Small Business has seen a dilemma when it comes to choosing and using an accounting package. The UK is primarily dominated by SAGE. The US sees plenty of QuickBooks and Peachtree, but there are others in the market too. The problem, however, is that although these three pieces of software along with the others provide a basis for double entry accounting, they don’t have what it takes to get true accounting automation, and I have to sadly say (now that I am in the UK) that SAGE is probably the worst out of the three.

All small business accounting packages suffer from similar diseases; not enough drill down user functionality, weak, if any, accountability for prepayments, deployment over multiple locations (without actually paying out of your nose) etc. etc. Despite all of that, I think it would be beneficial to review and discuss:

1. What is it that will make for a good Accounting Package, and

2. Which should you choose: SAGE, Peachtree or Quickbooks?

I’ve tried to look for reviews on the internet comparing the three accounting software packages, but I’ve had no luck. I have found some interesting articles that point to the shortcomings of SAGE or Quickbooks, but I’ve yet to see something that ideally tells you what’s good from a small business owner, accountant or book keeper’s point of view. There’s a good article http://nothing.tmtm.com/archives/2582 that discusses some of the fallacies of SAGE, and I totally agree with the writer, although I’m not sure small businessmen will ever be able to handle their accounting without the help of an accountant or bookkeeper. The double entry system is to blame for part of that; and people’s unwillingness to sit, think, and learn, given the lack of availability of time to the small business owner will make it impossible for business owners to use any accounting software independent of a professional virtually impossible.

As a professional accountant with a degree in Information Systems, I have a slightly different point of view about what accounting software should do and how it should work. I’ve also been a small business owner, and I’ll tell right off the bat that when I ran my own business, I could not take the time every day to sit down and update my books; hell, I couldn’t take out the time once a month, and I fell behind on my books drastically; but I can fix them come year end, because I know exactly what it takes. What about someone who doesn’t?

If software or accounting automation were to function ideally, whenever you made a sale or provided a service, the appropriate entry would be made automatically and it would update your books. Well, you can get part of that in a retail business, even with small business software like the QuickBooks POS terminal, but it still won’t do your depreciation, purchase of fixed assets, bill payments, etc. etc. automatically, even if you paid for and used every damn service you can subscribe for through Intuit over the internet. On the other hand, if you have a service business, well, you’re totally screwed! You’ve got to do everything yourself. The point is, for those of you who are thinking that “Ah! There will be accounting software that will do everything on its own one day,” the answer is no. That cannot be.

That’s basically because firstly the wonderful governments of the first world want extreme compliance with some rather unnecessary laws and regulations, and software will never be allowed to automate everything simply because a human being needs to be held responsible if something goes wrong. Second, we accountants love being in control. Corporate Accounting, for instance, can be the most dull job you have on earth, but the ability to tell someone “do your work and do it right, or no pay for you, buddy!” is excellent. Well, I like having my control over the money anyway. Third, and most important, the whole purpose of a double entry book keeping system is reconciliation. Everyone’s work is reconciled by another until an auditor signs off on it, and even then, sometimes the government comes in to reconcile that. As long as the basis and purpose of accounting is reconciliation and accountability thereof, accounting software will not become fully automated or “accountant-less.” Besides, the way I fathom fully automated accounting software, no small business could possibly afford it today.

Enough dreaming! Now, let’s get down to business. In the real world, what is it that a small business, say, any business ranging from GBP 200,000.00 in revenue to GBP 10,000,000.00 in revenue per year should look for? First and foremost, as discussed earlier, something that cuts down on accountant or book-keeper time. Now, what exactly does that mean? Things that a small business will primarily need a book-keeper or accountant for are:

1. Accounting for prepayments

2. Payroll accounting and returns

3. Depreciation for GAAP and Tax purposes

4. Minimizing tax legally

5. Useful, sensible reporting

1. Prepayments, if you think of them mathematically or simply, are nothing complicated. Even in simple double entry accounting, prepayments aren’t too complex. The concept is rather linear; if you pay for something before it was due, it becomes a current asset for the time being, automatically being written off against a liability that will arise in the future. So, what exactly is the simple accounting behind this? Say you pay your office rent 3 months in advance. The rent for the whole quarter becomes due on the first day of the beginning of the quarter. In such a scenario, in double entry accounting, you will:

a. You will cut a check for three months rent on the 1^st day of the quarter, say, the 1^st of January, for 3 months (from January 1st to March 31^st, 20xx). Assume here that your monthly rent is 1,000, and the 3 months’ rent is, therefore, 3,000.

b. In your books for January, you will make an entry for rent payment of three months on January 1^st, crediting your cash account with 3,000, debiting your Rent Expense account for 1,000 (for the month of January) and Prepaid Rent/Prepaid Expenses Account for 2,000 (for the prepaid rent for February and March).

c. When you prepare your financial statements at month end, you will show 1,000 in Rent expense on your Profit & Loss Account (if you’re in the UK, Asia or most of the Middle East) or Income Statement (if you’re in the US) and 2,000 in the current assets section on the balance sheet.

d. In the month of February, you would credit the prepaid expense account and debit the rent expense account with 1,000 each, respectively. Your balance sheet in February month will show only 1,000 in prepaid assets. Repeat for March.

e. You’re done!

As you can see, this isn’t really too complicated. The accounting is simple, but you have to be familiar with basic double entry debits and credits to do it right. I can’t tell you how many professional accountants screw up prepaid accounting, so let’s not blame small business owners for pulling their hair out with unusual and possibly unnecessary debits and credits for something as simple as a rent prepayment. You’d think that paying it for 3 months in advance you wouldn’t have to worry about for 3 more months. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in financial accounting.

2. The usual second hang-up in small business accounting is payroll. Now payroll is not rocket science; it is systematic and the method is well documented. But, undoubtedly, payroll is a very tedious and boring part of corporate accounting. Keeping track of different and changing income levels with different tax brackets and doing quarterly returns can, quite frankly, be a bitch. It’s not difficult; it’s just bogus. However, a small business can simply choose to outsource this function altogether. Depending on where you are and how many employees you have, you can outsource payroll accounting and disbursement for as little as $100 per month per employee or $ 300 per month in total. Please don’t start emailing me about where to find companies that can do this for you. Look around in your city. Ask a local accountant or check with someone like TriNet if you’re in the US. If you’re in the UK, well, you can contact me.

3. Here’s another subject I’ve seen small business owners get heart burn over. I have worked with clients and bosses who were shattered because straight line depreciation as per GAAP put a serious dent in their profits. It took a lot to explain to them that this was good for tax purposes (although that may not be true since you have to use government compliant depreciation methods depending on which country you’re in) and it didn’t really matter for scoring points in front of your bank, friends, or date. But managing statements that reflect and don’t reflect different types of depreciation, depending on who the financial statements are being made for can once again, be a boring and tedious task; one most small business owners would want to rid themselves off. Welcome to the real world; different institutions want your fixed assets accounted for differently. How would you calculate the life of each asset? How many years to break it down over? What percentage do you have to depreciate it according to the IRS? Treat it as real property or not? How about land and buildings? Who the hell is going to keep track of all the assets in your business? Computers, desks, chairs, fittings, etc. etc. Sounds like a full time job, doesn’t it? It is painful!

4. Corporate Income Tax, Sales Tax and/or VAT. Such wonderful terms. I assure you, even those of us who love taking your money for doing your taxes hate doing them just as much as you do. Again, although taxes can get really complex, they’re typically, for a small business owner, not too bad. That doesn’t mean they can be. When small business owners start making personal payments from the company account and start charging gifts, kids tuition, cars, rent, alimony etc. etc. for their extended family to the company account, the tax business can get rather nasty, especially if you don’t stay on top of it at month end, and tackle it while you can with your quarterly payroll return. However, I will say that even the tax return system is relatively developed. There is TOO MUCH documentation available on how to complete and file your return, and some software will typically be pretty helpful. But to maximize your tax benefit, you do need some tax craftsmanship, and that only comes with experience and knowledge of accounting and taxation. And who in the world will spend his time studying tax law and procedure unless he’s getting paid money to do it? No one. You’re better off getting professional help for this from the get go. Plus, by doing so, you don’t have to worry as much about the tax department coming down your ass for making simple mistakes. However, do keep in mind that if there is a mistake, and even if you have a chartered accountant sign off on it, it’s going to be the small business owner’s ass if there’s a problem. You need an accountant for this; I can’t stress how bad it is when you’ll get penalized $ 1,200 for trying to save $ 750 you could have paid an accountant initially, because second time around, you’ll be paying the 1200 and the 750. Do the Math!

5. It’s great to get professional looking P&Ls, Income Statements, Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Statements, etc. etc. etc. It’s very good for the small busiess owner’s ego to see a professional set of financial statements and reports with the business logo on it, but to most small business owners, the typical financial reports can be pretty damn useless. They’re a good measure to see how you’re competing with the big business on numbers, but useful reports that explain cash flow or budgets, that compare pro formas with actuals, present value and future value statements and calculations, and other such reports require some planning and thinking, and definitely need some kind of a financial background, if not an accounting one. It takes quite an accountant to explain a cash flow statement. A typical cash flow statement made under US GAAP is very user unfriendly, and I’m not sure a small business owner would want to spend his time on figuring out what exactly it means. That’s why you will need an accountant to explain or simplify any typical, standard reports that your accounting software may generate. Of course, if you’re happy without knowing what’s really going on, you probably don’t need to understand any of it. But for a growing and developing small business, accurate, useful financial reporting that provides valuable information, not data, is vital. It the job of a financial or management accountant to convert this data into information, and then present it to the man in charge of the business.

Now that we have established that a small business needs a professional accountant, or professional help, let’s discuss what it is that the accounting software in the market should about the above to minimize or reduce the use or functions of an accountant to reduce the overhead associated with having an accountant.

The Accounting Software Wishlist not available in existing software – by today’s standard

1. Let us first start of with drill down functionality. Let’s say, you have your balance sheet on the screen, and the figure for current liabilities looks a little out of whack (doesn’t it always?), and you want to see what makes up the massive number of US $ 2,,467,589.45. Well, if you were using SAGE, or any other third class third party accounting software, you would hear your PC make a buzzing error noise, that annoying sound that it makes on different occasions for different problems that sounds something like “tun`!” That’s because there is a lot of commercial software out there which will not allow for any drill down functionality, and that makes for very user unfriendly software, even for us accountants. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for us to be able to double click on our statements and reports, and have either the relevant ledger accounts pop up or a simple list of the items that are making up that number. Sometimes a typical, or what we may think of as typical, entry in a software does NOT come up with the desired result on the balance sheet or P & L. That simply means that the user doesn’t think the exact same way as the person who designed the software, and that’s a problem, because most johnnys who design the software have little or nothing to do with accounting. By the way, QuickBooks, Peachtree and Microsoft Office Accounting all provide for this. I’m not sure about MYOB, but I assure, SAGE should get fined for something as stupid as this. They’ve even bought Peachtree, but they refuse to learn from it.

2. Here’s what these software providers need to decipher: are you making the software for small business owners or are you making it for accountants? This question is key before we can tackle the ever famous ‘accounting for prepayments’ issue. Up to this day, all major small business accounting software does half and half. Take SAGE for instance, they have an option to account for prepayments, but it’s so horrid and hard to figure out that any normal person will be pulling his/her hair out to figure out how it works. Most irritating is the fact that you can’t see the effect of your prepayment entry until you decide to go in and CLOSE the month. So, if you were to look at your statements before actually closing the month to make sure there weren’t any mistakes, you’re screwed. Worst yet, if this is a tactic for security and internal controls in a business, it fails miserably. You won’t know what you’ve until you close the month, and then you’ll have to make a bunch of adjusting entries to fix up anything you may have screwed up. That will only cause more confusion for someone trying to pick up on erroneous accounting behavior.

It would, in fact, be simpler to add a prepayment section to the payment area, and simply ask the user how much of the amount being paid is prepayment, and then the appropriate entries could be made into the GL or PL accordingly automatically. Of course, that’s if you’re designing the software for the small business owner.

On the other hand, if you’re making it for accountants, and you’re dumb enough to not be able to figure out how to account for it automatically, why don’t you simply state that in the How-tos instead of giving a long lecture full of bullshit in Help Menu, and simply let us accountants make journal entries to account for prepayments. Well, it’s not like the software is stopping you. But that’s how I account for prepayments anyway. The prepayment options are buggy and sketchy at best, and quite frankly, even if you figure them out, they won’t work properly in Peachtree, QuickBooks, or SAGE. Microsoft has made a bit of an effort to incorporate prepayments into their new software, and it’s a decent attempt. However, it could require some further cleaning up.

3. Multiple Locations. I’ve deployed both Peachtree and QuickBooks over multiple locations. I haven’t even tried with SAGE, and given my low opinion of it thus far, I fear the day a client or an employer will ask me to do this. Of course, deploying over a network or over the internet is not as useful as one would assume. If you actually wanted to keep track of two locations from the two different locations, and have the software update everything automatically, wouldn’t that just be great.

The problems with deploying software like Peachtree and QuickBooks over a network or VPN are simple. The number of simultaneous user is limited (for many functions to one user only), and if you’re keeping track of say, multiple warehouses with equipment, your inventory management will get really screwed up. You’ll have to keep track of the same inventory different locations with different codes, and if you really want a clear report, you’ll have to export the report into excel, bunch and merge some cells, and then you’ll finally come up with the report you want. So, basically, support for multiple locations means:

a. The ability to deploy the same software with the SAME data set relevant to the specific location;

b. The ability to have multiple users logged on simultaneously; and

c. The ability to manage the books of multiple locations separately and the business as a whole.

Now we’re asking for something as complex as SAP over here, but the concept is similar. And mind you, it’s not very complex. WebERP provides an example of a software that already does this, and even though some old school executives might still believe there are possible security breaches to storing information online, that’s a rather weak argument in today’s day and age.

I took apart WebERP with another colleague of mine to customize a multiple location accounting system for a client. It was about 70% complete, but as you know with clients in Dubai, they didn’t want to pay up as per the agreement, so we had to abandon the project. A web based solution is the SIMPLEST way to manage a multiple location accounting software. A web based solution that uses AJAX will totally eliminate the need for accounting software like SAGE or Peachtree. Writing such a software is on my list of things to do. But I wouldn’t hold me to that.

4. Viewing Vendor/Customer Statements. This wish is simply more of a musing, although I think it will be a useful musing. How is that we can (or could until the 2006 versions) only print these statements. I mean, how hard is it for QuickBooks or Peachtree to actually come up with another screen to display a customer or vendor statement before printing it out. It’s either the product of very lazy project management or careless programming. Either way, VIEWING before PRINTING is not only more convenient; it is also more environment-friendly.

================================================

Enough debunking of accounting software. Please feel free to add features to this wishlist as you deem fit. Mind you, I think most other things are already available in these accounting packages. It would be nice to be able to manage your bank account directly from the accounting software too, but let’s fact it, that’s not going to happen. Part TWO of this article will discuss which small business software is superior for small businesses, both from the accountants the business owner’s point of view.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Accounting & Finance, News & Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.