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Charlie Russel for The Sleeter Group writes: In our attempt to come up with a standard for comparing online accounting systems, we (Doug Sleeter, MB Raimondi and myself) came up with a list of features that we would like to see in a good business accounting system. It is hard to compare products when they offer such different features. Each product has a number of differentiating features that make it unique or special, and it is easy to pay a lot of attention to those. However, we have to keep in mind that these are products that businesses will be using to manage their accounting processes. When it comes to managing accounting there are many features that a small business just cannot do without. As we review various online accounting products we will point out things that we like and things that we feel are missing. If a product has a whiz-bang exciting feature but it doesn’t cover the basics, there is a problem. So, we have our list of features that we will be using to compare any cloud (online) based accounting product that we look at.

I certainly don’t consider our list to be all-inclusive, and I’m open to suggestions as to what could be added. One of the dangers of making a list like this is that we tend to think of the features that we have in the product that we are the most familiar with (in my case, QuickBooks for Windows), without recognizing that an online accounting product is different than a desktop accounting product. Another consideration is that every business will have a business process that is critical, but not all businesses will have the same requirements. That makes evaluations complicated!

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