EconoAccounting is probably one of the first accounting software programmes of its kind to take downloaded bank statements and transpose them accurately into your ledger

by: Stephen Timm

ARE you one of many business owners who hands a shoebox full of slips to your accountant, or pays someone to sit for hours capturing transactions into your accounting programme? Business owner Stephen Hunter says he found his solution using a new accounting software product. A Johannesburg accountant claims to have designed a package especially for those business owners who struggle to get a grip on their accounting.

EconoAccounting, software which imports a business owner's bank statements straight from the internet into your ledger, will make transposing banks statements and tracking your business's cash flow quicker.

Launched last year by EconoServ and already boasting some 100 users, EconoAccounting has all the usual accounting software functions: an invoicing module, the ability to produce an income statement, trial balance, VAT report, RSC Report and print out an audit-ready general ledger.

But there is one main difference: Kevin Levinstein from Econoserv SA, says EconoAccounting is probably one of the first accounting software programmes of its kind to take downloaded bank statements and transpose them accurately into your ledger. EconoAccounting can be trained to recognise key words or phrases and allocate those transactions to their relevant expense accounts. After logging on to their bank's internet site and downloading their bank statement, business owners can import them into EconoAccounting which then organises dates, amounts and even descriptions of transactions into the appropriate accounts outlined by the business owner.

This means that, by using keywords, the software will automatically take things like insurance and travel costs and allocate them into the correct expenses without you, the business owner, having to sit for hours trying to reconcile every last rand and cent.

The importing and capturing, says Levinstein, is done at the rate of 10 transactions per second.

He says the software is easy to set up, support is offered to new users and free upgrades are available to download from the internet when new features are added and when banks make site changes.

We have discovered that up to 90% of all credit transactions can be 'auto-allocated', leaving us to manually allocate only 10% of credit transactions, and handle invoice payments in the same way.

EconoAccounting costs R1 150 inclusive and through Macro and selected computer shops.

Satisfied customer using the new EconoAccounting software: Louise Bruce, who runs Badges Unlimited, a small Gauteng company that manufactures button badges, says she saves R500 a month because she no longer has to outsource her bookkeeping.

Badges Unlimited has three employees and has been operational for 12 years.

Bruce explains that before she started using EconoAccounting in July 2003, she never knew where her business stood because she would just give all her bank statements to an external bookkeeper to reconcile.

Now, says Bruce, she understands much more about her business because the programme has helped her to get to grips with things like cost of sales and profit. 'At one push of a button I can see where my business stands'.

She says, however, that one shortfall is that you can't click on your contacts to send an email or fax immediately and have to go to Outlook Express to do this.

One business owner, an attorney with one employee, says that after installing EconoAccounting he was able to download and reconcile four years worth of bank statements in just 30 minutes.

Another business owner, Stephen Hunter, who runs a two-person, two-year-old Johannesburg software company called Stephen Hunter Software, says EconoAccounting has probably saved him many hours a week and he is able to review the state of his books whenever he wants.

'It's been a very useful programme and if I've got any queries he (Levenstein) is always available to listen and consider suggestions,' says Hunter, who has been using the programme for six months now.

He says the programme was very easy to start using and he was able to import all his accounting records from the accounting programme he had developed and was using before he responded to an ad in his post box and gave EconoServ a call.

He says, however, the EconoAccounting is limited in that it doesn't have salary and wage functions.