Accounting software for people who find numbers confusing
If accounting has always felt like a language you never learnt, that is because it is one. The sums underneath it are addition and subtraction. The right software speaks your language and translates, and the wrong software expects you to have learnt theirs.
Most people who say they are bad with numbers are not. They can tell you, roughly, what came in last month, what went out and who still owes them. What they cannot do is turn that into the words an accountant uses: debit, credit, accrual, retained earnings, trade creditors. The confusion is almost never the maths. It is the vocabulary, and most accounting software was designed by people who already speak it fluently.
That matters when you choose a package, because it changes the question. You are not looking for the simplest software. Simple software often gets that way by leaving out the part that makes your books real. You are looking for software that does the accounting properly and asks you questions you can actually answer.
Five questions are all you really need to answer
Strip the vocabulary away and a set of books exists to answer five plain questions. Everything else in accounting is machinery for getting those five answers right.
| Your question | What an accountant calls it | Where the answer lives |
|---|---|---|
| Did I make money? | Profit, on the income statement (also called the profit and loss) | Income minus expenses, for a period such as a month or a year. |
| What do I own and what do I owe? | The balance sheet | Your bank balance, stock and equipment, against what you owe suppliers, SARS and lenders, at one date. |
| Who owes me money? | Debtors, or accounts receivable | Invoices you have sent that are not yet paid, sorted by how late they are. |
| Who do I owe money? | Creditors, or accounts payable | Supplier bills you have received and not yet paid. |
| What do I owe SARS? | Output VAT less input VAT, on the VAT201 return | The VAT you charged customers, minus the VAT you paid suppliers, for each VAT period. |
If you can read those five answers off your software each month, and trust them, you are running your books properly. You do not need to know how the software got there, any more than you need to know how a car's gearbox works to drive to work.
The one idea worth learning: profit is not cash
There is exactly one accounting concept that a business owner cannot hand off, because it explains the most common shock in small business: a profitable month with an empty bank account.
Profit counts what you earned. Cash counts what arrived. Invoice a customer R20,000 on the 28th and that is income this month, even though the money may not land until next month or the one after. Buy R15,000 of stock and it is cash gone today, but it only becomes a cost when the stock is sold. Pay SARS the VAT you collected and it leaves the bank without ever having been your income in the first place.
So a business can show a healthy profit and still be unable to pay its rent, because the profit is sitting in customers' bank accounts as unpaid invoices. That is why the third question in the table above, who owes me money, deserves as much attention as the first. Any decent package shows both side by side. If yours only shows you a bank balance, it is telling you half the story.
Double entry is the software's job, not yours
Real accounting is double entry: every transaction is recorded twice, once where the money came from and once where it went, and the two sides must always balance. It is a five-hundred-year-old error check and it is the reason a set of books can be trusted. It is also the part that frightens people off, because it is where debits and credits come from.
Here is the useful part. You should never have to type a debit or a credit for an ordinary transaction. When you record an invoice, an expense or a payment, the software knows which two sides it touches and writes both for you. Your job is to say what happened in plain terms. Its job is the bookkeeping.
This gives you a quick test for any package you try. Record an ordinary expense, say a R460 fuel slip paid by card, and see what you are asked.
| Built for you | Built for your bookkeeper |
|---|---|
| What was it for? (a category in words, such as Fuel) | Which account code should be debited? |
| How did you pay? | Which account should be credited? |
| Did the slip show VAT? | What tax code applies? |
Both versions can produce exactly the same entry in the ledger. Only one of them can be used by someone without training. Manual journals, where you do type both sides yourself, belong in any serious package, but as a tool your accountant reaches for once in a while, not as the way you record a Tuesday.
Five signs the software was built for someone like you
Beyond the expense test, these are the behaviours that separate software a non-accountant can live with from software that merely tolerates one.
It asks questions in your words. Customers, suppliers, categories and how you paid, rather than account codes and tax codes. The account codes should exist, because your accountant needs them, but you should be able to go months without seeing one.
It refuses the mistakes you cannot undo. A beginner is going to try to delete a customer who has invoices, or edit a month that has already been reported to SARS. Good software says no and tells you why. Software that lets you do it quietly leaves a gap in your records that nobody finds until it matters.
It warns you when something looks wrong. The classic beginner error is recording the same payment twice: once from the invoice and once from the bank statement. A package that notices a new record looks like one you already have, and says so before you save, will catch more of your mistakes than any amount of care on your part.
It knows the local tax rules so you do not have to memorise them. South African VAT has exceptions a newcomer cannot be expected to know. VAT paid on entertainment, for example, generally cannot be claimed back, even though the restaurant charged it at 15%. Software that knows that applies it when you choose the category. Software that does not will happily let you claim it, and SARS will not be as forgiving.
It explains itself where you are stuck. Not a help centre in another tab and not a support ticket answered on Thursday. When you are staring at a screen wondering what accrual means or why the balance sheet does not match your bank, the answer should be one click away and written in plain language.
What no software can do for you
Honesty is due here, because software that promises to do everything is lying. Good software removes the vocabulary and the arithmetic. It cannot remove judgement, and five habits stay yours however good the package is.
- Keep business and personal money apart. One bank account for the business and nothing personal through it. Software can record anything, but it cannot tell your groceries from your stock, and every mixed transaction is a question someone has to answer later.
- Keep the slip. A photograph is fine. Without a tax invoice from the supplier you cannot claim the VAT on a purchase, and without a record of some kind you cannot prove the expense at all.
- Record things when they happen, not in a pile at the end. A week-old transaction takes seconds. A year-old one is an archaeology project.
- Reconcile your bank once a month. It is the only check that tests your books against evidence you did not create yourself. The full walk-through is in how to reconcile your bank account.
- Ask when you do not know. Guessing a category is how a loan repayment ends up as an expense and a capital purchase ends up written off in one month. A question costs a minute and a wrong guess can cost a VAT penalty.
None of these needs any accounting knowledge. They need about an hour a month and a decision to do them.
Where an accountant still fits
Keeping your own books is not the same as never speaking to an accountant. Most small businesses still use one once a year, for the income tax return and, for a company, the annual financial statements. Some also want advice when something unusual happens: buying a vehicle, taking on a loan, selling the business.
What changes is what you are paying them for. Hand an accountant a shoebox of slips and a bank statement and you are paying for months of bookkeeping before the real work starts. Hand them a reconciled set of books they can open themselves and you are paying for a review, which is a far smaller bill and a far more useful conversation.
Where OxyAccounting fits
OxyAccounting is written for exactly the reader of this article: a South African owner keeping their own books without training. It is a full double-entry system, and the double entry is never your problem.
- The ledger is ready the moment you sign up, with a South African chart of accounts already in it. There is nothing to design and no accounting decision to make before your first invoice. A short setup wizard asks for your company details, your logo and whether you are registered for VAT.
- You record what happened, it writes the entries. Invoices, expenses, payments, supplier bills and payroll all post to the ledger on their own. Expenses are captured by category and payment method, in words.
- It knows the VAT exceptions. Choose a category marked as entertainment, a club subscription or a motor car and the form asks for the amount including VAT and claims none of it back, because the VAT Act does not allow it. You do not need to know the section number.
- It warns before you double-record. A payment or expense that looks like one already matched to your bank statement raises a warning showing the other record. It warns rather than blocks, because sometimes you really did pay the same amount twice.
- It makes you decide when a customer pays short. Instead of leaving a few rand quietly outstanding forever, the allocation screen says what the shortfall is and asks whether to give a discount, write it off or keep chasing it.
- It refuses what cannot be undone. A customer with invoices cannot be deleted and a locked month cannot be posted into.
- Roxy, the built-in assistant, answers in plain English and knows which screen you are on. Ask what a trial balance is, or what a screen is for, without leaving the page.
- Receipt scanning reads the slip for you from a photograph and fills in the form, and you check it and save it. Nothing is ever recorded without you.
- Your accountant can log in to your books, and you choose how much they can do, read-only included.
It is one plan at R149/month with all of it included, payroll and VAT201 as well. If you are weighing it against other packages, the comparison guide sets out what to check. If you would rather just try the expense test above on the real thing, the 14-day free trial needs no card.
One last honest point. If what you really want is for somebody else to do the books, buy a bookkeeper, not software. No package is a substitute for the five habits above. What good software does is make those habits small enough that someone who finds numbers confusing can keep them.