accounting systems for small businesses

An accounting system is any system in place within a company that deals with the storage and analysis of financial information..  Small Accounting Systems Small businesses can not affo

CS27510 Commercial Database Applications

Thanks to Mathew Teague, Ian Matthews, Jack Jenkins, Lucy Wills and Sian Harper

An accounting system is any system in place within a company that deals with the storage and analysis of financial information This

system can be either manual or computerised but manual systems are increasingly rare

nowadays

 Small Accounting Systems

 Small businesses can not afford high priced/high ended.

 Small business can also have a problem with affording sufficient

security software for their accounting systems

 Small business may even have problems with keeping sufficient audit trails in their accounting systems.

 Large businesses can afford high priced/high ended software to do their accounting systems which will make a difference in making them more efficient when dealing with customers.

 Large business have the fortune of being able to tailor software to suit their exact business requirements.

 Large business accounting software is frequently part of a wide-range suite of software that is often known as Enterprise Resource Planning

or ERP software.

way of maintaining control over a business’s financial accounts and records This system consists of various ledgers and files into which information must be written by hand Those who have used this method of accounting in the past tend to prefer it to

computerised systems.

 Though more common in the past manual accounting systems are still in use in many small businesses as their primary source of record keeping.

 In some cases a manual system may be in place in addition to the computerised system as a way to provide another form of

backups or to keep internal control over the information.

 It is easy to erase or edit erroneous data.

 Secure against electronic attack

 Easy to learn

Disadvantages

 Difficult to make backups.

 Books can be easily damaged by human error

 Easy to physically steal

Wide range of software!

There is a very wide price range!

 Some are open source! (Free!)

 Can be both Monthly payments, Yearly payments

 Generally around £200 a year for small

 6.2 million Customers worldwide

to large businesses

Contains the following pieces of software:

Customers and suppliers Cash flow, Invoicing and VAT

wages

 Kashflow is a web based accounting system, designed for small UK businesses

 With this in mind - it is simple, and easy to use, but has some powerful features

contract, and 2 month free trial available

Easy to use:

 Can be accessed from anywhere

 You don't need to have any previous experience

- Basic descriptions, no complicated accounting

terms

 Intuitive interface, and lots of guidance available

in most of the modules

 Some features of KashFlow:

 Easily store and retrieve information about;

Customers, Sales, Suppliers, Purchases, Bank balance and Quotes

 Create custom invoice templates (or use those provided)

 Automatic creation of invoices (e.g monthly or annually)

 Generate VAT returns

 Paypal integration possible.

Sales record / invoice

 Large customer base

 Good customer support

 General accounting for large and small businesses

 Desktop based

Kashflow:

All accounting software has a Database running

in the background

 Kashflow uses MySQL

 Sage: also uses MySQL

 The whole point of the software is to store and manage financial information for the businesses

 There are several options out there for businesses of

varying sizes, and there is the software out there tailored for this

Kashflow

large support bases

for every system, the correct research just needs to be

done by the business to find the right software for them