Modern day accounting on the Mac

Doing accounting on the Mac operating system over the last decade has not been a particularly fruitful experience. At iSOS we take pride in integrating all sorts of business systems. Integration with accounting platforms here in the UK has been difficult.

Anyone wanting an Apple Mac native bit of software would have used MYOB. Others would have used industry standard PC software such as Sage or QuickBooks in an emulated Windows environment. Emulating a Windows environment was not desirable in the days before Apple adopted the Intel chip in their computers, as it was very slow. Emulating a Windows environment on a Mac these days is much better. However the only issue left is that any business system that integrates with Sage or QuickBooks needs to be multi platform for it to be then useful on a Mac. One such system is FileMaker Pro. We have achieved a good level of integration between FileMaker pro, QuickBooks and Sage through using third-party plug-ins specifically developed for these applications on the PC.

We seek to enable levels of integration that dramatically reduce double entry on the various systems. For example an invoice generated on one system should automatically push across to the accounting package. When the bookkeeper reconciles payments for those invoices the payments should be able to return to the originating system in order that the invoice can be marked off as paid. Having this level of integration can help where many users need to be able to keep track of customer credit or perhaps project budgets in a Mac environment.

Having achieved this level of integration we are still not content with having to maintain a PC to do the donkey work as the processes can still be slow, and just isn't that clever!!!. Having done extensive research on web-based accounting packages we have found two systems that have APIs (application programming interfaces) enabling us to integrate FileMaker Pro and content management systems such as Drupal directly into every element of the accounting environment. Both systems allow you to sign up for trial accounts with very little hassle. The first is Xero and the second is Kashflow. Both systems are UK compatible and extremely intuitive enabling any bookkeeper/accountant to login and feel right at home. As both the systems are in the cloud there is no hardware or IT infrastructure required.

If you have a FileMaker database or an e-commerce website that you would like to integrate with either of the packages we can help. Have a look at the linked videos below to see if these types of accounting packages are right for you. We've found there is a level of hesitation to put one's accounts on the Internet due to privacy issues. This may or may not be an issue for you. Both companies emphasise a very good level of security that is comparable to your existing online banking or PayPal environment.

Videos:

Kashflow
http://www.kashflow.com/tour.asp

Xero