Most small business operators will be familiar with accounting software aimed at that segment, the most popular of which might arguably be Intuit QuickBooks. While this is great software, it can have trouble when faced with requirements typically handled by larger organizations, including a large user base, increased security requirements, reconciliation across multiple geographies, and especially integration with other enterprise-oriented operational packages, such as asset management or large-scale inventory tracking.
For the purposes of this review roundup, rather than relegate these reviews to midsize businesses only, we’ll instead use the increasingly more popular segment description “SME software”—small to midsize enterprise accounting. And the metric we’ll use to determine if a particular accounting system falls into this category is its ability to handle complex business functions.
The reason for using this particular approach is simple: Over the past decade or so, business has changed dramatically. With the internet fostering global sales, inventories in multiple locations and countries, and a bewildering mélange of currencies and taxes, even a company with just a few employees can require the sort of financial system complexity once reserved solely for multibillion dollar multinationals. Those multinationals could afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on IT and financial system acquisition, implementation, and support on an ongoing basis, but most SMEs cannot.
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