Having decided to go for an accounting software, what you must understand is that the best accounting software is the one that performs all the conventional accounting functions promptly and accurately. All additional features are secondary to the basic functions. Never forget, it is the “rigid rules” of “accounting” that make the software so consistent throughout.

Since most of businesses deal in cash in some form or the other, the foremost accounting function is Cash Book maintenance, which ensures that all cash transactions are monitored for a certain period of time.

Next, comes the Bank Book, wherein all the records related to bank transactions are kept and can be easily sorted out for any specific time period.

Then, there is the Journal Book, which is what one needs to refer to for all such transactions that are neither related to cash, nor have anything to do with the bank.

Besides, there is Purchase Book and Sales Book. While the Purchase Book keeps track of all the purchases made and all such transactions that have anything to do with purchasing, Sales Book, as the name suggests, records the sales.

These books come in handy to prepare Trial Balance, which demonstrates the accounting accuracy of the involved transactions. The Trial Balance has a Debit and a Credit side. To find out if the transactions have been recorded properly or not one has to tally the sum total on Debit side with that on the Credit side. If they tally accurately, it indicates that the transactions have been accurately recorded. However, the tallying is effective only when the transactions are recorded using the double entry concept. The Double entry concept works on the principle that for every Debit, there has to be a Credit.

Now, if you are about to choose an accounting software, make sure that it performs these basic functions efficiently and accurately. Another thing that you must bear in mind is the user friendliness of the software because getting a technologically complicated software may make accounting complicated, which, surely, is not what you are getting the software for. So, settle for a software that is easy to operate and gives accurate accounting results.