One Advanced charging you for what you already have.
More customers have approached us with stories from the world of One Advanced sales department. Not only have they doubled their price after the 90 day cancellation period, but now they are charging for a “read only” license as well. This means that even if you want to move away from Exchequer, they have tied you over a barrel as you will need your records available for a HMRC audit. This is a departure from the industry standard of allowing companies to have access to at least one copy of a legacy software simply for historical purposes.
What are a companies responsibilities.
Currently the rules are that companies have to keep records for 6 years. Traditionally, when a company swaps platforms the legacy system allows access free of charge as obviously they wont actually be using the product and simply want a view of what they have already done. For some reason One Advanced, the current owners of Exchequer, seem to think this is an additional service even when there is no added value. This all seems to be a part of a strategy to intimidate clients to stick with an out of date program, which is no longer going to have any meaningful development. Many companies we have spoken to want to to walk away but feel locked into this arrangement. One customer confirmed that he was quoted 36k for a 6 year read only license. One gets the feeling they have more staff in their legal department than in their support team.
What can be done.
The HMRC rules stipulate that they just need to see the transactions, not necessarily the program it comes from. Since all software interfaces are just a skin covering a series of related tables, then we can get to that raw data, but use a different skin. If One Advanced decide to play nasty and lock you out of your own information our technical experts can delve in via their tools to the backend and extract all the data that you have previously posted. This can be reset and arranged into a SQL database upon which you can run queries or reports. This can be done for less than the cost of One Advanced and you have the information available to you forever. Please contact using the form below to discuss possible options.
Want to get out:
If you are looking at comparable software alternatives to Exchequer we have several options available to you depending on your business model. Please contact using the contact us form, so we can organise a call with you to discuss further.
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One Advanced is trying to lock customers into long term contracts.
One Advanced has increased prices.
