New Cloud Accounting Player Monchilla Announces Public Beta

A new cloud accounting player has emerged with the beta launch of Monchilla.com, a product that includes a suite of services including small business accounting, payroll, invoicing, billing, time tracking, electronic payments, and direct deposit for employees.

[IMGCAP(1)]The product was formally released at The Sleeter Group’s 2012 Accounting Solutions Conference and the company claims to already have 11 employees and 1,000 users.  

Although touted by Monchilla chief executive Jack Couch as an alternative to QuickBooks, for businesses that would like to keep QuickBooks they can still take advantage of Monchilla.com’s dashboard by uploading their QuickBooks backup file.  The Monchilla dashboard has all of the major financial statements (income, cash flow, balance sheet, etc) including a cash balance report that will alert users to a cash shortfall.  In addition, Monchilla’s employee time tracking features can also be used with QuickBooks.

Beginning today Monchilla.com is available free of charge by going to the company’s website and clicking on the “sign-up for a free account” button.  When Monchilla releases the final version early next year it will charge users $5 per employee per month for the payroll function Businesses that don’t use the payroll service will not be charged.  

Coach acknowledged the company is entering a competitive field of cloud-based accounting products, but believes Monchilla differentiates itself in several ways from its closest competition.

“Almost everyone is taking a ‘QuickBooks light’ approach. Xero did an integration with ADP because no businesses with [significant] employees could use the product, while Wave is only recommend for businesses with nine or fewer employees,” said Couch. “FreshBooks is really invoicing not a complete double entry accounting solution, while Monchilla is massive by comparison with these solutions.  We also took a fresh approach in that we encourage users to put in transactions as soon as they are aware of them. In a nutshell our strategy is to provide a much more complete solution than people are used to with their desktop products and be less expensive at the same time.”

Couch also plans to have Monchilla allow accountants and CPAs to be more “service-oriented” and is planning to provide some discounts and price incentives for accountants to use the product.

“We want to encourage and enhance the role of the accountant as a trusted advisor by bringing management accounting to the table in a way that allows accountants to provide this to all of their clients without a massive increase in overhead,” said Couch. “We encourage all of our users to engage a CPA and we are building a network of CPAs that support clients using Monchilla.”

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