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FROM: MAY-JUN 2008 ISSUE | BY DIANE CUSHING
Vendors like Sage Software, makers of Simply Accounting and Accpac, are under pressure from customers for more features and pressure from competitors to keep up. As a result, Sage beefs up its products every year. If you haven’t seen Simply Accounting for a while, you’ll be astounded at how much it delivers for the price.
How does Sage decide what to include in each new release? “We listen closely to our customers and partners,” says Jan Dyson, director of product management. “They have many tools to provide us with feedback and to rank the features they’d like to see. Their input sets our direction.”
The latest outcome is a major new product, the Enterprise edition. It supports up to 10 users at once, ideal for companies who have outgrown Simply Accounting, but are not ready to tackle a full mid-market solution.
Features from the previous Pro and Premium versions have merged into the Premium edition. Simply Accounting Basic has been renamed to Simply Accounting, and Entrepreneur is still the entry level product. The Accountant’s Edition, available through the Partner Program, lets accountants work on client data from any of the editions.
The new home screen is the most visible change for 2008. It provides easy access to data, tasks, reports, and help topics. Though well organized and intuitive as is, the display can be tailored to suit each person. And to support a more robust, multi-user product, Simply Accounting has adopted the popular open source database MySQL. MySQL is much faster than Access, can handle large volumes of data, and is not prone to the same corruption problems.
But progress can be painful. One look at the Simply Accounting User Forum shows that installation is not quite so easy anymore. Accountants and bookkeepers, who just want the product up and running, struggle with servers, firewalls, and access rights. Dyson says that Sage is actively taking steps to resolve these issues. They are working with firewall vendors to have Simply Accounting regarded as a “trusted” application and are providing customers with tools to diagnose the cause of installation problems.
Reports run much faster with the new database, and there’s a new, interactive way to customize most reports. Add, delete, and resize columns right on the screen. Change sort order with one click or move a column using drag and drop. Search for characters or numbers in the report using Ctrl+F and highlight all results, or match upper and lower case. For report output, there are new choices available: print preview, printing only specific pages, and exporting to a PDF file.
When upgrading to any 2008 edition, custom reports created in Crystal Reports have to be modified before they will work with MySQL. Many customers get experienced Crystal Reports developers like Richard Ridings to do these changes for them.
Respected instructor and consultant Alan Cohen, CGA, has his favorite features in the release. Though the redesigned home window and the MySQL database were high on his list, he praised another enhancement that others might overlook. He appreciates that Simply Accounting can now keep seven years of detailed history; Premium and Enterprise editions keep even more. Why? Because archiving at year-end and coordinating adjusting entries afterwards can be difficult. Now, businesses can just backup at year-end and keep on going. They can even use the one-step adjustment feature to correct errors from the previous year in purchase orders, invoices, and other documents. New, multi-year project reporting is a happy by-product of retaining more history.
For a complete list of the new features and a 60-day trial version of the software, visit www.simplyaccounting.com
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