This week two cloud-based services opened their doors. (Can a cloud open? Whatever.) One, myERP.com, purports to replace the likes of Quickbooks and Salesforce. The other, EazyBI.com, offers low cost analytics on a wide variety of metrics. Both are worthy of further study and are based on freemium models.
myERP is like a question-and-answer sparse interface that takes some getting used to. When you login to the service, you are just faced with a single text box asking you what you want to do today. You can type in things like “add a client” or “process an invoice” and it will take you to the appropriate screens. For those of us that want to point and click, there is a pull-down menu that enables you to set up accounts, invoices, and products, as you can see from the screenshot below.
And once you fill out enough of your financial landscape, you can use it for rudimentary billing and keeping track of your accounts. There is an explanatory video here. They claim integration with Google Accounts, I couldn’t get that to work but that might have been my browser and cookies for the numerous Google Accounts that I use.
myERP is free for 2 users. Additional users are $29 per month. Certainly if you aren’t yet using any software for this purpose it is worth checking out.
EazyBI has an interface in the opposite direction: you start out with a blank canvas and add analytic tools and what you want to measure. To help you get started, there is a canned tutorial that demonstrates its power. You can set up summary dashboards to analyze information from your own CSV data files, or query public data that can be imported from Twitter, Basecamp and Highrise sources. There is seemingly tremendous power and I didn’t spend as much time poking around here as I liked, but was intrigued by what I saw.
It is also free for a single user, and its pricing scheme is a bit complicated best shown from the screen capture below:
I think both services are worth further investigation. Let me know if you have others in the comments.
