5 Questions to Ask Before Buying Accounting Software

Price and interface are easy to judge in a demo. The questions that decide whether a system still fits in three years are structural, and none of them appear on a pricing page.

Price is simply the easiest thing to check

Monthly cost is published, visible and quick to weigh, so it tends to decide the purchase. The structural questions take longer to answer, and they are the ones still being felt years later.

Question one: where do AP, AR and GL sit?

Some systems hold payables, receivables and the general ledger as separate ledgers that have to be reconciled against each other. AOC Accounting combines all three into one ledger, with a chart of accounts that prevents double entries.

Question two: who defines the journal types?

Transaction sequences, document printing and auto-reversal are usually set by the software vendor. In AOC they are defined by the business, so the journal follows the operation rather than the other way around.

Question three: when do reports become available?

If a report needs an export and a rebuild, answering a question becomes a task someone has to schedule. AOC makes reports available immediately from the same ledger the transactions are posted to.

The questions that decide whether a system lasts are structural, and none of them appear on a pricing page.

Question four: how much detail can one entry carry?

AOC supports up to 10 analysis dimensions per function, so department, project, location or cost centre are captured at the point of entry instead of reconstructed from memory later.

Question five: what does moving later cost?

Migration effort grows with transaction history, open balances and the number of people trained on the current process. A system chosen for where the business will be in three years is cheaper than one replaced in two.