AccountsIQ is a rapidly growing financial management software vendor. Darren Cran was named CEO in October 2024 and now leads the company he joined 13 years ago, following several years as a CFO for Kefron and then as a portfolio CFO. I spoke to Cran a few weeks ago.
Cran first joined the company after a conversation with the founder and now Executive Chairman, Tony Connolly. He could see the digitisation wave that was coming to Finance and wanted to work closer to the technology. They hit it off; AccountsIQ had already built the platform, and he joined the company as its Client Services Director. He later led the expansion into the UK as UK Managing Director before becoming COO for nearly six years.
Cran now leads a company that, in his words, aims to “shape the future office of the CFO by delivering technology that enriches people’s lives. We do that through a flexible, scalable platform that’s a single source of truth.“
That platform was recently enhanced through the acquisition of ExpenseIn, an expense management suite. The acquisition expanded the employee count to 140, and Cran added that he intends to add another 25 this year.
It will also mean that the firm will have around 4,000 customers by the end of the year. Most of these are headquartered in the UK, with the company also having customers in North America, the UAE and Australia.
The expansion was fueled by growth funding from Axiom Equity last year. That investment was a reward for the strong Net revenue retention (110%) and gross revenue retention (97%).
Cran shared that ExpenseIn retention metrics are even higher. Cran explained a reason for the success: “We’ve had a huge focus on product and service; obviously, the second S in SaaS is service, which is often forgotten. We’ve been incredibly innovative and invested a lot of money in service.”
Growth means even more customers.
The ExpenseIn target market aligns with AccountsIQ. AccountsIQ targets mainly services organisations of between 20-300 people. Often, these organisations have a degree of complexity in their accounting function and/or the scale of transactions. That means they have outgrown solutions such as QuickBooks, Xero and Sage or a legacy solution.
Cran explained, “We have businesses with organisations with a lot more customers than that and also a lot less, but generally, there’s a degree of complexity and a volume of transactions for a finance team in any organisation to cope with. Their problems are just a little bit bigger than would ordinarily be capable of being solved by a smaller or a legacy system.”
Firms use the software in over 85 countries. Most are services businesses, though some are hybrid, taking advantage of the open APIs to integrate into third-party stock systems.
Looking forward
In 2025, Cran aims to take the AccountsIQ brand into the awareness of a wider audience. He wants the solution to be automatically included when finance teams are looking to upgrade or switch their current solution. He believes they have improved that brand awareness over the last few years, and once on the shortlist have a good win rate.
Cran explained some of the reasons for the high win rate. The first is financial, which is always a key factor for finance teams when buying a new solution.
Cran explained, “Our cost to serve our infrastructure is on Azure, and we’ve architected the product to allow it to be incredibly scalable. That also allows us to deliver some very, very significant price differentiation into the market. Our platform costs versus, say, NetSuite or Intacct are considerably lower.”
The Axiom funding has changed things for AccountsIQ. While it had funding previously, it was scarce, according to Cran. He explained the challenge, saying, “Our challenge now is the sequence at which we look to execute across our different horizons of growth. Ultimately, we have ambitions to be a global, unified platform.”
He explained that they are now able to choose between inorganic and organic growth, especially around the product. The ExpenseIn acquisition gave immediate access to a sophisticated expense management platform. He realises that they cannot build everything. The combination of buying and developing means that they can bring the best products to market.
Their strategy for 2025 was focused on four areas, several of which Cran believes they have delivered already.
Product Experience – improving the ease of use
AccountsIQ has already updated its UI and developed and rolled out a world-class approval workflow engine. Cran added, “We’ve seen a really significant uptick in our win ratio. Also, we’re selling to a slightly higher up towards the enterprise level customer now, as well, as a result of that.”
AI
As with most other vendors, AI is another focus for AccountsIQ. Wisely, however, Cran sees that investment in AI needs to happen both within the business and the product. Internally, it should help the organisation become more efficient and ease any scaling issues.
People
Like other CEOs, Enterprise Times has spoken to Cran, who wants to bring the right people into the company. Within the last year, he has brought on several senior leaders, including James Hunter, who joined as its Chief Financial Officer, and Evan O’Shea, who was appointed Chief Marketing Officer.
Interestingly, Cran also noted, “We strengthened the management team, and we’ve reorganised our org chart. Our organisational design has significantly changed to allow us to bring more expertise into the business and allow for internal promotion.”
Customers for Life
AccountsIQ has always had a Customers for Life philosophy. Its Customers for Life program now includes embedding the Pendo Software experience management platform into the product. Cran explained, “That ultimately allows us to deliver the right communication service to the right user at the right time, using a combination of digital engagement and also augmenting that with human contact.”
Leveraging third-party technology that the firm has embedded into the product is not restricted to Pendo. The company has also embedded Wrike to ensure that the onboarding project management.
On global expansion
80% of revenues are drawn from the UK; it has a small presence in the UAE, Australia and North America, with the software localised for all of those countries. Cran is unsure which region they will focus on for expansion next. Even the choice between Canada and the US is up in the air, as they have customers in both.
I asked Cran about the opportunity in North America. He replied, “We have got a slightly different opportunity in each of those markets when you look at the sort of incumbents that are operating in both Canada and the United States.
“The United States it’s a very diverse market, and there are obviously some pretty significant incumbents like Intuit that have a pretty dominant position in there. I understand they’re moving their product a little bit upstream, too.”
What about the challenge of NetSuite and Intacct, though?
Cran replied, “We’ve been increasingly winning against Intacct and NetSuite, which is good. We believe they have customers who shouldn’t be on those products. They’re obviously great products, and they’re good for people when they’re suited to them.
AccountsIQ believes that its solution is a sixth of the cost of Intacct and NetSuite and can also be implemented five times faster in most cases.
He continued, “Still, with how we’ve expanded our products and the service that we’re able to offer, the speed of implementation and follow-on service by doing all of our implementations ourselves gets us really good results for the right-sized businesses. We’ve closed some of the functional gaps, which has allowed people who may be considering going to a more top-tier size are finding successful outcomes with us.”
Implementation challenges
While cost is one-way AccountsIQ differentiates, the other is its approach to implementation. The firm does have some implementation partners, but it continues to implement the solution itself. The firm has invested in automation tools, which Cran believes will help it scale, certainly in the UK.
The time difference might be an issue in other regions, and this is possibly one of the reasons why AccountsIQ has not yet seriously launched abroad. There is more planning to be done, and it will be interesting to see how Cran plans the expansion.
While it may not have many implementation partners, it does have several significant other partnerships. Apex, BDO, and PwC are all partners that offer outsourcing services to clients using AccountsIQ. Cran also sees the value of developing relationships with auditors, partly because recent legislation has increased auditors’ influence on the systems firms use.
Offering low-pain implementations is attractive, as recent AccountsIQ research found 60% of CFO’s lengthy implementation times as the biggest barrier to changing software suppliers. The AccountsIQ aims to reduce implementation significantly. Cran sees three hidden costs for implementations that organisations must consider: complex integrations, testing and customer reporting.
The AccountsIQ approach starts during the sales process to uncover integrations and data challenges. AccountsIQ will use its sandbox to resolve these issues during the sales process, ensuring that implementations go smoothly. The sandbox also helps with testing. Cran explained that “85% of our new customers have integrations that require us to work with legacy technology or even new technology.”
It also aims to reduce the risk and cost of data migration. Cran explained, “We bring across opening balances for everything, and as many historical trial balances going back for up to five years if people want it, We don’t do a full data migration of every single record.”
If customers want more historical data, it extracts and builds a reporting tool so that customers can access it. The risk of bad data being imported outweighs the benefits.
The other factor that helps AccountsIQ is the embedded Wrike project management solution. It means the project is built out on the platform. Alongside Pendo and the AIQ Academy, a dedicated learning platform built on LearnUpon, a CPD-certified LMS system, it means everything is easily accessible to customers. Communication during the onboarding project is seamless, and everything is integrated.
Are cloud finance Systems a necessary evil or a force for good
To Cran, finance systems are a huge force for good. At worst, they are a necessary evil in the case where they fulfil an organisation’s compliance requirements. These would include the trial balance, VAT returns, and successful audits.
When you can complete the compliance requirements in half the time and the data within the system helps highlight the story behind the numbers, they can be a huge force for good.
Cran recalled, “A CFO that I worked for a long time ago taught me that these aren’t just numbers. There are all sorts of activities going on the whole time behind all the numbers that land in the finance function. It’s a really interesting way of looking at it.
“To be compliant, you have to put all the numbers in the right boxes, but if you’re able to attach the story against the numbers, which you can do by extended coding. Then Finance can start telling that story, the historical, and predict the future. It can absolutely game-change a business’s culture to become data-led in its mindset.
“Finance teams have a real opportunity to become the leaders of data thinking or using data as a really powerful form of competitive advantage. Ultimately, how to make sure that the business evolves and stays alive.”
Companies can leverage AccountsIQ’s coding structure to achieve this storytelling. The integration capability and automation of complex tasks can free up time for finance users to discover the story behind the data. Cran said, “You would hope that the bandwidth that you give back will make people more curious about what to do with the data.”
The Book Question
What was the latest book you read?
Cran answered, “I’ve got two books here, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni (Amazon Aus, UK, US), which I haven’t read yet. The one I have read is “Non-violent Communication” by Rosenberg and Chopra (Amazon Aus, UK, US).
It’s quite a provocative title. It’s a very interesting, simple communication model that’s designed to make you much more aware of the other person or people in your communication network and what might be going on for them. What their needs are, and obviously, the same for the communicator. There’s an awful lot more to it than that. It’s a really good book.”
