Top 10 Best Small Business Accounting Software

Accounting software: There are plethora of off the shelf and tailor made accounting software available in market, however to find the one which meet you business need can be challenging. It seems accounting software are alike and most of them do the same thing and give same reports.  But that is not the case, for instance some software come with many features such as crystal reports, financial statements analysis etc. while other are simple and easy to use without many reporting options. Large companies can often afford to order software tailored to their needs, this is not a feasible option for many small businesses.

Accounting software – what to look for

To find the best accounting software, I would suggest to look for an accounting software that can meet your needs and can grow with your business. You may need to make a list of all the task and reports you need small business accounting software must be able to do. This list helps will you to filter out all the fancy small business accounting software which does not fit in your criteria. Every business have different requirements from an accounting software and therefore you may need to consider whether the accounting software has following functions which I have already explained in features of accounting software.

Just to summaries:

• Ability to support multiple users.
• Tracking of inventory, work in progress, job orders, jobs and other production and task management requirements.
• Payroll processing and capability for other requirements (PAYE, annual leave, long service leave etc).
• Management and reconciliation of multiple bank accounts and the need to handle foreign currency.
• Ability to generate department or each business segment wise.
• Ability to interface with other software such as payroll and inventory module.
• Debtors’ management reports such as ageing analysis, flagging past due customer balances and customers exceeding their limits etc.
• Ability to generate financial statements and management accounts.
• Availability of accounting software support and training.

Top 10 best small business accounting software

I have come up with my list of the top 8 software options after reviewing each software on following feature of best small business accounting software:

• Basic Accounting tools
• Reporting & Analytics
• Employees and Payroll
• Inventory and services
• Productivity and Integration features
• Scalability

Note: 

10-9  Excellent
8-6    Good
5-4    Average
3-2    Poor
1-0    Bad