“We are taking what’s in Star and what’s in Practice Engine and will offer the best on the new cloud platform,” says Jim Dunham, president of Iris Americas.

United Kingdom-based Iris Ltd., has acquired several applications for running tax and accounting applications in North America and aims to capture the No. 1 position in the market with each category. Other companies and products  purchased are  AccountsWorld,  Doc.it and Conarc's iChannel.

The process of selecting a name for the new practice management application is underway—which will not be Star or Practice Engine—and a sandbox is available for customers can see the process on the new product.

Star and Practice Engine had a good deal of overlap in customers. But Dunham said what neither had was the ability to serve the range of small, medium and large firms. Iris is out to cover the full range of sizes.

Iris has decided to use AccountantsWorld’s Payroll Relief as its engine for the payroll market. Dunham says the product has “turned out to be a very strong platform. It’s all very microservices, a very modern architecture.”

The company is adding rules to Payroll Relief to support Canadian payroll. It is also making the product the engine for MyPay, which it acquired from Thomson Reuters. MyPay will continue in the market under that name, however

Doc.it will be the platform for document management with Iris adding aspects of features from Conarc’s iChannel. “Doc-It’s overall structure aligns itself better with a cpa firm,” Dunham says.