How To Select Accounting Software For Your Small Business

Here’s a step-by-step approach to help you decide which program can best serve your business accounting needs:

1. Determine and create a list of the specific types of accounting functions you want to perform. At a minimum, the software should handle cash disbursement and cash receipts, post all charges to the profit-and-loss statement automatically, and offer a complete reporting package. Reports should include a detailed general ledger, balance sheet, income statement (profit and loss), and cash-flow statement, as well as specific function reports for payroll and job costing.
   
   
2. Don’t pay for features and functions you won’t use. The typical small business writes fewer than 100 checks per month, makes 10 to 20 bank deposits per month, and produces 20 to 100 invoices per month. It doesn’t take a major accounting program to handle these functions, and it’s not worth it to buy a program that has lots of features you won’t use and that end up making the program more difficult to operate.
   
   
3. The most important step is to talk with other people in businesses similar to yours about what accounting software they use and what they like or don’t like about it. There is no better source for finding out about a program than those who have been using it for a while.
   

Gene Fairbrother
Business Consultant
National Association for the Self-Employed
Dallas

Read More Article

Accounting software is vital

Many Australian businesses don’t have adequate financial systems. Michael Rich discusses the most common questions around accounting sofware.

More than 300,000 Australian and New Zealand businesses are using out-of-date accounting software, resulting in a deficiency of vital information that is needed to perform core business activities, according to Michael Rich, managing director, Attaché Software.

This issue is particularly relevant considering we are moving from one financial year to another.

There are opportunities for resellers to advise their clients if their financial software is out-of-date and help them source an alternative solution.

Rich explained that as the economy slows the risks increase so it is more essential than ever for businesses to update their accounting software.

This is to ensure business owners and managers are in better control of basic business procedures including vital business lifelines such as cash flow and stock control.

Read More Article...

Software combines document management, accounting functions.

Intacct offers on-demand financial management and accounting applications as well as full integration with Accounts Payable Automation Solution. Latter replaces printed documents with electronic processes, complete with audit trails and version control, while promoting collaboration between finance and accounting departments. It includes automated extraction/population of index data, automated invoice/purchase order matching, and automated exception handling/escalation.

Read More Article...

Grand Terra Introduces ArrowBooks Online Accounting Software for Small Business Owners

New, easy-to-use web-based software is designed to make accounting, bookkeeping and business report generation as easy as possible for small businesses.

ArrowBooks Accounting Software, a new online offering from Grand Terra LLC, is designed to help small business owners efficiently handle their accounting and bookkeeping needs using web-based software. The concept behind ArrowBooks is to enable today's small business owners to spend more time focusing on their businesses instead of their books by removing the intimidation that usually goes along with self-managed accounting and bookkeeping programs.

Read More Article...

AccountMate Releases Latest Version of LAN Accounting Software

New Version of Accounting Software Released With Over 200 Enhancements

Today AccountMate Software Corporation released AccountMate 7 for LAN with more than 200 enhancements over the prior version.

Thousands of growing companies have been successful employing this software package to manage their day-to-day operations since AccountMate introduced this software platform 13 years ago.

Between the flexibility inherent in the product and the extensive enhancements that continue to be added, this business asset continues to help companies manage their bottom line. The latest upgrade of AccountMate 7 for LAN includes more than 200 enhancements improving functionality and reports.

Read More Article...

The Accounting Software (R)evolution

It’s time to take a long, hard look at the accounting software your office uses to serve clients. Not because there is anything wrong with what you’ve used all these years, but because the software we use has improved so dramatically over the past few years that the decisions made in decades past may no longer be valid.

Some 15 years ago, when I first started writing this column, accounting software was a mess. Rooted firmly in DOS, static and often spreadsheet-based, it sat there like a three-color lump on the screen. In those days, the big question was, “Which tax program would print a return the fastest?” Heck, they even held “shootouts” to time them and declare winners and losers.

No one even thought about Windows For Workgroups 3.11, or the Mac. If there was any thought given to the impending release of Windows 95, it was half anticipation and half trepidation. Today, the software has improved so rapidly that it is almost less an evolution than a revolution. In the space of a single half-decade, we have seen whole genres of software, like payroll, become an online service … with full HR support incorporated. Virtually every type of software has gone through an extensive upgrade in usability, navigation and appearance. Colors in the output have become more vibrant and now routinely include not only printed output but full-screen presentations in PowerPoint and web output.

Read More Article...

Accounting software answers emissions call

LOCAL company Supply Chain Consulting has developed world-first carbon accounting software so businesses can measure product footprints across global manufacturers and from factory floor to shop.

A specialist in real-time logistics and distribution software, the company adapted its monitoring systems to simplify the capture and analysis of emissions profiles in an organisation and across the extended supply chain.

A range of products is emerging to measure carbon footprints at facility or enterprise level, but CarbonView is the first to capture data across multiple suppliers and locations in an end-to-end way.

Once data is captured, CarbonView executive vice-president Fadi Geha says, the software offers analytical capabilities so businesses can conduct modelling to optimise their use of low-carbon suppliers.

"Once companies get a bit down the carbon reduction path they want to build a granular view of individual product footprints," he says.

Read More Article...

Expert: SaaS Will Alter Future Landscape of Accounting Software

The meteoric rise of Software as a Service, or on-demand hosted software, has prompted a paradigm shift that poses challenges not just to a firm's traditional IT infrastructure but also to vendors who must now counter the trend with low-cost, high-performance solutions to retain their user bases.

"In the next few years most accounting software will migrate into this space," predicted Michael Bodnar of Quantum Information Technologies. "Customers are literally one click away from leaving [their current software package], so it's up to the vendors to improve their functions and performance."

Bodnar, who led a session at the AICPA Information Technology Conference here on the market dynamics of SaaS, pointed to the rapid proliferation of SaaS CRM and business software providers such as Salesforce.com, which now has a base of 2 million users, as well as the offerings of Google Apps.

Read More Article...

India Inc's effective tax compliance rate rises to 26% in 2007-08

If increasing subsidy bill is giving headache to P Chidambaram, he has found succour in higher direct tax collections. Direct tax receipts from companies and personal income have reportedly, increased 71.3% (ET June 19) in the first two months of the current year compared to the same period last year.

This may be too early to predict the collections for the full year, but if one goes by past records the finance minister has every reason to be optimistic. After all, rationalisation of tax structure has been giving good dividends. Despite a fall in tax rate, collections of corporate tax have increased steadily.

An ET survey of 200 large companies finds that their aggregate tax provisions have increased 28.3% in 2007-08 over the previous year.

The bigger question, however, is: Does a rise in tax collections automatically imply success of the restructuring process of corporate taxation? After all, higher tax collections last year could be the result of higher profits. As demand picked up following improvement in macro fundamentals, India Inc witnessed an all-round prosperity.

Read More Article...