[MOA] Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2009
5/8/2009
I used Quickbooks for a few months and was quite disappointed. Then I found Microsoft Office Accounting Professional.
Quickbooks (QB) worked reasonably well, but after inputing a moderate amount of data it became unusably slow. Searching turns up a general consensus that when a QB file reaches 20 MB, its "too large". Not 20 GB, 20 MB!!! I reached this very quickly. This was not the only displeasure I had with QB, but it was the deal breaker and my reason to look around.
Fortunately QB has a good money back guarantee. QB also has excellent and responsive user foroums.
Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2009 (MOA)
I've been using MOA for about 2 months now very heavily. I will post more in the future, but in short it is a very good program, just shy of truly excellent. With a few small improvements, MOA will be quite a stellar program.
MOA feels much more refined than QB.
Search
Very perplexing is that MOA appears afraid of search. Customers, invoices, products, you name it there is no easy way to search them. For Microsoft, Search was a huge initiative a few years back. How can a program ship lacking even basic search functions?
There is a workaround. Just about anything can be exported with a single click to Excel. Click the Excel button and Customers (or other lists) are exported and opened into Excel. Using Excel you can then search.
Multi Currency
Finally, after many years of getting it horribly wrong, vendors have figured out multi currency. Both QB and MOA now perform well in this regard.
QB allows you to change the default currency, but has another very critical flaw. Many currencies besides USD use the $. Singapore, Caribbean, Bahamas and many others have dollars as well. In many places through QB it will happily display the $ symbol but not the currency name, so you have no idea if it is USD, or Singapore Dollars. It is a real problem that caused me to make many mistakes.
MOA always displays currency symbols when it is not clear, so there is never any confusion. MOA has shortcoming of its own, but its easily worked around. MOA installs a default currency, USD for the US edition and GBP for the UK edition. Additional currencies can be added, but there is no way to select them as the default currency.
To work around this, simply edit the default currency and change it to your desired currency. Then add back USD or GBP as secondary currencies if you need them. For example to set EUR as the default in the US edition, on a new project (do not do this on an existing project!) that has no financial transactions yet and edit currencies. Change USD to EUR and the description to Euros. Now add a new currency and add back USD if you require it. Now Euros will be your default currency for reports and other functions, yet USD will be available.
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