Office Accounting Express : A Free Accounting Tool From Microsoft
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Microsoft has released a free Accounting software on the lines of Intuit Quickbooks and it is called Microsoft® Office Accounting Express 2007. It is a successor to the Office Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA). It can be downloaded from here.
Microsoft® Office Accounting Express 2007, financial management software is designed for millions of starting businesses and home based businesses that currently use pen & paper or spreadsheets to run their business. It provides a single place to manage the company’s business finances with the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office system programs.
It is a desktop based application and is designed to be used on a single desktop. It is currently supported on Windows XP (SP2) and Windows Server 2003 (SP1). It uses SQL Server Express database as its backend (is installed as part of the application install).
(click on the image to enlarge)
The top ten benefits of using Microsoft® Office Accounting Express 2007
- Easy to learn and use (based on MS Office Programs)
- Spend less time managing everyday tasks
- Enter data only once (information shared across all office programs from a central location)
- Store and organize your information in one place
- Sell on eBay (list items, upload and manage pictures, and track activity in real time on eBay from inside the tool)
- Know how your business is doing (using 20 predefined reports)
- Get paid faster (integration with PayPal and acceptance of major credit and debit cards)
- Track employee time and process payroll (integration with ADP Payroll services)
- Do business with confidence (monitor your customer’s credit in real time through Equifax.)
- Easily share information with your accountant (share financial information with your accountant securely using Office Live)
Integration with Microsoft Office
Office Accounting Express 2007 has been designed to work smoothly with other Microsoft Office system programs. Its integration with Word enables you to customize any documents like quotes and invoices by using existing or new templates. You can then use e-mail to send these invoices to your customers by using Office Outlook 2007. The integration with Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager helps ensure that all financial and marketing information is available centrally, and changes made in any one program automatically show up in the other. Furthermore, Outlook users can view financial information from within Outlook, use Outlook to create invoices, submit timesheets from Outlook, and track time in the Outlook calendar. Reports for business insight can be created in Office Accounting Express 2007 and then exported to Excel, with its rich formatting, for deeper analysis and calculations. The analysis pack included with Office Accounting Express 2007 enables viewing financial data in Excel, PivotTable reports, and Microsoft Office Access reports.
The tool can import data from other software including Quickbooks, Microsoft Money and Excel.
Office Accounting Express 2007 is available as a part of Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 and Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007.
If you are interested in multi-user features and inventory features then you will have to shell out some money and buy Office Accounting Professional for $149.95 (upgrade from SBA would cost $99.95).
Unfortunately, the tool is only available for US but UK version is in beta testing. There are no plans for international availability of this product.
Summary
It is a very powerful tool with very extensive features built into it. Its integration with Office products makes it a very desirable product. The catch with free is that several modules like PayPal , ADP Payroll services are available as Add-ons and are not free.
It is a very close match with Quickbook but Quickbook has a very powerful online version of their software which is lacking here. I guess that might be the be next step.
Source: Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007
Popularity: 5% [?]
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