Equipping Yourself With Business Accounting Software

The market for financial management solutions is a very well-supplied one. The market is awash in highly developed and highly specialized software for nearly any kind of industry that one might need such software for, for any size of business you might care to equipped with what. You can obtain business accounting software for nearly any kind of accounting - fund accounting, fixed asset accounting, project accounting - the level of specialization achieved is truly phenomenal.

All this software is constantly updated to be kept up-to-date with every technology platform served, every standard observed and different compliance requirement needed. While you might sympathize with the lot of each vendor of business accounting software for the kind of complexity they have to deal with, the lot of the buyer isn't that easy, either.

Let's first take a look at what business accounting software is supposed to do. Basically, no matter what industry you're in and no matter what size of business you're trying to equip with software, you basically expect the system to be able to keep track of every financial transaction that goes on.

Whatever particular niche a specific package might help, basically, business accounting software needs to include modules for general ledger, it needs to include modules to keep track of payables and receivables, there need to be modules for payroll processing and reporting. Depending on the specific kind of industry a package serves, these modules may have specialized functions.

The business accounting software used in a business serves as the core of its enterprise resource planning system. When you try to speak to a vendor of business accounting software - a company like Microsoft Dynamics GP, Oracle JD Edwards Accounting or Epicor - the first thing they will do is to ask you a few questions to do with what specific modules you may need - inventory management, project accounting, fixed asset accounting, payroll accounting and so on.

Once they determine what you actually need, they will need to know the  size of business you need to outfit with software. Most businesses are either small businesses that are the verge of growing, or they are large businesses - enterprises.

As a small business will need software that does demand forecasting, seamless accounting among branches and so on. Large businesses will need multinational accounting to meet those standards, they'll need foreign exchange accounting and other complex features. SAP is the biggest enterprise accounting software vendors in the world.

As with most things about modern business, business accounting needs to change over time. These days, it isn't uncommon to see even moderately size businesses using not actual software packages on fixed computers, but software that exists on the cloud - Software as a Service, as it were. If you're in the market for software, you should also consider looking for business intelligence in the package you buy. This is the latest thing - using accounting software to try to forecast what the coming months hold in store.

Look For These In Applicant Tracking Software

For HR departments everywhere, no HR software acquisition plan is ever as daunting as the one where they need to find the right applicant tracking software. They need to find software that is capable of handling all the talent management of the company in one package.

Now just about any commercially available applicant tracking software is going to easily have the ability to keep track of resumes and cover letters. You don't really have to worry about making sure that your choice of software has that. There are other must-haves though that you may neglect to check for. Let uss take a look.

The first thing you need to look for is a requisition capability. Departments in your company need to be able to requisition talent. They need to be able to draft a great requisition for talent of a certain kind, and send it to HR. In fact, automated requisitions are a very important ability.

With this functionality, department managers will be able to automate the whole requisition process. The software will be able to identify positions and assignments that need new talent. Any applicant tracking software that that doesn't have this has to be an amateurish effort.

Once said requisition has been created and there are resumes from applicants coming in, your software needs to be able to screen those resumes automatically. It should be able to draft elimination questions,  automatically, filter out applicants who don't meet the minimum requirements, and so on.

Managers at organizations everywhere have to keep wasting their time with recruitment metrics. They keep having to provide informativereports about what the cost per hire is or what the time to hire is and so on.

When you don't have software tools to calculate these things, they easily become too expensive to have. So basically, your software needs to be able to do this - create custom reports - automatically.

Whatever existing human resource information system you have, your applicant tracking software has to be able to fit right in. Sure, any HR software is going to be able to integrate any applicant tracking software. That's not really the point.

The point is that needs to be ready-to-integrate - ready to go. If it isn't designed for and tested with a particular system, give it a pass. The same goes for integration with the company's website.

And finally, do look for compliance-based reporting tools. The US, the poetic CCP is and very strict rules for employment practices. Your software needs to be able to provide the reasons why a qualified applicant hasn't been selected. It needs to be able to capture compliance data, create logs in audits and so on. Without this, again, it's just no use.

E-book publishers apparently, just love DRM

Remember how before the iPod came out, playing anything on Windows Media Player was so unpredictable? It would frequently talk about DRM. And then, Sony made that terrible DRM mistake of putting a DRM virus on their CDs. Well, thanks to Steve Jobs, we no longer have DRM to worry about when it comes to music. But e-books are a completely different matter. The e-book publishers are running amok with DRM madness these days.

Let's say that you have a Sony Reader today. It's working just fine, but one day, you let it slip and it drops into the bathtub. It does work somewhat, but not really dependably. So you decide to go with the Kindle, instead. Now at this point, you will bump against a minor copyright glitch that brings you to the bad old days of DRM all over again. How do you transfer the books you have stored in your Sony Reader to your Kindle?

The books you buy for the Sony Reader are in a proprietary format. They won't open in the Kindle. To do that, you have to have to hack into those Sony e-books with special software. Apple's iBooks are in their own format, Amazon's books are in their own format – it's just a really unfortunate situation.

And even if you do buy a book that's in a universal format, they are still going to do something to it so doesn't open on another manufacturer's device.

Customers can get really outraged when this kind of thing happens. They feel that they've bought their books, and they have a right to read on whatever device they choose. The e-book publishers see things differently. They feel that of course, if it's just you reading your book on different devices, it should be fine. But how do they know if you aren't lending it to someone else? What if the new Kindle you just bought was not your Kindle, but belonged instead to a friend? How does Amazon know? If they let this happen, before long, people just be making copies and getting their books to all their friends.

Basically, when you buy an e-book Reader, you're locked to that format for avery long time. Perhaps for life. If you want to move to an e-book reader by another company, you may have to either find a reliable way to hack into your old reader and get all the books out so that they will open in the new reader, or you will have to just say goodbye to all the books that you havebought so far. It can be a terrible situation.