What should I look for in a program, Small Business Accounting?

A small business accounting program must perform three tasks: track income and expenses, generate business forms, and keep detailed records for other assets and liabilities.

Income and expense tracking

The task of monitoring a company's income and expenditure is actually the most important job of an accounting system. If you own or manage a small business, of course, you need some tool for measuring your income and cash flow.

Although money does is keep a checkbook, you can actually keep financial records for a business right out of a checkbook. To do this, simply categorize deposits as falling into some income category. And when you write a check or make some other withdrawal, to classify the expenses as belonging to some category of expenditure.

A problem with using a checkbook program like money, however, is that using a checkbook program, which are implicitly using cash-basis accounting to track revenues and expenses.

NOTE Cash-basis accounting counts income when you receive a deposit and counts expense when you write a check.

Cash-basis accounting is easy to understand, and this means you are less likely to commit errors in its implementation. However, cash basis of accounting is generally too imprecise for more complicated business. If you use inventory in your company, for example, cash basis of accounting is not very precise and the Internal Revenue Service does not allow it. And there are other circumstances, including operating system benchmark produces serious and usually unacceptable errors in precision. For example, if you often receive money before you have actually earned or incur expenditure often long before they actually pay for them, you must use an accounting program more sophisticated than a checkbook program.

The second task that a small business accounting program should help with the generation of business forms. The most common commercial form is simply a check. And of course money and any other program checkbook help you do this. Other business forms that small businesses are commonly used to produce include invoices, credit memos, monthly statements, purchase orders and so on.

If you have a small company with a very simple form, the requirements, maybe you need only check, money then the program can work very well for you.

However, if you have large or complex business requirements-shape, a more complete package of small business accounting, such as Intuit QuickBooks or Peachtree Complete Accounting, you will do a better job for you.

NOTE If you produce more complicated shapes, but produces these other forms with a word processing program, the Money program can still work for you.

Keep detailed records for other assets and liabilities

The third task that a small business accounting program should help you with detailed record keeping of your most valuable assets and liabilities. A checkbook program lets you keep detailed records of cash certificates, and for some companies is the main strength. But many small businesses have other significant assets and liabilities they need to track, for example, accounts receivable, inventory and trade payables.

Whether or not tools of accounting-control register, provide adequate assets and liabilities Money to keep depends on the situation. However, no small business accounting program does everything you need to do. Any accounting program that provides an extensive list of features, by its very nature, becomes a challenge to use. For example, switch to accrual accounting adds a whole level of complexity of accounting, and maintain detailed records of inventory adds another layer.

For these reasons, even when money is not everything you need to do, still the best choice would be to use the money and then just live with its shortcomings....