TurboCASH Advantages
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TurboCASH Advantages
Public company competitors
To date The TurboCASH project has been controlled exclusively by myself, Philip Copeman. This control has now been handed to the Good Things Partnership. This is an extremely flexible holding. It makes control of the project agile and able to respond quickly to market conditions. This is not the case with our competitors, who are all public listed companies, reporting on quarterly results.
The competitors are trapped inside their own assets. They all live off the annuity model of charging their users very high licencing fees. They are unable to shift this strategy without severely hampering their profitability. This makes them unable to respond to the threat of Open Source. There are no major players capable of adopting our “Free” strategy. For the foreseeable future this gives us a significant advantage.
The term which is used to describe this exploitation is “gouging”. The situation is so much in our favor that the large commercial competitors are even prepared to lose customers to us, in order to keep their core base paying the premium that they do. This means that a disaffected group is always available to change to TurboCASH.
Lowest cost of Production
The cost of delivering the competitive products is horrendous. As a rough example take SAGE, they have around 500 000 network users (the real money in this business.) They have a profit of 100 Million Pounds, which means that even before we start developing or supporting the software, the shareholders take 200 Pounds per user, just fo rbeing there. Then add say 200 Pounds for call centre support and a further 60% for distribution and you have a product that costs 1 000 pounds per year, with a release rate of once per year.
We come along with a delivery cost of around $ 1 and a release rate of twice per week. It is not long before the consumer starts to discover that not only is TurboCASH Cheaper, it is also better. The commercial vendors only protection is that it is hard to "change" systems. But these walls crumble.
Open Source monopoly
As of the writing of this document TurboCASH has a monopoly of the Open Source Accounting market. There are other accounting packages available, but none of them are of the quality of TurboCASH or are focused on the SME market. They tend to be PHP apps written for specialist web services or Enterprise style products.
This can be easily verified by going onto Google and searching for “Open Source Accounting Software”.
The barriers of entry are remarkably high. Its takes Millions of dollars to develop a quality accounting package, but more importantly it takes years to develop a core group of users that sorts out all you QC problems. TurboCASH has this advantage. Only the Commercial competitors have this, and their high profits prevent their entry.
Open Accounting figures.
The accounting for the Good things Partnership is very simple. These books will be presented live for partners. This unique “live access” to partnership information will show off the power of TurboCASH and will cement trust between partners as all information is fully disclosed – live.
It is easy to think of Open Source users as “easy come easy go”. After all, they got the software for free, what is to stop them just taking the next one free. Under this logic the Skype purchase by eBay for $2.6 Bn must look strange. VOIP technology is cheaply available. You could be in business and competing with Skype on less that $ 10 M and in a few months. Why pay the Premium? Simply because users do not easily change. A number of VOIP networks have begun, but they are all playing catch up to Skype.
An accounting package is mission critical. It is not casually used. Our users use TurboCASH for many hours a week. For most of them it is their primary application. In a very short time their investment in terms of learning and data input is really high. They are free to leave when ever they like, but this is no simple matter.
We are committed to linking TurboCASH to more and more world institutions. That means that the users use TurboCASH as a Client for many ECommerce an web service applications. Each one of these methods entrenches the TurboCASH user. Further, the community of TurboCASH users becomes a source of revenue to them (The Fishball). This momentum locks in the users and makes them stay with us.
New technology
There is a historical reason that TurboCASH has advantages over traditional accounting packages. This stems from the fact that TurboCASH was a relative late comer to the Windows environment. Whereas most of the major competitors crossed over to Windows in the early nineties, TurboCASH was developed in the early 2000s. This means that we had the hind site of the Internet in our favor. TurboCASH is built form the ground up with the Internet in mind, other packages “tack” the Internet onto their technology. This advantage will swing more and more in our favor as the Internet and ECommerce grows.
Out tools and Open Source partners give us a major advantage in this. We are certainly far ahead of any of the other accounting vendors in the adoption of Open Source technology.
One program for many Markets
TurboCASH comes originally from South Africa. This is a country with 11 Official Languages! From our beginnings we have always prepared a program that can be translates by the user on the fly. In particular we always developed in English and Afrikaans. This is one of the reasons that TurboCASH has moved rapidly into Dutch derivative countries like Holland, Belgium and Indonesia.
It is not only for language but also terminology that this is very useful. For example the same concept of “VAT” for a British person is “GST” for an Australian or “TAX” for an American. Without recompiling the program a non technical person can change :Debtor” to “Patient” or “Member”. TurboCASH can quickly and easily morph into another form. All this without any programming.! The result of this is that One program can be deployed onto many markets. We do not have to keep separate versions of the software. We only maintain one package. This is a complete contrast to our competitors. Quickbooks has multiple versions of its programs. Features available in one version are not available in another. SAGE does not even bother to try this. They have different products in every county that they deal. They rely on their business model, which is relentless in revenue “gouging” to pull them through each market.
Our commercial competitors have expensive centralized support call centres. They use this as a selling tool, claiming that support is a crucial service that they provide. The truth is that they create that need. Our users can get support from an y number of local consultants, but it is a voluntary expense and they are not limited to getting it from one company. There is little change to us in the cost of deploying 10 or 100 copies of TurboCASH. Our architecture and our distributed community is our key advantage.
It is not just the Open Source licence that makes TurboCASH cheaper. The other products would have great difficulty matching our production costs. We are simply able to make, maintain and deploy cheaper than anyone else. We can release twice per week, the commercial competitors take months. Our project is live and accessible. Theirs are hidden with restricted access.
Unambitious Marketing strategy
At first “getting One Million Users” can sound like a pie in the sky ambition. But when you take into consideration that TurboCASH can be deployed with very little cost in almost any market, we are not looking for a major shift to achieve this goal. We have a ready market wanting a change, we have a technology that is superior. All we lack is the marketing budget to deliver that message. The Good Things Partnership cures that.
