What accounting package do you use?
by Fred on 24/11/09 at 10:06 am
3 comments
When I started my digital marketing company, World Wide Creative, a few years back I was a stereotypical entrepreneur. By ‘stereotypical’ read ‘stupid in stereo’ … basically I did twice as much work as required, purely because I was instilled with the same dumbass, dogged determination that most SA business people are born with.
Besides doing the sales, marketing, design, creative, strategy, delivery, account management and human resources, I also did the book keeping. And you know what? I was doing okay until the last thing. The tipping point came one day when Andrew (the ‘Brain’ of Ideate fame) sat with me to demonstrate how crap I was at accounts duty. He asked me to generate a statement for one of our clients. Prior to this conversation, Andrew had loaded all the company admin stuff onto an accounts package.
Up ‘til then, I’d been using Xcel for all our invoicing and statements (yes, I know!) so these things generally took a while.
Thirty minutes later, I’d designed our client a beautiful document, with all the invoices from the previous months nicely added up. Another five minutes and our company logo was positioned ju-u-u-st right… and then I triumphantly printed out my statement.
Andrew, who had been sitting with me the entire time, took one look at the sheet and said these chilling words: “Fred, your statement took 35 minutes longer than mine. It took me 1 minute to create this [he pulled out the statement he’d generated in the meantime for the same client], and guess what? Yours is wrong.”
He was correct. It was wrong. I’d got the VAT wrong, as well as a few of the line items. It was a terrible indictment of how I was running the company. The good news was that from that day onwards, the management of accounts was wrested from my cold, dead hands and into the jurisdiction of someone wayyyy more competent. The company has since evolved into having an admin department, but, I can say with confidence, it would never have gotten there if I had kept control of the books myself.
To end off this article, here’s a list of options for you (as apposed to using Xcel):
- FNB Qwill (recommended – it’s free for FNB customers, enquire here)
- QuickBooks (what we used up til recently, good but not that pervasive in SA)
- Pastel (preferred by accountants, but painful for the man on the street)
- Xero.com (entirely online; we’re using this in one or two companies)
Happy accounting!
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
Tags: business software
Theunis
Nov 25th, 2009
Might want to have a look at a very brilliant piece of software, Omni – more info here http://www.omniaccounts.co.za/
It is completely flexible and priced according to what you use and need.
Bruce Wade
Dec 1st, 2009
Fred, sent FNB an email and they responded with a marketing call and a brochure email. I then also asked for a follow up call to discuss my business accounts and my new e-commerce venture and then nothing.
My frustration continues: http://www.ei.co.za/2009/11/27/banks/
Greg
Dec 1st, 2009
YOu may also want to look at at Page Web Accounting. Completely SA developed, multi currency, can be as detailed or as in detailed as you want. pretty much does it all
http://www.pagewebaccounting.co.za / pageaccounitng.co.za