April 2009
Installing and running an accounting system ranks very low on the average solo businessperson’s To Do List. Lower than… well, let’s just admit that it doesn’t feature at all. Most freelancers, work-at-homers and one-man bands playing the plumbing/consulting/home-based industry tune don’t even want to think about bookkeeping. They generate invoices from Excel and visit their accountant once a year with a box full of paper slips. They expect the accountant to do their magic, show a profit (but pay as little tax as possible), figure out where the money went and of course, charge as little as possible.
A new online business programme is about to change all of that. Softline Pastel’s new My Business Online is, as the name suggests, an online accounting system. The difference is that it doesn’t speak Accountantlese. It’s a plain-language online business programme that allows the user to pay bills, receive payments, create invoices and do all the paperwork necessary to keep their sanity intact. No need to understand debits or credits to use this online application. It keeps business records, which tells the user at a glance who their best (or worst) customers are, whose accounts are overdue, and automates mundane tasks such as sending out statements.
The programme’s dashboard gives the user an excellent overview of their business and lets them drill right down from say, a sales figure for the month, to an individual sale. Unlike other accounting systems, it allows the business owner to treat their business as one continuous record of transactions, across the usual financial year boundaries set by traditional accounting systems. Where possible it eliminates credit notes and other tedious accounting practices.
Two (or more) logins allows the user to “invite” their accountant to log on to the system with a unique password to perform the occasional or annual accounting tasks that are best left to a professional accountant.
Softline Pastel is South Africa’s leading supplier of accounting software and almost 200 000 companies use one of Pastel’s software applications. “But this system is different from our other software offerings – it’s online and brand new to the Pastel stable. In fact, it is a brand new category of software,” says Pastel MD Steven Cohen. “It is aimed squarely at the small business where the owner does everything. It doesn’t add to his or her burden and genuinely helps by keeping order, calculating taxes and preventing year-end stress.
“Because it’s online your data resides on a secure server where professionals care about things like backups and security. This is much safer than keeping data on a laptop since we all know what happens in your business when your laptop gets stolen or goes on the blink,” Cohen said.
My Business Online works a little bit like internet banking – a secure connection to a secure server using standard internet access is all that’s required.
At last, accounting is also cool. Is it premature to coin the term i-accounting?
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For more information visit www.pastelmybusiness.co.za