Tim Sullivan, who was a leader in the Sage X3 effort, has joined Avalara as director of sales. His LinkedIn page shows that Sullivan joined the Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based sales and use tax vendor in April, but the hiring has not been officially announced. Sullivan was director of Sage ERP X3 from January 2011 through April 2014. Before that, he was an area sales manager for Microsoft from June 2002 through January 2011.

Qlik Technology CEO Lars Björk was bubbly this week about new product introductions during the earnings conference call for the second quarter ended June 30. That includes this month's roll out of Qlik Sense Desktop, the first commercially available release from the QlikView.Next project. For all that, the loss rose to $10.2 million, 28-percent higher than the slightly more than $8 million in red ink for last year’s corresponding period. Sales rose only 22-percent to $131.6 million in the most recently ended period, up from $108 million a year ago.

FreshBooks says it has raised $30 million in what it terms its first institutional venture capital round. And given Xero’s fundraising and plans for a IPO in the United States, it shows how eagerly investors are willing to bet on the low-end, online accounting marketing. You may remember that earlier this year, Paychex made an investment of undisclosed size in Kashoo. The funds raised by FreshBooks will be used to fuel growth, including the expansion of its work force from 150 to 400 by 2016. The round was led by Oak Investment Partners with participation from Atlas Venture and Georgian Partners.

And yeah, yeah, it was a good quarter, but the big news from this week’s quarterly earnings webcast was that NetSuite will introduce a new user interface in 2014. “Later this year, we plan on rolling out our next generation interface,” said CEO Zach Nelson. “It will make NetSuite the easiest and most enjoyable business application to use anywhere.” The other thing notable was it seemed Nelson might avoid taking a whack at the competition. But what a relief, at 40.04 minutes into a 50.40-minute long event, Nelson talked about when companies are “ready to upgrade out their legacy stone age SAP or Sage implementation”.