VT Transaction Plus
I am well aware that there are few places for you to go and ask questions about the different accounting packages that are available. Not many of you have an accountant in the early days of business so where do you go for unbiased and expert advice on the choice of bookkeeping package?
Do you ask friends and colleagues? Do you wait for months until you find a review in a magazine of 2 or 3 packages and use that? Or do you go to one of the large computer stores and look at what packages they sell and pick one of those?
My company runs an information website at http://expertbookkeeping.info which was established to deal with such questions and provide a forum for people to visit and ask for free, expert advice on any bookkeeping package you are using, rather than pay the expensive support fees that most suppliers of accounting software require before they answer even the most simple question.
As a bookkeeping bureau, we constantly come across most of the main software accounting packages available, and more recently, some of the new on-line offerings that are popping up. This puts me in an excellent position to see how the packages are changing month by month.
Some of the newer offerings are quite good, and the on-line ones can be cheap, or even free.
So, what package do I recommend at the moment, taking into account features that I deem important for small businesses? taking into account ease of use, cost (both to buy and to support annually).. even down to computing power needed to run them!
At the moment - there is still nothing else that comes close to the VT Software offering VT Transaction Plus.
I could give you a list a reasons why I feel this way, but the easiest thing for you to do is go and download the beta version from their website - for FREE - and have a play with it.
If you do something wrong, you just edit it. Whatever you need to enter in the way of payments, cheques, purchase invoices, sales invoices, credit notes, VAT… they each have their own button - just click and enter. Just about everything you enter can be changed or deleted so you need never fear about making mistakes.
The reason for such flexibility lies in the way the product developed. Initially it was written for professional accountants to use for making sense of the small jobs people brought in to their office in paper bags. Just a pile of receipts and bits. The package had to be easily editable to make it a useful tool. A few years ago though quite a few business people were buying the package because their accountants had used it on their books in the early days and as their business developed, it was logical for the clients to take over the package with all the past history that the accountant had entered.
A decision was made to develop the package into a more formal bookkeeping package and that is how VT Transaction Plus came into being. I recommend this fantastic little package to most businesses that ask because it is so flexible. There are some though who need point of sale software for tills and other specialist tasks and so VT Transaction Plus is not suited to them.
It does suit 90% of small businesses though - tell me about your business and I will let you know if VT can help you or not.
I have prepared some training webcasts to help new users, there are some more to come (when I get a minute!)
Web cast no 1 - general introduction
Web cast no 2 - setting up a sole trader and entering payments and receipts
Web cast no 3 - generating sales invoices
Most people who start to use it cannot believe how easy it is and wonder why they haven’t heard about it before. Unfortunately, accountants seem to like to keep the art of bookkeeping a mystery and one that needs an expensive well known package to meet their needs - and obviously the accountant can then get a commission from the sale and extra fees from sorting out the mess you get into trying to fathom the workings of it.
I cannot do that. I want people who are determined to keep their own business records to have the easiest, most practical and cheapest solution available - and VT Transaction Plus is it for most. It is even fully multi-currency with an option to choose the base currency - so it has worldwide appeal.
Anyway, enough from me. Go and try it - and let me know how you get on!
~Ray
