Many accountants and companies are looking at online accounting and wondering whether to try it.  Companies often turn to their accountant for advice on this, which is why we spend a geat deal of our time talking to accountants and doing our best to accommodate their needs.

Anthony de Jong & Co is an accounting practice based in Hampshire that recently looked at the various online solutions available in the UK.  They face the same issues as most practices and, because they are new to online accounting, we asked them to give an independent comment on their decision.  Below is a copy/paste of what they wrote:

We are a small practice working with owner managed businesses, some of whom ask us to prepare their accounting records for them, usually every 3 months at VAT time.

For a long time now we have been keen to share with those clients the data we have complied but it has been less than satisfactory. We have the option of giving them printed reports (Profit and Loss account, Sales Ledger, Purchase Ledger, etc.) or sending them copies of our Sage data but either way these are no use as day to day management tools. Another issue is how they prepare their sales invoices where they often miss out on the advantages of using Sales Invoicing software and have to develop their own system of credit control generally using spreadsheets.

On-line hosted accounting software presents a perfect opportunity to deal with these issues, especially now that most small businesses have access to broadband. Instead of sitting behind closed doors preparing our client’s accounting records hidden from view clients can now see them in real-time and contribute themselves to whatever extent they choose. They will still look to us for support in the preparation as before but now they no longer need secondary systems for credit control and they can prepare sales invoices within the accounting system.

So why have we opted for E-conomic instead of one of the others? Our key reasons are: -

1. Data entry and reports are fast and straightforward (similar to Sage) and it does not shy away from the terms debit and credit! After logging in we can get straight down to business – no jumping to and from screens to enter different types of transactions. The keyboard shortcut keys save time when entering data.
2. Data can be entered by clients if they choose but posting can be prevented until the entry has been approved if necessary.
3. Users can be given access to selected parts of the system.
4. Export to Excel of all reports is built in and fast.
5. Import of data from files is straightforward.

These features tend to makes it accountant friendly. It is early days for us at the moment with this so we are waiting feed back from the clients we are running trials with but so far the clients we have asked to take part in the trial have taken no persuading and are excited at the potential the service offers.

Tony de Jong, Principal, Anthony de Jong & Co Ltd
Chartered Accountants & Business Advisers

This entry was posted on 8 June 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.