Accounting Software Feature Comparison

A tool created by The Insitute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB) to allow the Bookkeeper to capture all the business processes of their client and then compare against the various software providers. Welcome to the first instalment in our software feature comparison project. It is a big undertaking to compare the features of the main software players. We are comparing the main products of 5 companies: MYOB, Intuit, Reckon, Xero and Saasu.

We have invited them all to be involved in the process of assessing what features each software plan offers—most have agreed in principle, however the Sales comparison has been done largely in-house and utilising the services of paid software consultants. We hope to have direct input from the companies for future sections.

Our process has been firstly to assess in-house against a basic list of features. As we compare the products, the feature list grows and the list goes back and forth a couple of times as we seek further information or clarification about a particular feature or product. Then we seek external input from the software companies, and refine and finalise the list.

We have done our best to make sure the list is accurate at the time of publication. We anticipate updating the website regularly as software features and plans are added or updated.

We see this as being a valuable tool to help you assess products on their own merits and independent of the marketing material published by the software companies—not that there is anything wrong with their information, just that we hear from our members that it can be hard to compare “apples with apples”—so this tool is designed to help you make that comparison more easily.

Our intention is to compare different parts of the bookkeeping process in turn. This month it is Sales, next month will be Purchases, followed by Payroll. In future months we will look at banking, chart of accounts, BAS, analysis and other areas. All up it will likely take us until August to cover all areas of bookkeeping processes in the software products.

We remind you of related ICB information on selecting software for your clients, checklists for software choices, and our previous list of compulsory items which was the start of this whole process:

www.icb.org.au/resources/accounting-software

Note: at the time of publication we were unable to test the Intuit product “Simple Start” but we hope to have this information available for future newsletters and we will update the website with the features once we have this information.

We have extracted a small sample of the comparison chart below — download the spreadsheet to view the whole list.