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Langeberg Guest Lodge – Best Value 4-Star B&B
The ‘EasyAs’ Book Keeping and Accounting Package
My wife and I own and manage a guest house in South Africa and for the past 3 years I have done my day-to-day book keeping using spreadsheets of my own design created with Microsoft Excel. I’m fortunate in that I have a qualification in business management, and have a fair knowledge of financial and management accounting. My custom spreadsheets worked OK so why did I choose the EasyAs Accounting Software package to meet the needs of our business for financial information?
Basically, what prompted me to consider using off-the-shelf accounting software was the sense that I was spending too much time on book keeping, leaving me less time to manage other aspects of the business.
What made the spreadsheets time-consuming to operate can be summed up as ‘lack of integration’. Sales were recorded on one worksheet, separate from invoicing; petty cash transactions and bank account on others; wages on another; capital expenditure on another, and so on. In order to assemble the data for a bi-monthly VAT return it was necessary to extract data from several different worksheets, putting the information together on a ‘VAT summary’ worksheet. A similarly time-consuming process was involved in the assembly of data for the annual ‘financials’, i.e. balance sheet and profit and loss account.
In the process of choosing a book keeping package I looked at several that are available commercially and Easyas won the contest hands down, a ‘no brainer’. Here’s what I like about the Easyas package:
Recording expenses – you can:
Set up your own expense categories tailored to suit your business
Keep track of capital and current expenditure
Record which method of payment you used e.g. cash, cheque, EFT etc
Recording income – you can:
Keep track of income for different product lines or services
Keep track of new capital introduced as well as ‘current’ income
Record how the income was processed e.g. cash, cheque, EFT etc
Keep track of part-payments received e.g. deposits against customers you have invoiced
Invoicing – you can:
Create tax invoices (if you are VAT registered) or standard invoices (if non-VAT registered)
Print invoices to file and send them as email attachments
Keep track of which invoices have been paid and which haven’t
VAT – if you need to record VAT you can:
Keep track of the VAT and non-VAT elements of income and expenditure
Show the VAT amount on your invoices
Print out VAT reports which virtually complete your periodic VAT returns for you – what a timesaver this is!
Ease of use:
Like all good software, the EasyAs package is incredibly easy to learn and use – hey, maybe that’s why it’s called easy-as! I found I hardly needed to glance at the built-in ‘help’ pages but the comprehensive instruction manual is there if you need it. That’s as it should be.
User support:
For the price of the software you get all the back up support you are likely to need. Recently I was ‘tuning’ the performance of my office PC and a problem in the Windows registry prevented the EasyAs software from starting up. I was concerned about the prospect of losing my data (although I had done a recent back-up) so I emailed Tracey and team for advice. The speed of their response exceeded my expectations and I was able to re-install the software and recover my data.
Conclusion:
The EasyAs package satisfies the needs of my business to record financial information and analyse it in a number of useful ways. I have outlined the features that I find particularly useful for my business.
Recommendation:
Buy it.
Chris Micklethwaite
Langeberg Guest Lodge
South Africa
www.langeberg-lodge.com