Product Reviews

Oranged Software's Accounted is a new entrant to an increasingly crowded Mac accounting market and although far from perfect, it offers some promising features for sole traders.

The program follows convention in offering a start-up wizard that steps you through tailoring your accounts to your business. It's not as simple as others we've seen, and the program's US leanings are obvious, but setup is speedily done.

It's a bare-bones, double-entry accounting system that divides its accounts into three types: bank and cash accounts, which hold your money; and income and expense accounts. By default every purchase or sale involves at least two of these accounts. When you enter a new transaction through the program's simple toolbar, you're taken to a transaction window that prompts you to specify both ends of the accounting equation: where the payment comes from and where it's going to.

By default, accounts receivable or payable, which deal with money owed or due but not yet paid, are turned off. This ensures that you account only for transactions when actually paid for or received, which results in a more realistic cash flow picture. However, you can turn receivables and payables on at any time if you prefer to work that way.

The spartan transaction window makes it easy to add multiple transactions to the same account in one go. A new transaction can be entered just by clicking on a new line in the document. Through an 'Advanced' tab you can add transaction notes and even include an image scan of receipts.

The program's main window is divided into three sections. On the left, a list of your accounts appears and when those

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are bank accounts they're appended with their current balance. Transactions related to a particular account appear in the window's main pane. Handily, you can even create transactions directly in the main window just by clicking on the transaction line. You can edit those already entered too.

The best feature of the program - one we're convinced will be copied by others - is its Totals Ticker at the bottom of the main window. At a glance this shows important comparative figures for the selected account - current month, previous month and current calendar year details among others for income and expense accounts - and in the case of bank accounts, for example, all-time highs and lows next to each other.

But there is a downside - critically, there's no built-in ability to reconcile figures entered in the program's bank account with data from your own bank. And while data can be imported from Quicken and tab-delimited text files, there's no obvious way to export it.

Accounted's reporting functions don't include full profit-and-loss reports but they offer the sole trader equivalent: a report on taxable income and deductible expenses, as well as non-deductible expenses. It also compares income and expense accounts in chart form by month or by year.

Where Accounted shines is in its ability to import data from stablemate Studiometry (see p34), which tracks billable time and expenses. Payments in Studiometry can be imported as Accounted transactions in its bank account, while unbilled items and unpaid invoices can be synchronised to your Accounts Receivable account once created in Studiometry. You can also have the items become paid in Accounted once they are marked as paid in Studiometry. The only awkward element is that synchronisation isn't automatic - you have to update by clicking a button in the program's preferences.

Accounted is promising and cheap, but is it worth buying? If you're self-employed and understand the accounting principles the program's simplicity is appealing. It's also tailor-made for Studiometry devotees. The absence of support for features such as payroll or stock control is to be expected given the price but the lack of VAT reporting and inability to export data may put off many.