If you need to manage your accounts for book-keeping, tax purposes and Companies House requirements, take a look at Solar Accounts. If you purchase through this link, you'll get a 10% discount.

We use Solar Accounts and we are extremely pleased with it. In previous years we've used other accounting packages, and found them to be difficult and frustrating to use. Solar Accounts makes book-keeping and small business accounting straight-forward and easy. This is why we like it:

• Simple and easy to use
• Prints out professional-looking invoices
• Stores customer and supplier details
• Easy to produce the data for HMRC, VAT, Companies House
• If you use an accountant, easy to produce the data for them
• Excellent support, questions answered quickly by email, usually the same day.
• If you make a error, you can correct it!
• 60 day free trial
• Reasonably priced - and discount through this link
• It's a real program, that runs on your computer
• Does not require a powerful computer - Windows XP is fine
• Buy it and use forever - no need for monthly or annual charges
• Extremely easy to backup, e.g. onto a flash drive
• Not limited to a single company - as many as you need
• Not reliant on an internet connection
• You control the software and data - not stored on the internet

Our Experience

We tried Sage Instant Accounts 15, Tas Books, Microsoft Office Accounting, and Business Accountz before finding and settling on Solar Accounts

The all claim to be easy to use, but in truth, we found only Solar Accounts was really easy. Sage Instant Accounts and Tas Books were particularly difficult and "old fashioned".

Sage and Tas Books require special paper for invoices. We found Business Accountz invoices unusable and gave up on them.

Most accounting packages make correcting errors (e.g. amount typed in) very difficult. To ensure there's an audit trail, they require the corrections to become an additional entry. This is useful if you have a large company and want to ensure changes are not made, or at least you can see when changes have been made. If you're doing your own accounts, you're in charge!

Some accounting packages involve the installation of a database - Microsoft Office Accounting used SQL Express Server Database. The result was it required a powerful computer to run. Microsoft Office Accounting was suddenly discontinued.

Solar Accounts produces a simple file (.slr) that can be copied to a flash drive, attached to email etc, as easily as a Word file. This makes backing up and sharing data (e.g. on another machine) very easy

If you use an accountant, and they use Solar Accounts, then you can simply email the .slr file to them. Otherwise, simply print the "reports" they ask for.

There are now several internet based accountancy services. These charge a monthly or annual fee, usually more than the one-off charge for Solar Accounts. If the internet-based accountancy service changes fees, closes down, has technical problems, or you simply lose your internet connection - then you cannot access your data. For that reason, we did not try any internet-based accountancy software.

The above are our personal experience and opinions. Finding the right accounting package for your business is important, as it becomes the heart of your business. There's more reviews online, you'll find plenty of praise for Solar Accounts, for example on this forum

So, try Solar Accounts. There's a 60 day free trial download. This is the full product. When the trial expires, you can still use the software but cannot enter more data into it. At that point, just click here to order your serial number, and you can continue using the software - forever! Bookmark this page so you can come back after trying Solar Accounts!