Accounts Packages Review For Small Businesses
Value of Software Accounts Software
A common mistake in small businesses is to underestimate the importance and value of accurate and up to date accounts and the ability to understand where the business is in terms of cashflow and to review outstanding invoices. Some small business owners will struggle with manual systems while others (the spreadsheet masochists) will attempt to use excel. The value of commercial solutions is that they are built to handle accounts and normally ensure that you manage both sides of a transaction (when you enter a transaction say paying a bill you match the payment to the creditor with a debit on your company bank account).
Smart small business owners will use commercial software solutions to maintain their accounts records. These will:
- reduce the time spent processing business transactions, invoicing and payments
- provide a method to manage outstanding invoices
- in the long term will save you money
- it may even reduce your reliance on your accountant.
Accounts Software for Small Businesses
There are hundreds of products providing a range of software suitable for companies from the small trader to global conglomerates. Some software titles will have 100,000s of businesses will be using software others will be at the niche end. Avoid the niche or startup companies as your accountant may not be able to understand the software in how it works.
Choose products that:
- offer the right level product for your company size
- have an upgrade path
- offer support if you are new to accounts packages
- sell in large enough volumes so that there are forums offering help
Review of Quickbooks
Quickbooks accounts software by Intuit provide a range of products suitable for the small to medium sized business and maintain a loyal base of devotees and more importantly a base of accountants who are familiar with the product.
QuickBooks offer 5 versions of QuickBooks that grow with the needs of small businesses:
- SimpleStart - Great for new and home-based businesses who want the best start - and a more professional look.
- Pro - Ideal for growing businesses who have little accounting knowledge but need increased functionality.
- Premier - Great for dynamic businesses who demand more comprehensive financial management & business planning tools.
- Pro & Payroll and Premier & Payroll - The best in-house solution for businesses who have employees and need to manage payroll and staff data.
With Quickbooks Customers get the security of a money-back guarantee plus 30 days' free support from time of registration.
Hosted Software
Recent developments in software deployment provide hosted software accessible via a web browser. The concept of storing your company's critical and private information on a remote secure server might leave the small business owner feeling uncomfortable. Fear not, this concept has been used by multinational companies for some years. The leading provider of CRM software SalesForce.com has been securely hosting key customer contact and new business details of 1.5 million. Customers include giants like Siemens. For the SMB these hosting companies are be capable of keeping your data much more secure than if it was located on a computer in your own office.
The benefits of hosted software are:
- hosted software is usually leased on a pay per month basis which has cashflow advantages
- updates are managed for you and security patched updated in a timely manner
- the provider will be maintaining regular backups of your data for restoration (backups are critical to protect you from hard drive crashes and frequently the small business owner will be too busy to bother)
Focus on KashFlow
KashFlow, currently has a 70% share of the UK web-based accounting software market although other products are starting to appear including an offering from Sage and, in the US, a hosted Quickbooks product.
At the 2008 Software Satisfaction Awards
KashFlow was listed amongst the 4 industry leading products and won the category, based on customer review it receiving more than 3 times the share of the vote that Sage 50 received:
KashFlow - winner 3.85, MYOB Accounting Plus 3.6, Quickbooks Pro 2008 2.95, Sage 50 Accounts 2.91
Spreadsheet Solutions
Use these only if you fully understand accounting principals. The bigest disadvantage of these is that you need to keep up both versions of the double entry accountin manually whereas database solutions dela with this in the data entry stages and prevent the user from missing one of the steps. I have used diyaccounting solutions for the preparation of my own company accounts in the past and used these for submission to HMR as Tax return and to Companies House for Statutory Accounts. The diyaccounting package provides good summary information for year end and prepares a short version company tax return for you to copy onto the real form and a Statutory Accounts statement for Companies house filing.
Open Source not Ready
I am a normally an advocate for open source (free) software. I built and manage this website using a free content management system (CMS Made Simple), use the free version of Cubecart to manage a craft e-commerce site and indeed the website hosting company that serves up these web pages uses the free open source web server - Apache. Apache by the way runs most of the world's websites. However, when it comes to accounts software I recommend without any exceptions that you use commercial software that is supported and which is compliant with UK legal and tax framework. I have tested two free accounts packages over several months to manage my own accounts but gave up on both because of a lack of flexibility and of any user friendly support.