Quickbooks Simplestart

Simplestart is a spanking new low-cost addition to Intuit's stable of Quickbooks business accounting applications. It's aimed squarely at start-up businesses and established traders with simple accountancy needs who have never used accounting software before, though basic familiarity with Windows is assumed.

When you fire up Simplestart for the first time it quizzes you for basic information about your business and, armed with this, it creates a company file. At this point there's nothing to stop you inputting live data but you'd be wise to hold off for a quarter of an hour, which is all it takes to work through seven interactive tutorials. Once you start using the program there's a natural-language help system you can turn to for advice and information, plus 30-day access to an online support service.

The home page graphically depicts the flow of money through your business, and acts as a visual menu. From here you can invoice customers, process payments received, pay bills and record expenses. VAT, tax and trading reports are constantly updated as you enter each item, so your financial position can be viewed at any time.

One quibble is that it's a one-size-fits-all solution, so cash traders who don't need to record every item sold and might only want to record total daily takings still have to issue a sales receipt without a customer's name on it just to get their sales into the system. But for sole traders who issue invoices, it works like a dream.

Contact: Intuit 0845 450 7220
www.quickbooks.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
• 200MHz Pentium II or equivalent
• 64MB of Ram
• 230MB of hard disk space
• Internet Explorer 6.0