Tuesday 30 May 2017

Types of Accounting Software Used in Business

Accounting software allows you monitor the financial health of your business: you can track expenses such as payroll and equipment expenses, and income from sales.  

Sage 50 accounting software and quickbook accounting software is one of the popular accounting software out there, but there are different types and brands of accounting and quickbook software available in the market. 

Below are some of the types of accounting software: 

1.Spreadsheets: Spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheet help very many businesses to stay in step with the financials. They are useful for any type of business especially small businesses that do not have a lot of expenses and income to track, and they can be adjusted to almost any accounting need. However, small, medium and large businesses with many operations rely on spreadsheets to compliment other accounting software such as Sage 50 accounting software and quickbook accounting software. 

These programs are easy to use and one does not need advanced skills to use them. They are also less expensive for businesses compared to the more specialized commercial types of accounting software. 

2. Commercial accounting software: QuickBooks and Peachtree are some of the commercial accounting software we have in business and they can handle most of accounting needs for small to medium businesses or companies.     

These, however, allow for more advanced uses with their advanced features. Another important and helpful aspect about these software is ability to customize your accounting practices and evaluations. Again, you can leverage knowledge of graphs to summarize data and come up with reports that reveal business health.    

These types of software is also less expensive when you compare to enterprise accounting software such as Sage 50 accounting software and quickbook accounting software. However, they are less customizable and adaptable to needs when compared to enterprise software.
   
3. Enterprise accounting software: Companies sometimes create their own accounting software or hire a third party company to customize a given software solution to suit their own need. Such software is used to manage complexities in business. This software may be created accidentally by the company when the staff is asked to develop an accounting software that helps deal with specific situations. Other times, it is intentional. 

The first step towards getting a right accounting software is assessing your business needs.

Other factors to guide you include the cost of the software. As mentioned earlier, the general guideline is that most small businesses with very little financial activity to track would use spreadsheet programs that are less costly, require less labour and are easy to use. This will keep your production or operation costs low and not eat into profits.
 
Businesses with substantial amount of financial activity to monitor can consider commercial software as long as they are dealing with standard processes with little or no need for customization. Large businesses that are flexible in terms of operations and which have business customization needs would rather go for the more customizable enterprise software or make their own.

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