I hate to gush about a product – especially when its from a bank (cold shiver) – but FNB’s Instant Accounting package is simply awesome and will (in my humble and probably worthless) opinion be one of the most revolutionary products for the small business environment in 2010.

I’ve mumbled about it in a couple of previous articles but today I got to try it out firsthand. Suffice to say that I may not be a huge fan of FNB but I’m but I’m opening an account with them to get my grubby little paws on this tool.

If you are one of those SME owners who hates doing their admin and tends to collect all their paperwork in a shoebox somewhere then this program will change the way you work completely – and its not even complicated to use!

Plus it’s FREE which makes it frikkin awesome.

In a nutshell it is a rules based book-keeping package which runs off of your bank statement. According to the guys over at FNB 98% of the transactions that you will need to capture into your book-keeping package will be on your bank statement anyway so all the system needs to be told is where to allocate the income and expenses.

I’m just a lowly journalist but I couldn’t find any faults with it – the system does anything that I would need as an SME owner and a few more things than I expected it to be able to do.

And it’s not just aimed at small and micro businesses. The guys over at Cash Converters use it to track and do reporting on their other various stores and helps management pull up reports to compare different operating units.

Apart from the usual book-keeping up to trial balance functionality there is some nice reporting features on it including:

- Budgeting and budgeting variance
- Financial performance against previous financial year
- Cash-flow forecasts
- VAT reporting

The product is also very flexible. I had expected a “rules based” product to be very much an ‘out the box’ offering which could not adapt to different industries. The demonstration I saw included the services industry and a retail company. By FNB’s own admission it’s not ideal for manufacturing type businesses but for the rest you can configure this thing to your hearts content.

Nice product, I tip my hat to FNB and its developers – I’m sold on it.