Epicor Software has spun off its Retail Solutions division effective June 1. For the moment, the company is named Spinco—a new partnership of investors, but remains under the same ownership funds advised by Apax Partners as all the assets were transferred to the same parent that owns Epicor. Information about the retail business remains on the Epicor website, but I assume that will change when the company receives a real name.

Avalara has launched Avalara Returns Excise Pro, an online service. The sales-and-use tax company says the application enables small to mid-sized fuel distributors, suppliers, and terminal operators to file accurate fuel tax returns. Excise Pro utilizes a four-step process. Those steps start when the user enters fuel sales data into a return-specific spreadsheet template. Next, schedules are imported via spreadsheets with errors detected by the system's data validation.

Australia-based UXC Eclipse is Dynamics Industry Partner of the Year and mcaConnect is the Dynamics ERP Partner of the year for 2015. The awards were announced in the build up to the Worldwide Partner Conference being held next month. The Finalists in the Industry category were Edgewater Fullscope, Hitachi Solutions and VeriPark. The ERP finalists are Azzure IT, Columbus and Tribridge. mcaConnect, headed by Claude Watson, was No. 11 on this year's Bob Scott's Top 100 VARs list with $42 million in revenue.

The numbers are less interesting the counterprogramming. This week, Xero said during its Xerocon conference in Denver it has reached 500,000 subscribers. But the next day, Intuit released its announcement that it had  1 million subscribers for QuickBooks Online. There was no surprise in that—I pointed out in an article based on the 965,000 for April 30, the end of the last quarter, that it was highly unlikely QBO would not cross the threshold.