AccountMate has become the latest accounting software vendor to integrate with Avalara's cloud product. The integration means AccountMate customers can use the AvaTax sales tax application from within AccountMate to calculate final sales tax amounts on invoices. The press release about the deal quotes Pascal Van Dooren as chief revenue officer. Although he has been previously quoted while in this position, Avalara did not issue a press release announcing the change.

Intuit has introduced subscription for QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, its sort of low-end midmarket accounting package. The pricing was introduced on October 6 for what the company called "three feature-filled subscriptions." As with virtually everything surrounding the accounting side of Intuit these days, the change was introduced without an accompanying press release.

A debate about whether Sage 500 was ever slated to be put down keeps circulating through the reseller community. The prevailing wisdom is Sage waffled on questions about the product's viability and has been trying to put the cat back in the bag for the last two years. The official version came on a LinkedIn discussion group from product manager Tammo Stubbe who wrote "... the truth is that Sage has absolutely no plans to retire Sage 500 ERP in 2017".

The recent appointment of Michael Schmitt as the new head of the SAP Business ByDesign operation appears to be one of a series of steps in putting some life into the low end of the publisher's product line. SAP has invited the press to a conference call on October 17 in which "We will outline our strategy and talk about our go-to-market model and road map for SAP Business ByDesign in the near future and beyond." The big gun on the call is Rainer Zinow, SVP, SAP Cloud from the mothership SAP SE (once known as SAP AG).