KashFlow Adds Tradeshift Support After Being Blindsided By Intuit’s Investment In E-Invoicing Startup

This week’s news that Tradeshift, the business interactions and e-invoicing platform, has taken a ‘multi-million’ pound strategic investment from legacy accounting software maker Intuit is bound to have made others in the accounting software space sit up and take notice. One such player is the UK’s KashFlow who, in what could be perceived as a feisty move, has announced that it’s integrated with Tradeshift to enable SMBs who use its cloud-based accounting software to accept and issue e-invoices through the latter’s platform.

However, in a turn of events that adds a little colour to the story, we’re hearing from sources that KashFlow may have been blindsided somewhat by news of the Intuit deal, having spent months working directly with Tradeshift on integration with its platform with a planned co-marketing drive once it went live. That part of the arrangement now seems in doubt, and in what looks like a bid to move more quickly than Intuit’s competing QuickBooks, KashFlow has elected to roll out the new feature immediately, anyway.

Writing on the company blog, KashFlow CEO Duane Jackson explains how Tradeshift integration works:

The key word here is invoicing, i.e. it’s not accounting. Until today, if one of your big customers asked (or insists) that you start using Tradeshift to invoice them then you had to enter your invoices twice, once in your accounting package and again in Tradeshift. Meh.

We love automation, and we’re all about making the life of small business owners easier. That’s why I’m really pleased to announce that we’re now fully integrated with Tradeshift.

Create an invoice in KashFlow and submit it to your customer on Tradeshift in a single click. You can even see the status of the invoice right there in KashFlow, along with a link through to the relevant Tradeshift page to deal with any enquiries from the customer.

The integration works the other way, too. If a KashFlow user receives invoices via the Tradeshift platform a supplier record is created in KashFlow.

Showing a degree of humility, Jackson signs off the blog post congratulating Tradeshift on the Intuit deal, though he does note that KashFlow has beaten them to the punch with today’s new feature.

“So if you’re a Quickbooks user, you may get similar functionality in there too… eventually”, he writes.