Anil Ootam

.....For someone wanting to start their own IT consultancy (contractor)?

Cheers,

Anil (aootam@netscape.net)

Andy Hall

Hi,

We are a cabling contractor and we use Sage, I have a friend who uses Quick Books. Might be an idea to speak to your accountant and see what they recommend as they will have to sort it out at the end of the year. Most use Sage but not sure what they will do if they don't have the correct software. For the first year or so I just used an Excel spreadsheet which is ok for the quiet early days.

Good luck

Andy

Pirum

Sage certainly seems to be well recognised within the industry....they also offer some excellent back up and support, as well as training...

Also, as far as I know, a fair few Accountants have access to it...

Tom

Lee

Hi Anil

if , like me, you have no commercial experience of book-keeping but can add up, have a fair bit of common sense etc then there's no reason why you can't do it yourself.

I started off using Sage and after a year ditched it. I found that I was always having to reconcile Sage back to my manual records, it was not clear how to enter certain types of transaction like vat payments and bank charges, and I found that the business information/reports did not extract the data I was interested in. You also cannot customize invoices/reports - its all written for sage stationery.

I then moved over to Tas Books. How refreshing - everything designed from a user perspective - easy to edit transactions, fantastic help text designed for running a small business. And you can print your own customized invoices onto plain paper.

Speaking to a number of accountants they all say the same thing - Sage may be more the industry standard, but is hard work.

All good accountants should carry a copy of Tas Books - mine does so I just send him the datafiles.

I believe Tas has now been bought by Sage - the Tas products are remaining so I interpret this as Sage acknowledging the fact that their product is not "home user" but they still want that market as well so are using the leader.

John Catlin

Anil,

Over the years have used quite a number of packages and at present using Cashbook.

Go to :-

Mike Tuckwood

I use Tas books for both of my companies, including their Payroll option and it is reasonably user friendly as Lee says.

Not only can you print onto plain paper, but you can also customize a logo/document to print invoices onto as well.


<I>(Sunil works for Tas Books)</I>