Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2009 review

A little more than two years after its first welcome shake-up of a staid UK accounting market, Microsoft Office Accounting has released another polished upgrade to its user-friendly accounting package.

In most practical respects, both Express and Professional versions feel identical and they’re still both just as easy to use as ever, helped in part by an Office-style interface that will be more familiar to most people than more proprietary interfaces of the likes of Ability Accounts, NolaPro 4 or MYOB Accounting 17.

As with Sage Instant Accounts, when you select logically discrete accounting areas – Customers, Employees and so on – from a source list of tabs on the left, related information appears in the main window. With the home Company tab selected, the main window shows current reminders, cash flow status, and important account balances. It’s a more useful overview of your accounts than MYOB’s simple icon-based approach.

Accounting offers many other features aimed at the less experienced bookkeeper too. When you create your first set of accounts, you can choose from templates for various business types, which allow you to quickly tailor your accounts to suit your type of business. More obviously useful, though, is its Quick Start Window, accessible at startup and at any time through the toolbar, giving one-click access to common tasks, such as creating invoices or receiving payments.

When most accounting applications offer broadly similar feature sets, small advantages matter. The ability to generate Inland Revenue-accredited accrual and cash-based VAT returns is something most budget accounting applications can do, but Office Accounting copes better than most with changing VAT rates; handy given the current rate’s fleeting status. In the program’s VAT settings, you can set a date on which a VAT change is applicable, and even when it occurs in the future. This is much more reliable than manually adjusting a rate as Accounting’s method correctly accounts for backdated transactions.

On the flip side, there’s no direct support for the flat rate VAT scheme for small businesses, where VAT liability is calculated as a percentage of VATable sales. But this minor weakness is shared by most other accounting applications we’ve looked at, and the workaround involves a single ledger adjustment.

Accounting’s reporting tools, augmented by ten new reports in the 2009 version, are wide-ranging and are briskly produced. While most reports run inside Accounting, some, such as the sales and purchase analysis tools, are handed off to Excel. The most useful new report offers an instant year-on-year comparison of sales and profit.

Other improvements to the program, including a handy automatically updating Vista gadget that displays amounts due for immediate payment, are modest and ideally we’d have liked to see some of minor niggles from last year’s version addressed. Its handy wizard, which makes it easy to import accounts from Sage Line 50, Instant Accounts or Excel, still can’t import from QuickBooks.

On the plus side, PayPal integration is good. Just enter your PayPal login details, choose a button image and you can send PayPal Payments-enabled invoices by email. But if you have a merchant account, you’ll probably prefer the way Sage Instant Accounts offers, through subscription, a way to accept credit card payments without the need for an intermediary. And there’s still no direct online banking integration, only the ability to import bank statements.

But one other significant drawback of using the program – lack of industry support – is disappearing faster than a British summer. Microsoft has now set up an active professionals’ network for the program, and through a single menu command lets you send your books electronically to your accountant through Windows Live. Cleverly, Microsoft offers the program free to accountants, although they do have to subscribe to Office Live Premium to use the transfer feature.

Although Accounting’s entry price appears outstandingly low, it should be pointed out that not every feature needed by small businesses is included as standard. If you need to pay employees you’ll need to stump up a modest £10 monthly fee for the payroll features; while automated electronic salary payments and electronic tax is another tenner a month. Even so, for a multi-user, multi-currency application, Accounting Professional offers incredible value, particularly as Amazon is selling the 2008 version, for which there is a free upgrade, for under £100. That, coupled with its sterling value for money, is enough to keep it atop the A List.

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