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The ‘EasyAs’ Book Keeping and Accounting Package
My wife and I own and manage a guest house in South Africa and for the past 3 years I have done my day-to-day book keeping using spreadsheets of my own design created with Microsoft Excel. I’m fortunate in that I have a qualification in business management, and have a fair knowledge of financial and management accounting. My custom spreadsheets worked OK so why did I choose the EasyAs Accounting Software package to meet the needs of our business for financial information?
Basically, what prompted me to consider using off-the-shelf accounting software was the sense that I was spending too much time on book keeping, leaving me less time to manage other aspects of the business.
What made the spreadsheets time-consuming to operate can be summed up as ‘lack of integration’. Sales were recorded on one worksheet, separate from invoicing; petty cash transactions and bank account on others; wages on another; capital expenditure on another, and so on. In order to assemble the data for a bi-monthly VAT return it was necessary to extract data from several different worksheets, putting the information together on a ‘VAT summary’ worksheet. A similarly time-consuming process was involved in the assembly of data for the annual ‘financials’, i.e. balance sheet and profit and loss account.
In the process of choosing a book keeping package I looked at several that are available commercially and Easyas won the contest hands down, a ‘no brainer’. Here’s what I like about the Easyas package:
Recording expenses – you can:
- Set up your own expense categories tailored to suit your business
- Keep track of capital and current expenditure
- Record which method of payment you used e.g. cash, cheque, EFT etc
Recording income – you can:
- Keep track of income for different product lines or services
- Keep track of new capital introduced as well as ‘current’ income
- Record how the income was processed e.g. cash, cheque, EFT etc
- Keep track of part-payments received e.g. deposits against customers you have invoiced
Invoicing – you can:
- Create tax invoices (if you are VAT registered) or standard invoices (if non-VAT registered)
- Print invoices to file and send them as email attachments
- Keep track of which invoices have been paid and which haven’t
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VAT – if you need to record VAT you can:
- Keep track of the VAT and non-VAT elements of income and expenditure
- Show the VAT amount on your invoices
- Print out VAT reports which virtually complete your periodic VAT returns for you – what a timesaver this is!
| Ease of use: |
Like all good software, the EasyAs package is incredibly easy to learn and use - hey, maybe that’s why it’s called easy-as! I found I hardly needed to glance at the built-in ‘help’ pages but the comprehensive instruction manual is there if you need it. That’s as it should be. |
| User support: |
For the price of the software you get all the back up support you are likely to need. Recently I was ‘tuning’ the performance of my office PC and a problem in the Windows registry prevented the EasyAs software from starting up. I was concerned about the prospect of losing my data (although I had done a recent back-up) so I emailed Tracey and team for advice. The speed of their response exceeded my expectations and I was able to re-install the software and recover my data. |
| Conclusion: |
The EasyAs package satisfies the needs of my business to record financial information and analyse it in a number of useful ways. I have outlined the features that I find particularly useful for my business. |
Chris Micklethwaite
Langeberg Guest Lodge
South Africa
www.langeberg-lodge.com
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