JCurve, the ERP dressed in accountant's clothing

Australian software integrator JCurve unveiled last month its "simple and easy" version of cloud-based ERP suite NetSuite which it has customised for fast-growing small businesses. CEO Chris King spoke to BoxFreeIT about how JCurve's three products would be sold, who would buy them and how they would compete against other cloud and desktop accounting software.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

BoxFreeIT: Who are you targeting with JCurve?

King: We're certainly interested in a large-scale rollout, so tens of thousands of customers. The simple bottom-end product (JCurve Go) is perfectly suited for small businesses who are small and want to stay small. You don't have to be super aspirational to get the most out of high-quality software.

When people compare what we do – it's more powerful, has more functionality than competitors – they may see themselves becoming a bigger company and they don't want to have to upgrade systems several times in the next 10 years. They want to do it once and set themselves up.

BoxFreeIT: Do you see businesses looking at JCurve when they’re considering a new accounting program or will they be motivated by other reasons?

King: The slight difference with JCurve, unlike MYOB and Xero which are 100 percent accounting led, often our requirements come from front-of-house.

‘I need a better website’, ‘I need closer integration between my website and my backoffice’, ‘I can't manage my inventory’, ‘I need to bill my time more effectively on projects’, ‘I need to integrate my payroll with my billing’. Continuous business improvement is really driving a lot of our purchases.

So we're seeing a lot of requirement come from outside the accounting department and I think that's probably because we're a broader business suite than just an accounting package. We're really marketing to the business owners and leaders.

That said, the vast majority of departments that contact us are accounting driven.

You could argue that if you just use an accounting product you're still going to have the same inefficiencies in your business if you have multiple customer databases. We want a single customer database throughout the whole business and that’s when you start to drive real efficiency and integration between the departments and the data. A single database has to be the holy grail.

Next page: How easy is JCurve to set up and how does it compete with Xero and Saasu?