500 MB Nyheder Direkte fra Internet 2/500 MB nyheder direkte fra internet CD 2.iso/start/data/text/account.txt

Text File | 1994-09-21 | 20KB | 347 lines

         GENERAL ACCOUNTING
  In a typical store, the employees resell products to customers
for a profit, after buying the products from suppliers.
  To manage the store, you must keep track of all five concerns:
your employees, products, customers, profit, and suppliers.
  Each requires its own computer program. To compute what to pay
your employees, get a payroll program. To monitor which products
you have in stock, get an inventory program. To keep track of
what your customers owe ___ how much you're supposed to receive
from them ___ get an accounts-receivable program. To compute your
profits, get a general-ledger program. To handle debts to your
suppliers and figure out how much to pay, get an accounts-payable
program.
  So altogether, you need five programs: payroll (PR), inventory
(INV), accounts receivable (A/R), general ledger (GL), and
accounts payable (A/P). Let's look at them more closely.

               Payroll
  The payroll program writes paychecks to your employees. It
computes how much each employee earned (the employee's gross
wage), then subtracts various deductions, and writes the
difference (net pay) onto the paycheck.
  It handles several kinds of deductions: the federal withholding
tax (FED), the Federal Insurance Contributions Act's
social-security tax (FICA SOCSEC), state taxes, local taxes, and
payments to health and pension plans.
  It prints checks to the government, to pay the taxes that were
deducted and your state's unemployment insurance. At the end of
each quarter and year, it fills in all the payroll-information
forms that government bureaucrats require.
  If the program's fancy, it counts how many employees are in
each department of your company, totals how much money each
department is spending for labor, and keeps track of employee
vacations and attendance records.
  Before buying a payroll program, check whether it includes a
table that lets it automatically compute your state's income tax.

              Inventory
  The inventory program counts how many products are in stock.
  It prints each product's sales history, predicts when each
product will sell out, and notices which products are generating
the largest profits. By analyzing all that information, it
determines which products to reorder and in what quantities.
  For each product it says to reorder, it prints a purchase
order, to mail to the supplier. It keeps track of whether the
supplier has sent the requested goods.
  At the end of the year, it totals the dollar value of all the
products in the inventory, to help compute the value of your
business and your tax.
                                                Accounts receivable
                                         The accounts-receivable
program computes how much each customer owes. For each customer
who pays immediately, the program prints a receipt; for customers
who plan to pay later, it prints a bill (for services) and an
invoice (for goods).
                                         It notices which bills
and invoices have been paid. It sends dunning notices to the
customers who are late in paying ___ the ones that are past-due.
It refuses to accept orders from customers who are past-due or
reaching their credit limit.
                                         It computes a finance
charge for customers who pay late. It gives discounts to
customers who pay quickly or buy large quantities.
                                         It records each
customer's name, address, phone number, and buying habits, so
your sales force can talk the customer into buying even more. It
records your salesperson's name, and computes the salesperson's
commission.
                                         Before your company
services a customer, the program gives the customer a written
estimate of the cost.

                                                  General ledger
                                         The general-ledger
program computes the company's profit, by combining info from the
other five programs. It prints a variety of profit reports for
your stockholders, bank, financial planners, and government. The
reports show the results for the day, week, month, quarter, and
year.
                                         It tracks each
department's budget, to make sure that no department spends too
much. To protect your money from being stolen or embezzled or
lost, the program performs double-entry bookkeeping: whenever it
credits money to one account, it debits the same amount of money
from another account, so that the books balance.
                                         If the program's fancy,
it stores your business's history for the last several years. It
compares your current profit against earlier profits, and each
current budget item against previous budgets. It tells how much
your business is improving or declining. It even tries to predict
your business's future.

                                                 Accounts payable
                                         The accounts-payable
program prints checks to your suppliers, to pay for the products
they sent you.
                                         The program delays
payment as long as a supplier allows, so that you can temporarily
invest that money in your own business, without requiring bank
loans. That's called, ``making full use of the supplier's line of
credit''.
                                         The program stores each
supplier's name, address, phone number, product line, and
discount policy, so that you can purchase easily and wisely.
   Which accounting package to buy
  I have not yet found an accounting package that I really like.
Each accounting package has its own headaches.
  Old generation Of all the cheap general accounting packages for
the IBM PC, the most famous is Dac Easy Accounting. It lists for
$149.95; discounters sells it for $80. That price includes
everything except payroll, which costs extra. Version 4.0 was
full of bugs, but version 4.0.3 and later are okay.
  To pay even less, get its little sister, Dac Easy Light ($69.95
list, $42 from discounters). It's the only accounting package
that's easy to start using. It's much easier than Dac Easy
Accounting!
  Unfortunately, Dac Easy Light has many limitations. For
example, it doesn't handle payroll or inventory. It can't handle
large companies, since it limits most of its database files to
500 records each. It doesn't print well on laser printers, though
it handles dot-matrix printers fine. Its instruction manual is
too brief: it doesn't explain advanced topics.
  If you use Dac Easy Accounting or Dac Easy Light to print
invoices, the invoices will be ugly. For example, if somebody
buys 4 sweaters from you, the invoice will not say that the
quantity sold is 4; instead it will say that the quantity sold is
4.00.
  If you have a Mac, do not buy the Mac version of Dac Easy
Light! The Mac version is poorly designed and much harder to use
than the IBM PC version.
  If you're looking for an accounting package that's pleasant,
try Money Matters. You can get it for just $32 from discount
dealers such as PC Connection. It comes with a very warmly
written manual that guides you through the process very well. It
understands 13 kinds of businesses and comes already set up for
them. It's harder to learn than Dac Easy Light but can perform a
greater variety of tasks and do a deeper analysis of your
business activities. It can produce three kinds of invoices:
``inventory based'' (showing quantity sold and how many items are
on backorder), ``service based'' (for doctors and other service
providers), and ``professional letter'' (to print on letterhead
stationery). They look great! Money Matters also lets you
construct your own databases of computerized ``file cards'' on
which you can store notes about job costs, vehicle repair
records, or anything else you wish ___ and those databases will
work in conjunction with all the rest of your accounting.
  As your business grows, you'll eventually outgrow Money
Matters. Then you can step up to a fancier version called
One-Write Plus, which is much harder to learn but can handle
companies that are larger and more complex. It lists for $299;
discounters sells it for $159.
  Unfortunately, Money Matters and One-Write Plus suffer from
this peculiarity: whenever you type an amount of money or a phone
number, your screen will look nutty until you finish typing all
the digits. For example, when you try to type $6.25 (by pressing
6 then 2 then 5), you'll see $_.__ then $_._6 then $_.62 then
finally $6.25. To avoid going nuts, avoid looking at the screen
until you finish typing!
  Another fine package, which unfortunately costs much more, is
Businessworks PC. It lists for $795. It can handle accounting
situations that are more complex and advanced than the other
programs I've listed.
                                         New generation Recently,
a new generation of accounting packages has arisen. They're very
popular because they're easy to use.
                                         The most popular and
easiest to use of the new generation is Quickbooks. You can get
it for just $82 from discounters. Add $25 if you also want
Quickpay, which does payroll. Unfortunately, Quickbooks doesn't
keep track of inventory. It runs under MS-DOS.
                                         The next step up is
MYOB, which stands for ``Mind Your Own Business''. MYOB is
somewhat harder than Quickbooks but performs a greater variety of
accounting tasks. It was originally written for the Mac, but now
you can also buy a Windows version. Discounters sell each version
for about $110.

                                              Two kinds of accounting
                                         There are two ways to do
accounting: conservative and cowboy.
                                         The conservative way is
to do double-entry bookkeeping, which records each transaction as
a ``credit'' to one account and a ``debit'' from an offsetting
account. That forces the books to balance and prevents any
department from going over budget or stealing money.
                                         All ``professional''
accountants use that conservative method. But it's tedious and
hard for a novice to fully understand.
                                         If the company is small
enough so that the president knows all the employees personally,
watches their work, personally approves all payments, and has a
good gut feel for how the business is doing, the conservative
``double-entry'' method is an unnecessary waste of time. Instead,
the president can simply total all the payments that the company
received, total all the checks that the company wrote, total the
value of the inventory, and report those totals to the government
at tax time ___ after breaking down those totals into the
subcategories that the government requires. The president can do
all that easily with a pocket calculator or a spreadsheet program
(such as Lotus 1-2-3). That approach is called cowboy, because
it's quick but suffers from a dangerous lack of controls.
                                         Most small companies
having fewer than 10 employees use that cowboy approach ___ and
so do I! That approach is reasonable only if the president is
personally involved in all facets of the company's day-to-day
operations and has enough common-sense wisdom to compensate for a
lack of computer-generated analyses.
         Accounting hassles
  Although some companies use standard accounting packages such
as Dac, Money Matters, One-Write Plus, and Businessworks PC, most
do not, for four reasons.
  1. To use those accounting packages, you must understand the
theory of debits and credits, which is complicated.
  2. Those accounting packages work best if your company's an
intermediary that buys from manufacturers and resells to stores.
  If you run a retail store in which most customers pay cash,
you'll complain that the accounting packages don't automate your
cash register or automatically copy data from the cash register
slips to the sales records and inventory module. If you run a
non-profit organization, you'll dislike how the accounting
packages keep bragging about your ``profit'' instead of how much
you're ``under budget''. If you run a doctor's office, you'll
regret that the accounting packages don't record your patient's
medical histories and needs, don't fill in the forms that your
patient's insurance companies require, and can't handle multiple
payers (in which the patient pays part of the bill and several
insurance companies split the rest of the bill). If you run a
consulting firm that dispenses services rather than goods, you
typically won't need inventory or accounts-payable modules, and
many items in the other modules will be irrelevant.
  3. Each company does business in its own unique way, whose
peculiarities can't be handled well by any general-purpose
accounting package.
  For example, your company may have a unique way of offering
discounts to customers. To make the computer automatically
compute those special discounts, you must write your own program;
but then you'll have difficulty making your program transfer that
discount information to the accounting package you bought.
  Because of each company's uniqueness, the typical company
avoids generic accounting packages and instead hires a programmer
to write a customized program, by using a language such as BASIC
or DBASE.
  4. General-purpose accounting packages print standard reports
but don't let you invent your own. Instead of using the reports
generated by general-purpose accounting packages, many managers
prefer to design their own reports, by copying the company's data
into a spreadsheet program (such as 1-2-3) or data-management
system (such as Q&A or DBASE) and then ``fiddling around'' until
the report looks pretty. General-purpose accounting packages
don't let you fiddle.


       SPECIALIZED ACCOUNTING
  If you have just one accounting problem to solve, you can buy a
simple, pleasant program to solve that problem.

               Quicken
  To balance your checkbook, get Quicken. It can also write the
checks and report how much money you've spent in each budget
category.
  You can get Quicken for MS-DOS, Windows, the Mac, and Apple 2.
Discount dealers sell each version for about $40.

                Taxes
  For help in completing your 1040 Federal Income Tax form and
all the associated schedules (A, B, C, D, E, etc.), get Turbo Tax
($39 from discounters) or Andrew Tobias's Tax Cut ($45 from
discounters). Turbo Tax gets you through the computations faster.
Andrew Tobias's Tax Cut dishes out more personal advice.

            Home finances
  To help keep track of your mortgage, life insurance, stocks,
credit-card bills, and other aspects of modern consumerism, get
Andrew Tobias's Managing Your Money ($43 from discounters).
  Besides doing accounting, it also dishes out advice on how you
should invest your money. To determine your life-insurance needs,
it asks lots of questions about your lifestyle and predicts when
you'll die! Try it: buy the program and find out when the
computer says you'll croak.
                                                 Mail Order Wizard
                                         If you're running a
moderately large mail-order company, get a program called Mail
Order Wizard. It handles order fulfillment well: it makes sure
the goods are in stock, automatically computes the shipping
charges (based on the weight of the goods and the packaging),
bills the customers, and keeps track of which ads and catalogs
are the most profitable. It also has built-in morality: if an
item is out of stock for more than 30 days, it automatically
sends a notice to all customers who ordered the item and offers
to cancel their orders and refund their money.
                                         It's published by Haven
Corporation, a 17-person organization run by Bruce Holmes who,
like me, gives 24-hour free help and has a strange sense of
humor; it's the only accounting program that makes you laugh
while you're installing it. You also get a helpful newsletter
that teaches you mail-order tricks, and the company runs a cheery
annual conference where users get together and swap tricks about
computers and the mail-order biz.
                                         Mail Order Wizard is
used by the mail-order divisions of many famous organizations,
such as Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, Famous Amos Cookies, Magellan
Travel, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and the MIT Bookstore.
                                         I became aware of this
program when my brother Dan and his wife Linda discovered it,
bought it, got thrilled, and dumped all the other accounting
programs they'd been using. Now they're rich ___ their Eagle
America router-bit company has become a multi-million-dollar
mail-order business.
                                         I'm still poor. Gee,
maybe I should be using Mail Order Wizard too!
                                         Unfortunately, Mail
Order Wizard handles just one accounting task: order fulfillment.
It does not deal with payroll and other overhead expenses. Its
keystrokes are non-standard, though you get clear instructions on
how to master them.
                                         It can handle big
mailing lists (up to 4 million customers) and big mail-order
catalogs (advertising up to 5400 products).
                                         It's a bit pricey: $1895
for one computer, $2995 for a 2-computer network, $3995 for a
4-computer network, $5495 for an 8-computer network, and $6995
for an unlimited network.
                                         If you can't afford
$1895, buy a stripped-down version:
Version                                                What it
can handle                                                            Price
Wiz Kid                                                5,000
customers
80 products                                                            $495
Wiz Kid Plus                                          10,000
customers
200 products                                                           $995
Wizard Apprentice                                     20,000
customers
5400 products                                                         $1495
Wizard                                             4,000,000
customers
5400 products                                                         $1895
The Wizard can do credit-card approvals by modem; the
stripped-down versions cannot. The Wizard and the Wizard
Apprentice include the UPS manifest system (software that
simplifies paperwork for shipping by UPS); the Wiz Kid and the
Wiz Kid Plus do not.
                                         For more info (or a $20
demo disk), contact Haven Corporation at 1227 Dodge Ave.,
Evanston IL 60202-1008; phone [phone] or 708-869-3553.