I don’t know how Rod & Xero are designing their system, but since they are targeting to go global, perhaps it would be a good idea for them to explore the possible use of rule-based & expert-system in the architectural design of their system. Expert-system suits very well with applications that have different rules (ie, different taxation rules in different countries), that are changing frequently. When the rules changes, you don’t need to re-write or re-compile any codes, all you need to do is re-edit the rules (addition of new rules or deletion of old rules that don’t apply anymore) which are written in text-files. I am aware that taxation legislations are prone to frequent change, so in such an environment rule-based & expert-system comes very handy and it has low costs of maintenance because there is no re-coding or re-compiling of codes whenever the rules change. Rule-based & Expert-system are already popular in taxation-adviser software application of today. I might drop Rod an email about exploring rule-based & expert-system scenario.

Nice review. I’ve been trying to find a decent SaaS package, even just for estimates and invoices, that is usable in NZ. It is quite a challenge.

Xero would be quite good, even though it doesn’t do estimates, but it is very expensive when compared with the competition. As I said in my mini-review on my blog I can’t see what the target market is, the sweet-spot is quite small and they’re either looking to get more blood from a stone (money from micro to NZ small businesses) or not charge enough from the NZ medium size enterprises. I’d also have some concern that they’re going to hit i18n problems from the other direction; customising for local tax means you can make some decisions which are hard to generalise later.

Xero does look very nice, but I’m not much closer to finding even the basic estimate/invoicing option; a lot of i18n problems everywhere. The last suggestion (time59) won’t let me put TAX INVOICE on the invoices…grrr…