accounts

Most business accounting software is designed for accountants, which isn't much help to small business owners, who are usually not only chief accountant but also chief cook and bottle washer, among other titles. Business owners who keep their own books need accounting software that doesn't require CPA certification to use. OWL Software's Simple Business Accounting (OWL SBA) is designed from the ground up for the business owner who wears a lot of hats, starting with a user-definable interface refined in more than 20 years of developing business software. Most accounting software is based on the traditional double-entry … Read more

Microsoft has decided that its Office Accounting product just doesn't add up.

The software maker said on Friday that it plans next month to stop distributing the accounting product line, ending the latest in a series of efforts to take on market leader Intuit.

The accounting product line was launched in 2005 amid some fanfare, but failed to grab much market share and was later pulled from retail shelves in favor of online-only sales.

"We continually evaluate our business strategies to make sure we're working to meet the needs of customers, partners and shareholders," Microsoft said on its Web site. &… Read more

Periodically people may find that their user accounts have become corrupted, where system processes and applications will not function properly when running in that account. Depending on the severity of the corruption, troubleshooting and fixing the problems may sometimes be more effort than it's worth, with creating a fresh account being a quicker workaround, especially if upon testing a new one the odd behavior does not persist. In these instances, while sometimes a complete reinstallation of OS X is the most straightforward approach, migrating to a new account may be preferred if you need to ensure other user accounts and application installations do not get touched.… Read more

We've had ongoing coverage of the guest account bug that cropped up in Snow Leopard, where depending on how the account was configured when you upgraded there may be a small possibility that logging into the guest account could wipe data from non-guest accounts. This is a rare bug, but one that caused a number of people to be concerned about the potential for data loss.… Read more

Ezimerchant Professional is designed to help build Web sites where users can sell their products. While it offers an impressive selection of tools, the program is complicated and frustrating to use and requires Web design skills.

The program's interface deceived us after our first impression. Although Ezimerchant has a professional-looking layout, we needed to revisit the Help file constantly. We were able to quickly build the skeleton of a Web site featuring a Home page, an About page, and more. While we were able to customize text, images, and the design template, we were disappointed by the results, which … Read more

Double Entry Accounting offers a very simple set of software tools for monitoring accounting entries. This journal-style program allows users to monitor the numbers, but it leaves something to be desired in the design department.

The program's interface was basic and lacking direction, so we needed to visit the Help file's instructions and view a sample accounting collection before we understood how to navigate everything well enough. Once we felt comfortable, we discovered that the program allowed us to make deposits and deductions into several categories we created in order to gain a solid picture of our accounts. … Read more

Although there are more signs lately that the worst of the recession is over, Apple is one of the few companies that has seen little of the effects of the recession to begin with.

We'll find out if the company's good health has remained during the quarterly checkup Monday afternoon. According to Wall Street, it's been another good three months for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. Apple's stock price jumped 43 points during the quarter to close at $185.35. Because of a string of impressive earnings announcements dating back a year ago, the launch of … Read more

BS1 Enterprise Accounting - Free Edition provides a surprising amount of control over a company's finances and makes the entire process simple. This is a great choice for small businesses.

The program's interface initially turned us off, since it is primarily a small toolbar on the desktop. However, after reading the Help file's tutorial, we soon loved how simple and unobtrusive the program was. This simple toolbar felt like an entire accounting department at our fingertips, from Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, to Inventory, Sales and Purchase Orders. Each separate department popped up as a simple screen with … Read more

UPDATE: Apple is aware of this problem and is working on a fix!

A number of reports on the internet are now covering the problem where user accounts are getting deleted after people have logged into guest accounts on their system. We covered this a few weeks ago in an initial report, followed by a secondary report that discusses some additional details of the issue and potential fixes.… Read more