To buy appropriate accounting software for your business or your company, you should follow certain guidelines.
1. It should be right in size to meet the organization's need.
2. It should be bought from a reliable company, which provides complete customer support and fixes bugs without delay.
3. It should be able to handle multiple or single user entry as per the requirements of the company.
4. User interface should be easy to use and software should be tested for multi-user and role based feature.
5. Integration to third party software should be easy.
6. Reports should be clear and have all the options needed by your organization.
7. Support for multi currency features, multi locations, multiple companies.
8. Depending on the need of the organization, it can be bought, which supports e-commerce feature.
9. It should be supported by a high security feature.
10. It should provide proper data backup and should be tested for overloads.
In the planning stage, the features needed from the software should be defined and the buyers who are new to accounting should consult an accountant to understand about the features of the software.
1. The need for accounting software should be defined.
2. Allocate budget and resources for buying the software.
3. Set up a committee consisting of technical members and accountants to analyse the features of accounting software of various vendors.
4. Design a proposal to send to the list of vendors.
5. Ask for demonstrations from the vendors and compare the working of software through test entries. Make some test entries to check the complete functioning of the software. For example: Create a new company and make entries in bills and vouchers. Check for double entries. If a cash payment is made, the asset account should be debited and the revenue account should be credited. The amount should be shown in the owners' equity statement and income statement. Generate a profit and loss statement, and create dummy balance sheet to see the flow of the software.
6. Compare total cost of implementation, time of implementation and additional features of the software such as integration to third party software, security, flexibility in technology and customization, before buying the software.
1. It should have the features such as modules for handling accounts payable and receivable.
2. An easy to operate module for general ledger to helps you to get a complete picture of the financial statements and incomes.
3. Cost reporting and balance sheet generation should be easy.
4. There are many accounting software which comes with integrated payroll management system to help to keep a record of salaries of the employees of a company.
5. It should provide budgeting, funds flow and forecasting modules.
6. Depending on the requirement of the organization, you can search for asset management and depreciations features.
