Intrabench, which sells CRM and accounting software, has implemented and made available the UK VAT change in its software, company officials say.

 

“The result of the recent UK VAT changes is that many companies are now struggling to cope with software upgrades and accounting changes, which will come into effect the first of December,” say Intrabench officials. They see the SaaS (News - Alert) model as having an advantage, as a change can be made to a central system which goes out to all users of the software.

 

Companies that are not using a SaaS model may have to upgrade their software themselves to comply with the change, “and pay high costs for consultancy as well as deal with any problems that arise when the change takes place,” company officials added.

 

SaaS, software deployment in which applications are hosted off-premise, is a rapidly expanding industry. According to a recent Gartner (News - Alert) Press Release, global revenues for SaaS will exceed $6.4 billion in 2008, a 27 percent increase over 2007 revenues of $5.1 billion.

 

The cost to business for this 2.5 percent VAT software change is immense, as many software implementations have been hard coded to 17.5 percent, which makes changing the software a time-consuming, expensive operation.

 

As this software update has already been implemented within Intrabench, customers need only select the new VAT rate and all new invoices, quotes and accounts will take into effect the VAT change for repeat billing and payments, according to the Intrabench, “VAT returns will calculate the figures correctly taking into account the amounts before and after the 1st of December.”

 

It’s certainly a popular option: This week Revel Consulting, a Kirkland, Washington-based business and IT consulting firm, was selected by Reader’s Digest to integrate a software-as-a-service product with the company’s current customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.

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