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Simply Accounting (Not)

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for March 29, 2001

Copyright © Myles White, 2001

Accountants like AccPac International's Simply Accounting because, unlike both of its main competitors, Intuit's QuickBooks Pro and Mind Your Own Business (M.Y.O.B.), you cannot turn its audit trail off. Every time you edit or delete an entry, that transaction is stored and printed when it comes time for year end.

I've poked around with M.Y.O.B., and used QuickBooks Pro fairly extensively. I don't have accountant-level training, but I've been running my own small business for over 30 years and have more than a nodding acquaintance with other accounting software products I've either tried or reviewed. I've also written at least two invoicing programs in the old dBASE and in Microsoft Access. 

I'm bracketing my "expertise" here because I don't want to give you the impression that the comments that follow are a professional accountant's assessment of Simply Accounting Pro 8.5. Instead, my perspective is from a the point of view of a small businessperson with just enough accounting knowledge to get myself in trouble.

I should also say from the outset that someone with accounting experience who has had years to get familiar with the various versions of Simply (I've only known it since version 4) may not encounter some of the problems I ran into.

What's new: 

Simply Accounting Pro 8.5 is fully network capable. (The single-user update won't be released until May). It's sold in 1-user and 3-user versions and to get up to the number you need you'll have to buy them in combination (for 5 users, for example, you'd buy two 1-user versions and one 3-user "valuepack."). According to the AccPac folks who came around to give me a presentation on the product, it's done that way instead of simply selling licenses directly because, "We work exclusively through the distribution channel and want to give our partners the profits." What you end up paying is the full retail price for each additional user instead of the more commonly smaller amount a license costs.

It allows you to work in multiple currencies (the single-user version is limited to two).

If you have customers to whom you wish to offer "preferred" pricing, that option has been added.

Inventory has had a facelift, too. For example, now you can buy in tonnes, stock in kilograms, and sell in grams (earlier versions required the unit of measure to be the same at all times). You can also add long descriptions to items and add a picture (although you'll have to customize any reports on which you'd like them to show up).

You can store more than one address or phone number for an employee, vendor, or customer, as well as adding a country to the address. The address fields are longer, but you're still restricted to 35 characters for a customer, vendor, or employee name (not enough).

A new "Statement of Cash Flows" lets you see where your money came from and where it went over a specified period.

There are new account classes to help you sort yours.

You can add colours and different fonts to reports.

For Canadian users, there is now an option to "automatically update the personal tax credit amounts that are subject to indexing for your employees," and to update all of your employee records at once.

Short list: 

If you're thinking this is a short list of new features, you're right. Adding the multi-user and multiple currency options are the main purpose of this update.

One of the things I've liked over the years that Simply has been evolving is the "simplicity" of its on-screen look and feel. The things you can do are logically grouped and, if there's something you don't want to use – such as payroll – you can make that column of related tasks disappear (then you can add it back when your business, hopefully, expands). 

And then we come to its shortcomings.

Ooops! 

In its single-user mode, you can change all manner of things, but once you're in multi-user mode that becomes more difficult. Basic company information, for example, or system-wide settings for other items become unavailable (for instance deciding you want to change an account from unreconciled to reconcilable). You can switch back and forth between modes, but not while someone else is using the particular "company" file you want to modify – and it will also help if you have a fast computer and hard drive, because it needs to close the file, then re-open it to do the task. When in multiuser mode, however, the program uses field-level locking (in other words, two or more users could be working on the same record, so long as they're making changes to different fields in the record).

Simply Accounting Pro 8.5 comes with Seagate's Crystal Report Writer 7.0 and the two are supposed to be integrated. The integration, which allows round-trip editing in Crystal of the pre-designed reports in Simply, as well as allowing you to create custom reports, works well enough if you install both programs into their default locations in C:\Program Files\... If, however, you do as I do and try to keep your C:\ drive from becoming overloaded and install to another drive, neither Simply nor Crystal can find each other. 

The workaround is to start Crystal and import at least one form; after that, Simply appears to be able to find it. However, it's a bit of a Catch-22, because in order to have Crystal show you a preview or avoid mucking up the database relationships for a report, you then have to "validate" the database and tell it where to find Simply (sigh).

According to AccPac's product director for Simply Accounting, Jim Collins, Seagate broke Crystal's ability to find Simply two versions ago and AccPac hasn't been able to convince Seagate to fix it, yet.

Beats me: 

I hate software that makes me feel stupid, and before I finally gave up, I was feeling pretty dumb. For my little tests, I tried to create a Simply account for a non-profit agency. That's one of the template offerings (along with Church or Religious Organization) and just about any other kind of retail, professional, or self-employed field you can think of (except writers). I'm familiar with how this type of agency works, because I'm the volunteer treasurer of a small one and I'd already set up an account for it using QuickBooks Pro.

I ran into problems right off the bat. During the "setup wizard" portion of the creation of the new "company," one page insisted I had to indicate whether this new entity was a sole proprietorship, partnership, or limited or incorporated company. There was no checkbox for "none of the above" or "non-profit agency" or even, "agency or institution." How about "unincorporated association?" There are thousands of those in Canada.

I heavily criticized a much earlier version of Simply because, as a writer, it wouldn't allow me to create an invoice where I charged by the word (it couldn't understand why there were no "words" in inventory or why there were no costs associated with putting them there). That problem has long been solved but, in this case, despite having templates for entities that would logically receive them, there's no provisions for donations (collections, passing of the hat, call them what you will). 

Oh, they show up on the chart of accounts, but the program can't seem to understand that you don't invoice, write out a sales order, or issue a quote for them or that there isn't a specific product or service you exchange for them. Unlike QuickBooks, there doesn't seem to be any provisions in Simply Accounting for a cash sale, either (each one needs an invoice and a customer name – tedious). 

Despite creating a "customer" called "Donations" and carefully checking to make sure we didn't charge "Donations" for GST or PST, the #$!@$ program kept adding PST, anyway (Mike Harris would be pleased).

Then, there's the simple matter of rent. I guess, technically, your landlord is a "vendor," but you can't tie a vendor to a specific expense type. You don't send out a purchase order for "rent," nor does your landlord typically invoice you for it. Fortunately, there's an "Other Payments" option here, but the program insists that some sort of tracking number has to be added to each transaction. It doesn't generate these, either, and won't allow duplicates (so just putting in your initials, as Collins suggested, didn't work).

I hope your memory is good and that you like sitting in front of your computer. Because there's no way I could find that lets you post rent due (or any other recurring payment) automatically. Yes, you can record a transaction and call it back for updating next time, but, again unlike QuickBooks, Simply won't add recurring expenses for you (such as the weekly rental of a hall, the monthly rental of your office space, or the balanced billing from Hydro or the oil company, as examples).

The more I've tried to use the program, the more convinced I've become that Simply for Accountants would have been a better name. Or, as Jim Collins put it, "Yes, sometimes it does appear to make doing simple things more difficult, but in order to keep auditable records, that's the way it works."

Cash flow: 

The single-user version of Simply Accounting 8.5, when it becomes available in May, should retail for $139 to $149. The Pro version will sell on the street for about $229 for the single pack, and $599 for the three-user pack. You can get more information about the product at www.simplyaccounting.com (which re-directs you to a much longer address at AccPac's site), or by calling 1-800-945-8007, option 1.

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