The Business of Software

I'm planning of starting a company in either US or UK (or maybe even both!) and I'll need an accounting software which is best rated (in your opinion or in the opinion of the magazines), can easily exchange data with CPA's and has an API (COM would be great!) so I can program against it (e.g. for automatically importing sales data from the online shop into it etc.). Which one would you recommend for US, which one for the UK?

Can't speak to the UK, but my wife is an accountant & her office does all their work in QuickBooks.

AFAIK -

The common and most popular accounting system in the US is QuickBooks

In the UK the popular accounting system is Sage Line 50 (for small businesses)
QuickBooks is also being used but much less than Sage.

In Australia the popular business management accounting system is MYOB, while QuickBooks is also available, again with a lower market share.

That said, Intuit QuickBooks has by far more users than any other small business accounting software

HTH

So what kind of opportunities are there for writing 3rd party add ons to QuickBooks?  Is there good MISV potential here?

Sage and QuickBooks are both popular with smaller companies in the UK AFAIK. Don't know about bigger companies.

I don't know if this counts as accounting software, but I use GnuCash (http://gnucash.org) for all of my mISV money tracking needs. As long as you can get used to double-bookkeeping accounting, it's really nice software. And at the risk of scaring off 90% of the forum participants here, it's also open source and free in cost.

And of course I meant "double-entry accounting" and not "double-bookkeeping" above.

I use Excel for all accounting, invoices, expense reports, etc...

I bought Quickbooks but it is overkill for a 1 man shop with no physical inventory.

Simple spreadsheet is fine for tiny businesses but you need to know something about accounting so you know what to record and how.

According to http://accounting-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ (great site by the way)
PeachTree Complete (at least for US) is better than QuickBooks. Any experience with it?

> of course I meant "double-entry accounting" and not "double-bookkeeping" above

Yeah, yeah. Sure. :-)

Quicken

Excel ;-)

"... PeachTree Complete (at least for US) is better than QuickBooks. Any experience with it?"

Yeah. At my last job they used it.  This was 3.5 years ago.  It uses/used BTrieve as its database, and a funky version of BTrieve.  It required a special database driver that was not compatible with other applications using BTrieve or Pervasive.  It was a nightmare for the accounting department.

My suggestion: QuickBooks.  I haven't found another small-business accounting package that is anywhere close to it in terms of features or flexibility, particularly with reports.

Stay away from MYOB.  It's ok but its reporting is atrocious.

Thank you all for your kind input. I'll go with Quicken as both US and UK versions have an SDK which can do some cool things.