Product Reviews

Keeping tabs on cashflow is essential to the success of any business. But what if you can't afford a department dedicated to keeping your finances in order? You need a bit of software that will handle everyday tasks - quotes, invoices, VAT - but doesn't take a financial whizzkid to understand. MYOB reckons its Business Basics provides everything a small trader needs for just £79.

The program's New Company File Assistant lets you quickly and simply create a company account. You can even choose from a list of ready-made templates designed for particular company types.

The program is divided into three main areas: Accounts, Banking, and Sales. Accounts covers all your income and expenditure information: Banking provides access to some of Business Basics' most useful features. A well-designed reconciliation facility lets you download your bank statement and automatically reconcile matching

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transactions.

The Sales option shows how seamlessly the program's parts work together. You can knock up a quote and turn it into a sales invoice without re-keying it. It's easy to track payments from customers, and analyse debtors. And because you can allocate sales and costs to individual jobs, each job can have its own profit-and-loss statement. More than 70 types of report enable you to analyse business performance.

You can directly print items such as cheques and receipts, but Business Basics also helps banish paper by e-mailing invoices as PDF files, or reports as HTML pages.

Aimed at sole traders and businesses employing only a few people, the features of BusinessBasics are small-scale. It can't support more than one currency, and there's no purchase ledger - which assumes you'll only be buying from a few suppliers. There's also no way to submit your VAT return electronically, and no way to tie sales invoices in to an automated stock control system, as you can with pricier packages.

Business Basics includes a rather nifty contact manager. An Audit Trail Tracker provides trouble-shooting help, telling you who made what changes to accounts. There's also a tool for checking the integrity of data - something that's long been a feature of rival Sage. Failsafes such as these make Business Basics a fine choice for book-keeping novices, and it's easy to upgrade to 'grown-up' business packages such as the £234 MYOB Accounting as your business grows.