Ploofle

(backdated as this is super old and incomplete to boot)

After a few days of hitting machines, cramped thumbs (thanks, eraser nubs), and general irritation, I’ve slogged through learning to use these accounting softwares. Disclaimer: this is only attempting to be somewhat methodical. YMMV.

Take into account that my only semi-real accounting experience has been in entering in the register for Quicken where someone else set up the categories for expenses/income and that I’m looking at this from a small business/web development company standpoint. Also, I’m looking for something that could ideally work in a mixed systems environment – Mac and Windows, at least – and super ideally something that could be accessed remotely – perhaps with a VPN connection – if anyone is doing billable time on the road. The way I’m testing this is literally as if I were planning to adopt the software as the real deal – I tried entering in sales and purchase data for both and printing out invoices, customizing features, and what-not.

This review will be organized by the general feature I’m looking at, the results with either software package or both, and which I consider to be better in that aspect. Continue past the break if your eyes haven’t glazed over yet…

Company setup
Both:
In both, you start out by giving information about your company. They’re both pretty easy, and have a variety of default account lists, including for Web Development!! In other words, without me having to figure out whether it’s an asset, a liability, equity, or whatever the hell is the right accounting word, line items like Website implemention fees, Web Design (income category), Software Purchases, etc are predefined. For payroll, both can setup manually entered FUTA and FICA percentages (would’ve been sweet if I currently had any employees).

SA:
Has option for selecting company organization type, which adds more accounts, like Partnership A and Partnership B withdrawals, loans, investments, etc. The categorization system also has a few more details/options than MYOB. I also found, though, that adding categories was very odd for the uninformed. You add them (and reference them; more on that later) by account or line item number, rather than description or text name. The numbers, according to the help file should correspond with the main headers roughly. That means, of course, that you know what the main headers mean. And that you remember that number when adding a new account, cuz it doesn’t let you go back and check during the add process.

MYOB:
The MYOB setup wizard lets you optionally go through all sorts of lookup customizations, so even if the default lookup for accounts is by number, you can easily change it to search by description/name. MYOB also uses the asset/liability/etc etc verbiage, but I found its help file more useful in explaining, at least roughly, what those words mean. I thought it was really useful to see from the start what, based on your company location data, the state, city, etc. taxes were. MYOB also seems (seems, mind you) to do a lot more data backup prompting and core data checking than SA. Just saying.

Edge: Neither
Both pretty much cover the basics; SA’s accounts were better, but user-adding processes unnecessarily difficult. MYOB’s wizards were useful for more subtle system settings and the tax tables I found very cool.

SA – Reconciliation – requires you know acct number – lookup not possible – bleh.
Way of processing invoices/bills to customers – create receipts. Not quite intuitive to me…
How to view recurring bills/payments?
If you go through the daily business manager, tho, it conveniently puts all these items in a time-based organization – easier to pay/account for, almost, by not using the main menus.

Also has better electronic bank statement integration that MYOB – from initial checkout, I think that MYOB can also use electronic statement downloads, but you have to import them specially, while SA will connect and import on the fly. Gives options for small business checklists for day-end, month-end, fy-end, and calendar year-end to-dos, which is neat (tho took a bit of exploring to reveal) You can also add your own to-do items to the lists.

I found it hard to decide which kind of invoicing to use – Service or Professional – more based on the invoice printing outout rather than any difference in initial, company-end, data entry.

Entering Sales/Quotes/Invoices/Purchases
SA: You can’t add accounts on the fly, and some of the options for inventory/sales items are a bit iffy for me (is web hosting annual cost an item or a service? as you buy it pretty much once, but it’s not tangible and you don’t have an inventory for it…). It also doesn’t autonumber items; like I know or care what I want to call the products? And you have to search for accounts by number, not by name or desc., in the main entry windows. And maybe I missed it, but I don’t see an option for automatic lookup of tax codes. Paying/creating checks, though, is easier than with MYOB – fewer buttons to hit. It also doesn’t seem to differentiate between company contacts and individual contacts – sorting by last, first as opposed to company name.
MYOB: Nice recurring payment/integrated customer tracking feature. Very useful flowchart-like display for all areas, kinda directing you to enter data/accounting in a certain order. I had some trouble with this in SA, and it’s very possible that using MYOB first helped get me through. SA has howdoI… sections that pop up when you switch to different tasks, but if you don’t know what the words mean or why you would want to do that, it’s not as helpful.
Both: Can track jobs/projects, do timeslips (tho this is mostly geared toward independent contractor timesheet accounting, it could prolly apply to costing out hourly technical services).

Edge:
Hourly timekeeping
SA – works. Find setup a bit odd, but still, figured it out. Limited shipping options list (prolly addable, but not as nice as MYOB). Has project creation – but pretty much a label for grouping together costs by project as well as user – no tasks, subtasks, etc as found in MYOB.
In both, you pretty much have the employee keep track of the hours, then you bill based on hours (and optionally pay based on hours too)
In our case, the payroll aspects aren’t immediately useful – as owners, we don’t get paid in quite the same way – but at least worth a checkout.
Entering Purchases by the Company
SA – confusing. Product numbers for things you buy from other people? No obvious way of telling if a payment (or sale, for that matter) is recurring based on the invoice – only through the startup business manager tool. There are quite a few options for vendor management tho – print 1099s for companies, taxes that apply from that vendor, current balances, statistics about ytd purchases from em, etc.
Also can run payroll checks pretty much on its own – click on run payroll checks and if all data’s been entered from previous invoices, time billing, taxes, etc., it’s good to go. Also keeps track of benefits, vacation time, etc.

Customer/Contacts
MYOB – Seems to have a form email function for periodic emails to all outstanding balances, or even just receipts. Also can export for mail merge instead. Sweet.
SA – Good integration w/ networking. Can store URLs and emails and email/jump to sites as necessary.
Graphs/Charts/Budgeting
MYOB -
SA – Budgeting is based on the accounts you have set up – you can set up their budgets as you go. The graph options also make a lot of sense – the pictures are good and scales well. One annoying thing is that it’ll pop up a little “advisor” if, say, hypothetically, you’re overdrawing on your checking and it’ll ask you if you want advice about preventing it. The reports are also pretty good, allowing you to print up reference charts of your own (for, say, accounts, or inventory items) as well as things like balance sheets and cash flow. These reports are strictly utilitarian, and you’re given the option of custom reports, though not custom graphs.
Both -
Edge –
Compatibility Issues
MYOB – Mac and windows, tho it requires purchasing both products if you want both of em to use it.
SA – windows-only
Price
Current price searches are the following (non-Ebay, lowest I could find):
MYOB AccountEdge (Mac) -123.94 w/ rebate
MYOB Business Essentials Pro (Win) – 123.94 w/rebate
SA Pro – 149.95

SA 2004 is roughly half the cost of, while I haven’t found much cheaper than the promo price of the current MYOB as compared to 2004 software.

MYOB – *big* issue is that it doesn’t play happily with Thunderbird for emailing statements and invoices. Based on support sites, it appears that both developers are going round and round on this one, with the end result that the vast majority of MYOB people can’t use it. I can print to pdf, tho, so I can work around it, but that’s not so cool.

I haven’t looked at the basic software, which may fill my needs, yet, but I shall in a bit.
Actually, looking at MYOB BusinessBasic after the pro thingy is rather sad. A lot of features that I liked – the mass emails, the customer contact management, the managing purchases – are all gone, tho the account setups are still there.

Tags: DIY, praxis