Australian PC Authority Review

Accounting software is a tough market to get into and is littered with the carcasses of many who had tried and failed to take on the established giants in Quicken and MYOB. BusinessBreeze is a locally designed product specifically aimed at the small business market.

It has been developed with a typically Aussie no-nonsense attitude - forget fancy features, just make it easy to use - and that's why it should succeed.

It has a simple and straight forward menu. If you want to make a cashbook entry click on Cash Book; if you want to write and invoice, click on invoicing; if you want to pay staff, then click on payroll. It's all in one menu.

In keeping with the simplicity theme, the user manual can be lifted without having to bend your knees. It's 34 pages, but still shows you the fundamentals.

As long as you have a basic understanding of bookkeeping you should be able to master BusinessBreeze in under an hour and that means no added expense and lost time associated with having to go through a training course to learn the program. When you do a job or sell a product, you write an invoice. When it's paid, you enter the payment. When you pay a bill you enter the amount and as long as you put in the correct tax codes, BusinessBreeze does the rest. The payroll module is a breeze compared to QuickBooks Pro and MYOB. Once you have created an employee on your books just fill in their time sheets, rate of pay, tax rate etc, and it will calculate overtime and superannuation deductions. BusinessBreeze allows you to create your own stationery, just as long as you don't want to get too fancy. While it does not have the nice looking interface of QuickBooks, it is easy to navigate and does the basics well.

At $329, which includes the payroll module, it compares favourably with MYOB's new Business Basics. The only problem is that at this stage it does not have the loyalty base of MYOB and may struggle.