BPA is a personal and small business accounting system which is completely unlike any other product on the market. Many of the current users throughout Australia enthuse about it's remarkable data entry interface and they all enjoy an increased awareness and understanding of the simple concepts of accounting and book-keeping which are kept well hidden in many of the other packages.
It is designed to handle all your accounts and financial records in the one file, and normally the data accumulates over a period of many years, so that long term analysis and summaries of your complete financial picture can be obtained.
You can keep both your personal / household and business accounts for any number of different activities all within the one file, which is ideally suited to many small businesses and home based enterprises, where budgeting and cash flow management has to be carried out as an overall operation, rather than as a set of stand alone accounts.
At tax time it is possible to report separately on only those entries and accounts which are relevent to the tax return, and these can be summarised in tax pack categories.
BPA has been designed and developed over more than four years to reach it's present state of evolution, although there is always ongoing development - mainly as a result of user feedback and suggestions.
TECHNICAL:
BPA is a full double entry accounting system and all the account balances are automatically updated (ie: posted) every time that an entry is made. Running totals are also maintained within each account for every month of the financial year.
Data can be edited or changed at any time and there are no end of month or financial year operations required. It allows an unlimited number of bank and credit card accounts, and the system can accommodate up to 80000 records. Based on the authors comprehensive financial records since July 1989 this is probably enough to cover the next 80 years of most people's financial records!
There is a full debtors / creditors system which can be used to keep track of outstanding invoices and supplier purchases. (Sometimes referred to as an accruals accounting system)
Data entry is normally done in the unique BPA Main data entry screen - a fully interactive screen where all (or selected) previous entries are on view, although there is also a batch entry option and a split transactions screen.
Budgeting or forecasting is done with an itemised master list of all recurring and once off transactions which can be periodically reviewed, and updated. From this list BPA is able to generate all the future transactions over any specified period. With this information it is possible to print out (and graph) detailed cash flows (on a day by day basis), as well as preparing complete monthly profit & loss and balance sheets for the future periods.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
The file FEATURES contains a more comprehensive list of BPA's main features, and also within the program there are several sections within the large help system which further discuss the design objectives and features of the program.
WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THIS EVALUATION COPY:
The evaluation package includes six files of sample and starting point data for both business and personal type files. Also there is a seven page Walk Through and Tutorial Document to assist in quickly discovering some of the main points of the program.
The evaluation program allows a maximum of 150 records in all the internal files for chart of accounts, budgets etc, and 75 transactions - ie: cheques, cash, receipts etc in the main transaction file. Data can be saved to disk (this is done automatically - you never have to save your entries with BPA) and printed reports up to two pages maximum per report can be printed.
You can prepare a customised chart of accounts to suit your exact needs, and then enter the first 75 entries. After this when the full program is purchased you simply replace the evaluation program and application and continue with the full versions - and continue to work with your initial data file.
