When choosing an accounting program for a small business, you have to be aware of what functionality you will be needing.

When I opened my consulting business, I downloaded the evaluation versions of several different softwares, and eventually settled on Quickbooks. The reason I chose Quickbooks were many:

1. Availability of POS hardware/software for when I start doing retail business;
2. Credit Card processing capabilities;
3. Integration with my bank for automatic transaction updates for easy balancing of the books; and
4. Price

I started out buying the simple Quickbooks Pro, as for the short-term, and for budgetary reasons, it was all that I actually needed. This provided me with the bank integration, check-book maintenance (balancing and printing of checks), invoice administration, accounts recievable and accounts payable.

You can easily check out the functionality and download trial versions of almost all Quicken software at http://quickbooks.intuit.com.

Learn more about this author, Alan Fernald.
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