MS Office Accounting Express 2008

Anyone tried this yet? I'm having some luck and would like to hear about experiences others are having. If you want to have a look the DL is at

http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/office/accounting/default.aspx

My big concern is continuity; it's not clear to me that MS is fully invested in this product. But Intuit's products just seem to get worse and worse with every new release, so I'm a bit nervous about QB2008 as well.

It's Microsoft-so quick answer: No.

I installed it and took a look at it a while back. Seems OK, but you really need MS Office to get data into and out of it, so the fact that it's free isn't all that exciting. If you have Office anyway, it's worth a look.

I don't know about support, but I think it had import/export tools to other software, so if they discontinue it...

It's not so much the fact that it's free (I'll probably upgrade to the paid version if I can get it to work) as the fact that it seems to be more PayPal-friendly than Quickbooks. You can import PayPal data as from Excel (and you can use this same data to create customer records), which is a bit less scary than using IIF.

US and UK versions only. Windows only.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play.

Rob

I just had a conversation with a chap at Big Red Consulting (bigredconsulting.com) who had a couple of interesting observations:

a) QB and Quicken are completely separate programs developed by separate teams, so it's unlikely that there is cross-pollination of defects.
b) MS has previously developed and then dumped two accounting packages.
c) QB has a huge market share, and most accountants use it, so the easiest way to get an expert to validate your bookkeeping is to use QB .

He didn't exactly say, "you have rocks in your head if you use MSOA," but I suspect that's what he was thinking. The great paucity of third party resources about MSOA also gives me pause. So that's where I am.

BRC has a third party add on for importing PayPal data called PayPal to QuickBooks Link:
http://www.bigredconsulting.com/aboutebaylink.htm

For those who are interested, I'll post the procedure for importing PayPal data into MSOA later this week on my blog.

I'll try MS Accounting Professional as soon as I get a chance. The free (Express version) definitely won't work for me since I work with a lot of inventory.

I can't tell you about the 2008 version yet because I have not tried it, but I'm really looking forward to trying it. (downloading now as I type)

I can tell you about the 2007 version though (the PRO version anyways, I don't care for the Express one)

I really liked it and would've definitely switched from QuickBooks, except I could not successfully migrate all my data and it was kind of slow. If this has been fixed in the 2008 I'll dump QuickBooks.

I've been using QB since 2003, currently I use QB 2006 Premier. I like QB because it's very easy to use and flexible. However, it lacks multi-currency support and has limits for the number of inventory items, customers and other lists you can have. This is something I really need, I've had to set up several company files to overcome these limits, but it's a pain to manage.

We've been asking Intuit for years to add multi-currency support for the US version, but they just don't listen or don't care.

MS Office Accounting PRO doesn't have this kind of limits and it has support for multi-currency!

I've tried a few other accounting programs, including PeachTree Quantum. None is as easy or flexible to use as QuickBooks, except MSOA.

If I'm able to successfully migrate all my data and it doesn't run as slow as I remember, I'll definitely make the switch.

Interesting! Good luck and let us know how it goes. Apparently one of the big plusses of MSOA is that since it uses a database rather than a simple file, the limits that you bump up against in QB are (purportedly) no longer a factor.