Cambridge company gets busy in the US with new solutions

The company has just announced double digit growth and strong value creation with its audited results to December 31. And it spelled out major strides in the US.

During the year, AIM-quoted GetBusy launched Accounting Unlimited in the US, packaging an unrivalled feature set into one plan and driving excellent expansion revenue since launch. It also unveiled major new integration for SmartVault with Thomson Reuters’ UltraTax application, opening promising new accounting markets within the US.

In Cambridge, the company – a productivity software solutions specialist – is based at Howard Group’s Unity Campus in Pampisford.

GetBusy CEO Daniel Rabie said: “In the US, a market that harbours an outstanding opportunity in the accounting sector through our SmartVault product, we made considerable progress in enabling scale and considerably expanding the target market.

“SmartVault is seeing a higher volume of larger deals, demonstrating its increasing appeal to larger accounting firms. The number of new customers generating more than $10,000 in annual subscription revenue, typically equating to 20 or more users, increased by 25 per cent in the key Q4 selling season, compared with the same period last year.

“We expect this trend to lead to a meaningful increase in average selling price in the future. Larger customers tend to have markedly lower churn rates than smaller customers, which substantially enhances the lifetime value of the customer base.

“Our integration with Thomson Reuters’ UltraTax launched in July. Sales into UltraTax customers have since contributed nine per cent of new revenue, with average selling price being 76 per cent higher than the average across all SmartVault customers.

“This is particularly encouraging as successfully accessing users of UltraTax roughly doubles the medium-term market opportunity for SmartVault. Additionally, this integration provides a reusable blueprint for further integrations into other tax software platforms as well as practice management and workflow tools, providing SmartVault with a route to even broader adoption in the future.”

GetBusy’s US business obtained the key ISO27001 and SOC2-1 information security certifications during the year and the company will shortly be upgrading to SOC2-2.

Rabie explained: “These benchmarks are often required for larger enterprise customers in which there is a greater IT sophistication, as we have seen with our ISO27001 certification in the UK, so we expect this effort to enable SmartVault to become more successful among larger clients, such as those on the UltraTax platform.

“The combination of SmartVault’s leading position and brand recognition among US accountants, its expanding integrations that open a larger addressable market, its success in attracting higher value customers, its progress in generating meaningful expansion revenue opportunities and its enviable customer retention rates, make SmartVault a business that we believe has very significant strategic value. We look forward to significantly growing the business and realising that value over the next few years.”

Rabie outlined the potential for expansion in the North American marketplace, saying: “The US accounting sector alone employs 1.2 million people, including over 650,000 Certified Public Accountants within over 130,000 firms.

“Cloud technology adoption across the sector, particularly in the tax preparation market, is relatively early stage. The market is dominated by a handful of large tax software providers whose clients overwhelmingly use legacy on-premise software due to its familiarity and rich functionality.

“The transition of the sector to the cloud has been gradual but is accelerating. Specialist productivity tools are increasingly a priority for small accounting firms. Declining numbers are entering the profession in the US; the Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting an annual shortfall of some 50,000 newly qualified accountants over the next decade.

“This labour shortage is a catalyst for two trends that are favourable for our solutions. Firstly, firms are focusing on optimising practitioner efficiency by implementing simple, no-code workflow automations like those enabled through SmartVault and its integrations into the major tax software applications.

“Secondly, firms are making increasing use of outsourcing, including through offshore providers, to plug the labour gap, making a cloud-first technology stack essential for secure and efficient collaboration.”