Matthew Sarrel for PC Magazine UK writes: Accounting tools help businesses keep track of their all-important financial transactions. While larger firms typically run highly customized solutions, small to mediums-sized businesses run off-the-shelf products to stay on top of their current financial situations.
Accounting software typically includes general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and invoicing; more sophisticated packages add payroll, inventory, and fixed asset management. Reporting and alerts are important features in accounting software so businesses can stay up to the minute with their financial status.
This edition of the PCMag Business Choice Awards focuses on accounting software and services, something essential for all businesses, or at least for those interested in documenting and understanding the relationship between income and expenses. For 27 years, we have been augmenting our hands-on, labs-based product reviews with our Readers' Choice Awards, in which PCMag readers rate the products and services they use the most. The Business Choice Awards extend the Readers' Choice Awards by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment.
Our latest survey asked respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with the accounting software or service they use or manage, and the likelihood they would recommend them to others. In addition, we inquired about their satisfaction with technical support, and the overall reliability of the solution.
If you select, deploy, or administer the products in our Business Choice Awards, or if you advise or manage people in these roles, then you know how critical it is to choose the right products. The results of the PCMag Business Choice Awards survey are invaluable when doing so. And on the next page we'll reveal the best option for building a successful accounting solution for your business.
Every business needs some method of accounting for income and expenses, so there are many choices. The general ledger functions for recording income and expenses are likely to be similar between products, yet there is plenty of room for distinguishing features such as the ability to process electronic payments, sync with banks, generate invoices, manage and pay bills, and run payroll.
Perhaps the most important features of accounting software and solutions are those involving reporting. The ability to see profit and loss on your balance sheet quickly and easily is critical. Most accounting software will let you develop custom reports, like profit and loss per month by customer, and save those reports so you can run them whenever you want. The trick is to find the accounting software that offers you the features you need and doesn't charge you for those you don't.
In this year's survey for accounting software, four received enough responses to be included as finalists: FreeAgent, Microsoft, Sage, and Intuit.
Intuit is represented twice—once for its QuickBooks package for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and then for its Quicken software, which managed to score enough entries via write-in vote. Quicken is typically meant for individuals, but it does have a Home & Business variation perfect for small office/home office (SOHO) businesses.
For overall satisfaction, FreeAgent takes the lead with a powerful 9.4, followed by QuickBooks at 7.4. It's worth mentioning that our winner, FreeAgent, an entirely Web- and mobile-based solution, had the fewest number of responses—but they're incredibly happy end-users.
Intuit's Quickbooks is far and away the most utilized accounting software in our survey, based on response—roughly 24 times the number of responses of FreeAgent. Such "popularity" didn't help Intuit's Quickbooks' overall score, which is a full two points lower. (If combined with Quicken, Intuit's score would be even lower, at 7.2).
¦ Red—Business Choice Winner.
The rest of the pack—Microsoft, Intuit via Quicken, and Sage, don't even measure up to what QuickBooks managed.
Reliability, the ability of the software or service to run every day and provide consistent results, loosely follows the trend of overall satisfaction. FreeAgent is out front with a noteworthy 9.5, followed by QuickBooks at 8.0.
Looking at tech support, we see a slightly different story. FreeAgent is again the best, despite the fact that one-third of its customer base has required tech support. (That's still not as bad as Sage, with 41 percent of its users needing tech support. Sage also has the worst rating for tech support.)
Note that Intuit's Quicken—again, focusing more on consumers—has the lowest number of people who need tech support at 17 percent—but the rating it gets for support is also the worst among all the software in this survey, at a dismal 3.7 out of 10.
Turning to the important question of how likely users are to recommend an accounting software or service to a colleague, we see a large range in responses. The highest score goes to FreeAgent with a 9.5, again far outpacing the competition in this survey. This question is used to calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which shows a large spread between the likelihood to recommend different accounting solutions. FreeAgent's NPS score of 92 percent puts it into an eschelon with companies like Apple and Canon, which get great NPS scores consistently in our surveys. In fact, a 92 percent gives FreeAgent a special title—the highest NPS score we've seen in any of our surveys all year long. (The only other company that came close? Bose got an 86 percent NPS in our Readers' Choice survey...for headphones!)
The other recommendation scores and NPS scores are nothing to write home about; in fact, only Intuit's QuickBooks managed even a positive NPS (14 percent); the other three vendors got negative NPS scores, which means they're actively being denigrated by users more often than not.
Business Choice Winners: Accounting
FreeAgent
FreeAgent dominates our Business Choice Awards survey for accounting software and solutions. Customers of the little company for SMB accounting are highly satisfied across the board, even if one-third of them need tech support. Even then, they've made it the most highly recommended product we've seen all year long.
Methodology
We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. The surveys are hosted by SurveyMonkey, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from October 31, 2014 to November 24, 2014.
Respondents are asked to rate their accounting software or service provider. They are asked multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.
Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the accounting solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the accounting solutions' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your accounting software or service?"
Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.
Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors).
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