Labs

This program is designed to provide all the tools you need to manage your own company. Like Accountz, it uses the double-entry system. Unlike Accountz, it's anything but straightforward.

In concept, the program is very similar to well known business finance software like QuickBooks or Sage. It tracks every transaction, from your initial quote through to the fulfilment and payment of the contract. In theory, this means keeping track

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of money coming in should be easy. You create a quote, then convert the quote into an invoice, then into a customer payment, and so on. Expenses and other transactions, such as bank charges and interest, are tracked by making direct entries into your nominal or real accounts.

This may sound simple enough, but Small Business Manager makes it more complicated than it needs to be. There are 12 different flowcharts, with as many as nine steps each. When you click on your chart of accounts, you're presented with a list of all the default accounts - well over a hundred - obliging you to hunt around for the accounts you actually use. We also found grouping accounts difficult: the software didn't seem to work as described in the manual, which itself was confusingly laid out, relying too much on hyperlinks that jump back and forth through the text.

Despite its low price, this program has all the ingredients of a comprehensive business management package, and then some more - but all mixed up into a confusing mess.