What’s happening?
On 24th March 2022, AccountancyManager was acquired by Bright Software Group (Bright), provider of the leading BrightPay payroll product.
Why Bright?
Bright was formed in September 2021 due to a merger between BrightPay, a leading provider of payroll and HR software solutions, and Relate software, a leader in post-accounting, practice management and bookkeeping software. Today, Bright’s leading software supports over 7,000 accounting practices and over 30,000 small to mid-sized businesses across Ireland and the UK, with a headcount of over 200 people.
Bright is backed by Hg, a leading software investor with expertise in tax & accounting technology businesses and a strong track record of supporting companies to scale.
AccountancyManager and Bright share a common philosophy focused on serving customers above everything else. BrightPay and AccountancyManager are two of the highest-rated products used by the accounting profession and we believe that by joining forces we can continue to support our users to be more efficient and successful.
What is the benefit of the acquisition for me?
By operating as part of Bright, we will have access to additional resources to continue to improve the products, services and support we provide to our customers.
How will development be affected by this?
We can only foresee a positive impact on our development. Bright wants to help us grow and improve the software we provide. To achieve this we will be looking to invest further in our development team, which will enhance the output from the team.
Will I still talk to the same people?
Yes, the current AM team will stay and continue to be integral to the day-to-day running AM. We intend to expand the team to enable us to work with more users, but this recruitment will be consistent with our current approach. It’s critical for us to retain our relationships with our existing users and internal team culture.
Our founder and Chairman James Byrne will become an adviser to the Bright board of directors.
Our CEO Kevin McCallum is taking on the role of Chief Operating Officer, within Bright but will continue to be responsible for AccountancyManager.
Why now?
The accounting tech space is a fast-moving industry, and there is a lot of interest from accountancy practices on practice management, workflow and process automation in particular. By joining the Bright group we’ll be better equipped to develop solutions that enable accountancy practices to future proof their firms and build a tech stack that works seamlessly.
How will the roadmap be changed?
We’ve always been transparent about our roadmap and utilised user feedback to aid our decision-making regarding upcoming functionality.
We’ll continue to operate in this way and with the support of Bright, be able to release new features and products that we’re confident will have a positive impact on our users.
Will there be an integration with BrightPay?
As we’re now part of the same group as BrightPay we have the opportunity to explore these options further than we could have done previously. We’ll discuss this internally and if there is a benefit for our users we’ll add this to the roadmap.
