I don’t know whether it is politically correct to ask here, but I must ask somewhere.
I am setting up a small business, but with a high volume of sales order/invoices. I am tossing up between Manager and FrontAccounting, and the following are my main areas of concern. Hopefully someone can help me tip the balance and make up my mind asap.
FA is very open, the source/reports/data are all accessible and customisable. Manager is more closed, which makes us dependent on ‘them’ to fix/modify/add anything that we need/want.
Is there a team behind FA, or is the whole project dependent on one (very smart) developer ? What happens if he leaves/dies/… ?
I do like the easy and simple interface of Manager. It’s easy to learn and use from day one, whereas FA has a more steep learning curve. However, is it better to tackle the steep learning curve once and then have the power to do all one needs to do ?
There are some features missing but any accounting system should be easy to understand by anyone
and here, the forum support is amazing so you will answers to most of your questions.
You have probably not asked this question in the most impartial place however I would strongly suggest going with Manager, it’s cleaner and issues are dealt with extremely quickly (within days, not six months!).
It is becoming a real alternative to the mass commercial products available.
FrontAccounting is old (I mean just look at their website) and I used to use it for my hobby business about five years ago. It was frustrating as hell then and it’s probably the same now.
Not sure if you’re in Australia however the GST Reporting features of Manager are also good, not to mention the fact that Tax Tables are likely to be integrated shortly for Payroll which will be very useful if you operate under a company structure and pay yourself as an employee - or actually have several staff.
Never tried FrontAccounting, but my opinion is manager is by far the simplest accounting program that I have ever tried. There is no steep learning curve - one does have to spend a bit of time understanding basic accounting concepts, but the program itself is dead easy to use. This is the biggest selling point of Manager. Nobody has time to learn how to use complicated software and especially having to relearn how to do certain things if you use that feature infrequently.
In addition, the forum here is very active. You get help quickly and bugfixes are fixed within days rather than weeks!
I would suggest that you get a spreadsheet and write the pros and cons of each program in your spreadsheet and highlight what is important to you. What is important to you, may not be important to me or other people.
What if scenarios such as whether the developer will die to me is irrelevant because one could equally say that FrontAccounting will close their doors tomorrow due to bankruptcy- one just doesn’t know, so I don’t waste my time worrying about something I have no control over.
The program is simple to use, I like the gui interface (its intuitive and modern looking), I get great support, new features are being added all the time and bugfixes are fixed quite fast. This is all that matters to me.