General

Accounting and bookkeeping are two important aspects of running any type of business, whether its a small retail store or a large corporation. Any business owner knows that these tasks can become a painful experience and if not managed correctly the tax man may end up knocking on your door.

We recently were advised by our accountant that we should invest in an accounting software tool so we can better track our expenses and project future financial growth of the company. There are many off the shelf accounting software products on the market. If you walk down to Office Works or search online, you will find software packages that could either be affordable or just too expensive. Some are easy to use whilst others are just too complex but to be honest with you, there isn’t a perfect product out there that does exactly what you want. Every user and business has different processes so a one size fits all approach to accounting software cannot be used here, but what I can say is that if you have basic accounting requirements then you may be in luck. What I’ve done is compared and detailed some of these software packages so we could make a suitable decision of which product we should be using and hopefully at the same time we can also help our readers find a solution that meets their needs. We decided that using a SaaS (Software as a Service) online package would be the most cost effective solution since you are not required to pay extra for software upgrades – everything is done online. Here’s our list, it’s not the most comprehensive but it’s a start (keep in mind we compared product versions that had similar benefits and costed roughly the same):

Software Package	MYOB Live Accounts	Xero (business)	Saasu (pro)	Freshbooks	Zoho Invoicing (premium)	Freeagent
Price	AU$25 per month (includes GST) +11c for each bank transaction over 100	US$29	AU$25 per month (min 3 months) 12 months gets 1 month free	US$29.95 per month	US$25 per month	US$20 per month
Number of accounts	Unlimited	5	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Number of users	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	N/A – 1 for each additional account	3 + US$5 per additional users	Unlimited
Contacts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Number of Invoices and expenses	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	500	Unlimited
Link Bank accounts	Yes – unlimited	20 reconciled bank statements per month	Yes – beta test	Don’t think so	No	No
Support	Yes – unlimited	Yes – unlimited	Email only	Customer Support Mon-Fri / 9am-6pm ET	Yes	Yes – unlimited
Backup	Yes – data is safe and backed up	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free Trial	Yes – 30 days	Yes – lets you raise a maximum of five new invoices and reconcile 50 bank statement lines. The trial is also limited to a maximum period of 180 days.	Yes – 20 Transactions per month	No – 30 day money back guarantee	Yes – 5 invoices per month, 2 users	Yes – 30 days
Mobile access	Not sure	iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile	Not sure	Yes, iphone	Not sure	No
Payroll	No	No	25 employees	No	No	No
Other Features		accept credit card payment, invoice workflow status, resend invoices, API support, multi-currency	multi-currency, point of sale hardware + software, items and inventory, connectors, CRM/Activities, time based timesheet, inventory, ebay connector	access online payments, Timesheets, Document Sharing, Support Ticketing	Remove Zoho logo from outgoing emails	UK Based company (not ideal for Australia), timesheet,

Now based on the above comparison we decided to trial the SaaSu (pro) package.