Joe Willie Jones, Chile/USA

Quicken tries to make life easy for the non-expert. Unfortunately, though they do succeed, it leads to some fairly major complications as you start looking for its more advanced features.

The main criticism is that it is not a full double entry system. They have accounts which, as far as I can see, represent all the Balance Sheet accounts. Transactions between these, naturally, use double entry. However, Income and Expenditure transactions are recorded as a single entry in an account which is then marked with a category. (Interesting if you want to make a transfer between two categories - you have to make two equal and opposite transactions in an account or a single, zero--value, split transaction in an account).

Although it has many good features, since I first met it, Quicken has, like so many others, got increasingly bloated. More and more features are added - many of which I would never need. They do have simpler versions, but one or two aspects of the more expensive make it advantageous. This, however, is now becoming more difficult to argue. Furthermore, I have discovered that in the interests of copy protection, they are now including elements which, at least potentially, may be a threat to the overall security of the system and I have decided to call it a day.

Before that I was reaching this point anyway for one other essential feature and, to be honest, I have only continued with it as long as I have in the hope that they would improve this. The problem is its handling of international currencies. They have provision for foreign currency accounts. However, there is no provision for foreign currency categories. These always appear in the system currency (here, the pound). They also only provide for one exchange rate per currency. This means that every time the rate changes, every single transaction made in that currency is revalued during the entire time covered by the data. Since they don't encourage proper closing of accounts every year, this means a fairly meanings significance to historic figures. I have worked out a workaround for this, but it is really time-consuming.

In addition, features such as an instant balance sheet and income and expenditure report which I expect to be instantly available with a system, together with instantly available balances on every account (or category) require the generation of a report - in the case of the latter, a rather more cumbersome procedure of selection than it need be.

Thank you for the return of reason :-)"

John Underwood, United Kingdom

Frank van Dixhoorn, Zambia

Hein Hoek, Belgium

By chance I stumbled upon the website of the German computer magazine Chip and from there I found your Account Pro. Believe me, it is an absolute hit and you may quote me! It not only fulfills my simple needs but it contains also many extras to satisfy even professional accountants; although I really hate administration, I love working with it! For me personally it is a gem that I can set up and do my bookkeeping in Dutch - and to print out everything in Spanish for my accountant. Secondly it is great that I can make direct corrections instead of the laborious correcting contra-bookings that always end up on the wrong debet or credit side and thus need contra- repair-bookings also always showing up on the wrong side. Also, compared to so-called professional commercial programs, its registration price is very affordable.

So believe me, I think you did a great job."

Wam van Dam, Spain

Nati Shomroni, Israel

Oivind Nicolaysen, Norway

Tim Lloyd, USA

Henrik Linden, Finland

My selection to make the real test on was Account Pro. I will try test for 2 months in a company that produces and export premium wines. It has no more than 20 clients and 50 suppliers. If everything is OK I will be very happy to pay for the program and establish a relation with you." [He did]

Ricardo Gonzalez I, Chile

John Bodfish, USA

Olli J. Marttila, Finland

Peter Berg, Denmark

Ruth Vendelbo, Denmark

Kjeld Jensen, Denmark

Gert Mensing, Netherlands

Wout De Wachter, Belgium

Peter Kaastrup, Denmark

Chetan Bothello, India

I am still working on our Head Office to get the program on their side too, but in any case, even if we just keep it here and send the documents by courier (like we do with our existing system) we will still be able to slim down the papervolume by kilos, due to the rational way to present the figures. So, thank you for this program."

Peter Eik, Singapore