it be that it was free for small accounts, to give people a chance to see how it works, and then it becomes an annual cost for the larger accounts, if you want to use it, but not an obligation?
How about some crowdfunding to get it going?
I would be happy to pay extra for it
Hi All, we have put the integration of quickfile on the back burner and focusing more on quickbooks. However I think quickfile is slightly better.
If I can get a user list for the app, then we can allocate additional resources. However we are using a intermediary tool called taskbe.com, which is a scheduling app. The integration between taskbe and quickfile will have the following features
Uploading expenses - (allocating them to clients and jobs)
Invoices - (allocating them to clients and jobs)
Estimates - (allocating them to clients and jobs)
Adding Clients.
If you can please join our group on info@taskbe.com, with any suggestions on the integration and what your requirements are that be great.
You donāt need to use CamScanner at all now. You can link Dropbox to your QuickFile account, scan the receipts and save them into the receipts folder. They are automatically cropped, compressed, backed up then streamed into the QuickFile Receipt Hub.
Not totally ruling out an app, I see that it can be very beneficial in terms of receipt capture. But as I mentioned before itās hard to make a strong case for that right now and I still believe we should focus on making QuickFile more responsive across different devices.
The Dropbox capture of receipts works perfect and doesnāt need an app for that part it couldnāt be simpler. I think some people miss-understand the benefit of an app to some users. They are not going to be sitting in their van consolidating bank statements and accounting or depreciation, that will always be done on a pc, but when I have customers still carrying NCR invoice pads around with a smartphone in their pockets then you have to agree it is a little backwards. Invoicing on the go is the big issue and loading the site onto a mobile is not always possible, a lot of places still have poor data signal.
But even with an app youād need a data connection to be able to generate a new invoice (to ensure it has a unique number - you donāt want several people using an app in offline mode and generating different invoices with the same number) and to email it to the customer. No data connection means youād still have to write out the receipt by hand.
Prehaps! the app should be based around the āCash Registerā that QF has already got. No need for a data connection to call for the next invoice number. A simple app that allows for the creation of a receipt while on the go is preferable to too much toing and froing back to base.
Cash Register App is my vote!
If there was a facility to send the customer on arriving on a site an email with a form to complete/check their details and confirming the job to be done the receipt could be personalised.