How much should you pay for accounting software?
Some years ago TAS Software bought out a very good, cheap accounts package called TAS Books. At £99 it provided an excellent set of accounting ledgers and sold in the thousands by mail order. TAS Books became one of the leading entry-level packages in the market.
Later came TAS Books 2, which for £399 added a full set of distribution modules to the basic TAS ledgers. The software was excellent and the equal of much more expensive systems. However, TAS Books 2 never did very well.
So why did one package succeed and the other fail?
Continued...
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IRIS
Stephen,
Have a look at IRIS. It will do exactly what you want and all from one database. It might not be the cheapest but it saves a considerable amount of time: and time is money!
Software
VT, Visual Transaction, is the probably best on the market. It comes in two parts.
The ledgers and day books are in windows.
Accounts prepartion in Excell.
Absolutely brilliant
Packages
Fundamentally if you buy a package, you will have to fit your business to the package. Not many suppliers will tell you that, but it is a fact of IT life. And that means change and workarounds galore.
Once you take integration, implementation and the inefficiencies introduced by a less than perfect fit of system to business you might actually have been better building a system from scratch rather than 'integrating' a package.
As ever it is a toss up between capital and revenue.
what about sage line 50?
The thing about TAS books 2 is interesting, because it has a lot of similarities with Sage Line 50 in terms of both functionality and implementation issues, yet is seemingly sold off the shelf with great success.