Accounting System Required

Some very small businesses don’t have accounting systems because either the owner doesn’t know how to account, isn’t aware what benefits might be gained or simply doesn’t have the time. The only one of these that applies to me is that I don’t have the time, but that’s no excuse so I’m on the look-out for a suitable system.

I’ve been thinking about this for a little while. A majority of small businesses use an off-the-shelf package such as Sage or Quickbooks, but I’m not keen on these. My dislike for accounting packages designed for non-accountants is that, in aiming to make accounting easy, they determine too many of the decisions and implement too many rules, resulting in inflexibility. What this boils down to is the accounting package takes upon itself the role of Controller and delegates the role of clerk to the user - and the Controller character played is pretty strict.

If demand is anything to go by (Sage and Intuit Quickbooks between them have 54% of the UK market for companies with less than 10 employees) this is what many users want. With my background I wouldn’t be satisfied: I want to be the controller.

You may have heard or come across “open source” software before - basically that is software available for free. There are several free accounting systems around and I’ve decided to trial some to see whether they meet my needs. I will post my findings back here as I go.

Before starting, my expectations are that open source offerings will be more flexible than Sage or Quickbooks but most certainly less professionally finished and therefore probably less efficient to use.

My system requirements aren’t too demanding. Here’s a short list:

• Include general, sales and purchase ledgers
• Decent provision for user-defined account codes
• Period accounting with twelve periods per year
• Control over year-end closing procedure / journals
• Hold at least two years of data for live enquiry
• Efficient journal entry screens
• Separation of the tasks of journal entry and journal posting
• Import journals from external files (Excel, CSV, etc.)
• Facility for holding budget data, with efficient entry or import of budget data
• Efficient and informative account enquiries
• Effective report generator for financial statements
• Access to data for in-depth and advanced reporting
• Provisions for full data export (in anticipation of moving to another system in the future)

Let battle begin.