Friday 8 September 2017

What are the Most Common Accounting Software Used?

Most accountants train to work with the simplest tools that generations of accountants before them used. However, There may come the point in your career that you will work for a company that too large or too complicated to stick by this traditional means of accounting.

Luckily, modernization has innovated most of the jobs around the world, and the accounting profession is no exception to that. Hence, to keep up with other professional, it is important that one learns about the latest and most common accounting software’s used in the market.

Why Are Accounting Software Important?

Most accountants engage in hundreds, if not thousands, of transactions every single day. Furthermore, they would have to summarize and present these transactions with the highest level of accuracy possible. This rigorousness of their job is because, at the end of the period, these reports would be a major of basis of future decisions.

Before accounting software existed, they’d have to record each one these transactions of their books manually. Hence, not only was their job several times harder before, the accuracies of their reports were highly unreliable. Thanks to accounting software, all these changed.

Most Common Accounting Software

To help you find the best software for you and your business. We’ve listed below 5 of the most used Accounting software by companies today:

QuickBooks Accounting

QuickBooks is one of the most famous accounting software in the market. California-based financial software company Intuit released the first version of the software in 1998 to cater for the need of simplified accounting platforms. Today, QuickBooks, according to the company, holds an estimated 85% of the retail market.

QuickBooks Online lets you see how your business is doing instantly.

QuickBooks Website

The software is available in three variants. The first one is the original desktop version of the software. The desktop-version offered the user various services such as remote payroll assistance and outsourcing, remote access capabilities, online banking and reconciliation, electronic payment functions, and more.

QuickBooks also has a cloud-based service called QuickBooks online. The product is available to users who are willing to pay a monthly subscription which provides them exclusive access to QuickBooks online platform.

Lastly, QuickBooks Point of Sale is one of the newest offerings of Intuit. It aims to replace traditional cash registers by offering other functions such as inventory tracking, customer information, sales, and more.

Xero Accounting

Unlike QuickBooks, the New Zealander Rod Drury and his personal accountant created the software more recently in 2006  to compete with what he believed were outdated accounting software in the market.

Xero is offered as a “software as a service” product where users can access the platform by paying monthly subscriptions. Since its initial release, the product is now available in over 180 countries worldwide.

Some of the major offerings of the software are automatic bank and credit card account feeds, invoicing, accounts payable, expense claims, fixed asset depreciation, purchase orders, and standard business and management reporting. Some of which are not available to others.

FreshBooks Cloud Accounting

FreshBooks caters specifically to smaller service based businesses. The original version of the software was created in 2003 by Canadian entrepreneurs Mike McDerment and Joe Sawada. Three years later they rebranded it to FreshBooks to suit the changing taste of internet users.

The all-new FreshBooks is accounting software that makes running your small business easy, fast and secure. Spend less time on accounting and more time doing the work you love.

FreshBooks Website

One of its biggest advantage over its competitors is its responsive mobile app. Users can access the software while on the go making the product easy to use for freelancers and small businesses. Furthermore, it also offers some necessary functions such as cloud invoicing, reporting, and payment processing.

Wave Accounting

Launched just in 2009, Wave Accounting is one of the newest players in the accounting software market. According to their website, they manage at least $175 billion in revenue and expenses of their customers worldwide annually. The company initially offered the software as a double entry accounting tool.

Wave Accounting Inc. then made available other financial services such as Payments by Wave (credit card processing), Receipts by Wave, Invoice by Wave, Payroll by Wave, and Lending by Wave. All of which is available to anyone for up to a certain number of employees.

Sage 50 Accounting

Lastly, Sage 50 Accounting, formerly known as Peachtree, is offered by the third largest supplier of enterprise resource planning software worldwide namely The Sage Group Plc. It is a subscription-based business management software available to businesses of all sizes.

[Sage] delivers built-in accounting best practices to keep your business finances on track and help you stay compliant with taxes and reporting requirements.

Sage Website

Users can integrate the software with the functions of Microsoft 365 making reports easier to process. Furthermore, it offers an integrated data checker to weed out common mistakes committed by accountants, security functions that allow the users to track who is entering their database, stock management and more.

The post What are the Most Common Accounting Software Used? appeared first on Aldaris CPA Group.

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