Thanks for clarifying. For my part I’ve never thought there was any malicious intent direct from you guys and have only felt sympathy for you for being saddled with the association which it looks like, with hindsight, you’d rather never have had.

Onwards and upwards! (and see you tomorrow!)

Duane

I think it’s worth clarifying a few things here:

In the very early stages of FreeAgent Central, we were involved with Dennis who provided a small amount of consultancy in return for a small shareholding in the company. Fairly quickly it was understood by both parties that this wasn’t going to work out (call it a difference in philosophy) and Dennis’ involvement with the company stopped, while he retained his shares. This was over 2 years ago and since that time Dennis has played no part in the running or business of FreeAgent.

At the point at which he made his divestment announcement, Dennis instructed us to transfer his shares to his partner Judith. We’ve always been entirely transparent about that transaction to anyone who asked, and the fact that it does not yet appear on the public record at Companies House is because it won’t until our next Annual Return in February 2010. Whether or not the current situation is in keeping with the wording of his divestment announcement is for Dennis to justify, not us.

I can appreciate Duane and Daren both feel aggrieved by recent events, but I want to make it clear that these are nothing to do with FreeAgent. We have no connection with Dennis’ comments and they are not necessarily representative of our own views. We have never asked Dennis to take any particular line on any given story.

Most importantly of all, we have no interest in mudslinging any of our competitors. We don’t need to, and we’re firmly of the opinion that online accounting companies should be sticking together while the market grows.

Anyway, I hope that clarifies our position on the matter, and hope we can all move beyond this and go back to the important business of building great services that our users love.

Ed

Ed Molyneux
Founder and CEO
FreeAgent Central Ltd

I and Crunch.co.uk was on the receiving end of one of his malicious attacks in July.

One of our marketing freelancers (now working on other projects and not on crunch.co.uk) made a mistake by answering a basic accountancy question in a blog. It was a simple mistake to make as he was incredibly new to the world of Accountancy. Unfortunately he failed to check his answer with any of our Accountants or Tax Specialists.

Dennis picked up on this and called our office specifically asking for this freelancer. Unknown to us, until later, he recorded this phone conversation without this freelancers knowledge. As our lawyers pointed out this is illegal. To confirm again this freelancer was NOT in our Accountancy team or any of our Tax Specialists and the freelancer made this clear.

He then created a blog post that was entitled ‘Health Warning
– Crunch gives bad advice’. Unbelievably to aid his intent, he tweeted this, making specific reference that our very own Brighton Community should be beware of Crunch.

On replying to an article on the Cloud Ave site that had
picked up on his article and written ‘Crunch gets it all so right and at the same time so wrong’, we answered his comments fairly stating that the freelancer was not any of our Accountants and we certainly didn’t give bad advice to our customers.

He then uploaded the illegal phone recording of his conversation with our marketing freelancer on his site. I’m sure this has since been removed.

I can only say that I, my board and lawyers were flabbergasted by his actions. He is, or now his partner is, a shareholder of FreeAgent Central.

In all my career in setting up http://www.pure360.com and the 2 years of hard effort put into building http://www.crunch.co.uk, I have never experienced such an assault from an individual who has an invested interest in seeing a direct competitor put out of business. If any of you think this man is a professional journalist, please think again.

Any further assault on Crunch’s good name and we’ll take legal action against this man and all that he is connected with.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. “SaaSlover” isn’t me or one of my colleagues. I wouldn’t know if it’s one of my supporters.

I don’t doubt that Dennis knows what he’s talking about on accounting matters. But his posts show he hasn’t a clue about security or APIs. His most recent post proves that again as he seems to be under the impression that if a third-party integrates in to an application via an API then *all* of data users enter into the original app flow through the third parties system. Whether he’s a proper journalist or not is subjective.

I stand by my decision to disengage with him. So much of what he writes, especially about myself and KashFlow, is full of factual errors and quotes out of context. That’s what I and plenty of others find odd. He either deliberately writes opinionated posts on subjects he knows nothing about or he has an unhealthy obsession with me – either way, ”odd” sums it up. Responding to his posts and pointing out everything he’s wrong about or misleading people would be a full time and pointless job. Hence my decision to take the path chosen by Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others and just ignore the man.

It seems I’m not alone based on the emails I get from other vendors distancing themselves from him as fast as possible.

As for people doing due diligence on KashFlow – I’m sure anyone reading his posts will see them for what they are.

With regards to the comments above where people say he looks like a serial killer – I’m sure he can take it. He dishes out much worse to others.

Thanks again for taking the time to post

You know that I disagree with the way you’ve handled the particular issue Dennis raised about KashFlow security and permissions right from the start, and I think this post is a continuation of the wrong tactics. You can categorize Dennis’s AccMan blog in many ways, but odd really isn’t one of them. Dennis’s strap line says it all “never knowingly under opinionated”. He’s a real character (and we need more of them in our industry) with what he describes himself as “strong opinions, weakly held” – he’s always prepared to listen to other views. The reason his blog has such a high readership and great conversations is because his opinion is respected, he has real world accounting experience to call on from both running a business and being a partner in practice, his analysis is comprehensive, and he can be both entertaining and controversial. You’ve rather disingenuously implied he’s not a real journalist. Dennis was a respected journalist in this field for 10 years before he started writing a blog. As bloggers go, he is old school. He’ll only publish any facts he’s uncovered once he’s got corroboration, unlike some who will print any controversial, uncorroborated gossip just to drive traffic. He always allows debate and negative comments on his site, and regularly allows guest posts of an opposing position, just like he did in this case here. Dennis knows that I disagree with some of his approach on name calling and language where he crosses a line, but that’s a separate issue to the facts and opinion – you should be arguing on the merits of your case rather than worrying about that. Looking to the comments here, you saying nothing to the rather odious people who compared his picture to Harold Shipman does you no credit at all.

The bottom line though, is that disengaging is definitely the wrong tactic. Anyone doing due diligence on KashFlow will come across all of this and wonder why you’ve taken your bat home rather than argued your corner, or asked for a guest post on AccMan to state your case.

A bit of disclosure for your readers – I’m one of the sponsors of Dennis’s blog. We’ve work together on various projects, and I count him as a good friend.

What an odd fellow.

I wonder when you’ll get your apology Duane…

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

M