My perception is accounting is really unnecessarily complicated but after wrestling with my accounting problems for a while I found a really useful shortcut that I wanted to share with you. Everyone who starts or manages their own business has ’higher priority’ tasks to perform than spend time on their accounting. Accounting is a ‘chore’ that many people look forward to doing but must be attended to on a regular basis to avoid disaster.

I asked my accountant for advice and he persuaded me to use Sage Software which turned out to be a small business accounting software package. Without even evaluating software I simply went ahead and bought the cheapest version I could find. On reflection I am relieved I didn’t waste too much cash on this as this software is possibly the worst and most unfriendly application I have ever been faced with. OK my first piece of wisdom is that whenever you see the words accounting software go carefully as it definitely means the developer isassuming you know a great deal about accounting.

Like me I know this just isn’t the case for most small business managers and this inspired me to put aside time that I couldn’t spare to search for a solution to make my life simpler. It was really worth doing this as I discovered a more useful solution than I could ever of dreamed of named salesorder.com.

This is arguably the simplest system I have ever found and what’s more it is net based and therefore I can access it from anywhere I choose to work. Better still and the third piece of wisdom I want to share with you is that the people who work at salesorder.com are not just very knowledgeable of their service but they know a great deal about the problems of managing a small enterprise and have taught me the bookkeeping I need to know.