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Tracking Income and Expenses
The task of tracking a businesss income and expense is really the most important job of an accounting system. If you own or manage a small business, obviously, you need some tool for measuring your income and your cash flow.
Although checkbook programs like Quicken and Microsoft Money do little more than keep a checkbook, you can actually keep financial records for a business right out of a checkbook. To do this, you simply categorize deposits as falling into some income category. And when you write a check or make some other withdrawal, you categorize expenses as falling into some expense category.
One problem with using a checkbook program, however, is that by using a checkbook program, you are implicitly using cash-basis accounting to track your income and expenses. 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 that means you are less likely to make errors in implementing it. However, cash-basis accounting is generally too imprecise for more complicated businesses. If you use inventory in your business, for example, cash-basis accounting isnt very accurateand the Internal Revenue Service does not allow it.
And there are other circumstances, too, in which cash-basis accounting produces serious and usually unacceptable errors in precision. For example, if you often receive money before you have actually earned it or if you often incur expenses long before you actually have to pay for them, you need to use a more sophisticated accounting program than a checkbook program.
Online AccountingAccounting in USA has seen lots of change. There was a time when the accounting was more of book keeping done in huge ledgers and was the purview of select few. Its not so anymore. Accounting is much more widely accepted as a business function and general people also look for the accounting details of the firms they are associated with. Also lot more transparency is required now. Keeping in line with the development of IT and other technologies, the accounting is also now based on internet and has taken wide strides. Online accounting services, viewed as merely experimental only a few years a ..
Generating Business Forms
The second task that a small business accounting program should help you with is the generation of business forms. The most common business form is simply a check. Any checkbook program help you do this. Other business forms that small businesses commonly need to produce include invoices, credit memos, monthly statements, purchase orders, and so forth.
If you have a small business with very simple form requirementsperhaps you need only checksthen a checkbook program may work very well for you.
However, if you have extensive or complicated business form generation requirements, a more full-featured small business accounting package, such as Intuits QuickBooks, Peachtrees Complete Accounting, or Microsoft Small Business Accounting will do a better job for you.
If you produce more complicated forms, but you produce these other forms with a word processing program, then a checkbook program may still work for you.
Microsoft Great Plains Project Accounting - overview for consultant
Microsoft Great Plains now it is one of the four ERP solutions, owned and promoted by Microsoft subdivision Microsoft Business Solutions: Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Axapta and Solomon. Pretty interesting mix and of course, each product has its own realization of Project Accounting. We would like to give you short overview of Project Accounting module, coming with Microsoft Great Plains.
History.
Great Plains Software had wise strategy when it did allow high level software development so called satteltes of third party modules for Great Plains Dynamics and eEnterprise, writte ..
Detailed Record Keeping for Other Assets and Liabilities
The third task that a small business accounting program should help you with is detailed record keeping of your most important assets and liabilities. A checkbook program lets you keep good detailed records of cash, and for some businesses that is the principal asset. But many small businesses have other significant assets and liabilities they need to track, for example, accounts receivables, inventory, and vendor payables.
Whether or not a particular software programs accounting tools provide adequate asset and liability record keeping depends on the situation. However, no small business accounting program does everything you need it to do. Any accounting program that provides an extensive list of features, by its very nature, becomes a challenge to use. For example, moving to the accrual basis of accounting adds an entire layer of complexity to financial record keeping, and keeping detailed records of inventory adds another layer.
For these reasons, even when a particular program doesnt do everything you need it to do, your best choice still may be to use the programand then simply live with its shortcomings.
About the Author: Seattle accountant Stephen L. Nelson CPA is the author of both Quicken for Dummies and QuickBooks for Dummies and several other books about accounting software as well. His website is http://www.stephenlnelson.com.
Source: http://www.isnare.com Stephen NelsonPicking A Small Business Accounting Program
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