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TinyBooks Pro: Is It Right For You? |
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TinyBooks Pro is, without a doubt, an astoundingly simple-to-use accounting program. That is surely its main niche!
It's written for small business owners who pretty much hate accounting and want to do as little of it as they can get away with,
yet still have all the facts and figures that they need to run the business and help at tax time. TinyBooks Pro fills this need for
thousands of small businesses. But, being such a simple program, it cannot include the vast features of the "big boy" accounting
programs. These other accounting programs are truly superb, but they suffer from being so overly complex that they leave most
users who are not trained accountants in a daze of bewilderment. Many of these other programs are not only much more expensive
than TinyBooks Pro, but often have to be re-purchased every year. Some aren't even compatible with the latest Mac OS Lion as
TinyBooks Pro is.
So, the real question you have to ask yourself, is if the subset of accounting features that TinyBooks Pro does provide is
sufficient for your business. I can't be more honest than that. That really is what it's all about. Luckily, TinyBooks Pro is
distributed as shareware and you are free to try it yourself before purchasing. The program that you download is the real thing,
no features are left out. It's a true test of the program. If your business is such that TinyBooks Pro can effectively handle your
needs, there's not a simpler program out there. See what hundreds of others have said about TinyBooks and TinyBooks Pro. Better
yet, have a look at the program itself. Try the simple TinyBooks Pro Tutorial. You'll see, step-by-step, with screen captures,
exactly how easy TinyBooks Pro is to use.
TinyBooks Pro: Accounting Experience
Ken Winograd (the programmer of TinyBooks Pro) has a rather long history creating financial and accounting software. Long before
the Macintosh even existed, Ken wrote various investment portfolio programs for the Apple II computer. These programs were never
made public and were used exclusively by Ken's friends and family. Later, Ken also worked for a company called Great American
Software where he created the Invoicing Module for their very popular One Write Plus accounting software for IBM PCs. Ken also was
the Lead Programmer for the very first versions of software-based Dome Books, published by Dome Publishing of Rhode Island.
At that time, the Dome accounting software supported Apple II, IBM PC, and even Commodore 64 computers. Since 2003, Ken has
designed, programmed, published and supported the popular TinyBooks and TinyBooks Pro Accounting programs, currently for the
Macintosh only. The one common theme in all these years of accounting experience has been to make accounting simple and intuitive
for families and small businesses around the world.
TinyBooks Pro: Theory of Operation
TinyBooks Pro works by keeping track of multiple accounts which you can customize. There are four basic types of accounts:
Deductible Expenses, Non-Deductible Expenses, Taxable Income and Non-Taxable Income. For a typical small business, that's about
all that's required. As you might guess, the non-deductible expenses and non-taxable income accounts are included for your
bookkeeping convenience, as they are not included in profit computations. But, if you are using this program for home use,
rather than as a small business, such account types are very handy indeed. Business Profit is calculated by subtracting the sum
of the deductible expenses from the sum of the taxable income. With TinyBooks Pro, you never have to request a calculation, all
calculations are performed instantly any time you add, delete or modify any item.
TinyBooks Pro Tutorial
If you're interested in TinyBooks Pro (and I hope you are) why not try it for yourself? You can download TinyBooksPro.zip for free,
and try it for free. What you'll download and try is indeed the real thing. No features are left out. Once you have it downloaded,
you might want to try a simple, step-by-step tutorial on how to use TinyBooks Pro, including screenshots.
Here's the Simple TinyBooks Pro Tutorial page. The tutorial
should just take 10 minutes or so, and you'll probably end up knowing 90% of what TinyBooks Pro can do for you.
Professional Invoice Printing
(Invoices, Estimates, Proposals, Statements, etc.)
TinyBooks Pro also includes a very handy, professional Invoice Printer. You can find "Invoice/Estimate Printer..." in the Utility
Menu. It really is quite simple. Many programs that include the ability to print invoices get very complicated very quickly
because you often have to deal with paid and unpaid invoices, and sent and un-sent invoices, listing some invoice amounts
as part of an Accounts Receivables module and not listing others, etc. With TinyBooks Pro, all the Invoice Printer really does is
print professional-looking invoices (and other forms). That's all. Nice and Simple!
Choose "Invoice/Estimate Printer..." from the Utility menu of TinyBooks Pro, and the Invoice Printer dialog will appear. Here, you
can fill in all the various invoice fields (Date, Customer Number, Invoice Number, Bill To, Ship To, etc.) and then TinyBooks Pro
will print a professional-looking Invoice, and on plain paper too, so there's no expensive custom or 3rd-party forms that need to
be purchased.
I'm using the word Invoice a lot, but make no mistake, this dialog is VERY flexible. In addition to Invoices, you can also print
Estimates, Proposals, Statements or virtually any other form you might require.
Here's a rather shrunken picture of the Invoice Printer window (on the left) and a sample of what a printed invoice might look like
(on the right.) In this picture, I didn't yet fill in all the Company Information fields, so the Invoice just shows the name of the
company (The Demo Company), not the address, email, website, phone, etc. This is just the default way that an invoice might look,
you have additional customization opportunities as mentioned below.
Note that not only can you customize the information in the standard fields, but you can customize the field names themselves!
For instance, if you do not want to use the field called "Salesman", you can easily change the name of that field to Saleswoman,
Salesperson, Technician, Broker, Officer, Therapist, etc. If you don't want a "Shipping" field, you can leave it blank, or change
it to Postage, UPS, FedEx, or whatever else you might want.
TinyBooks Pro actually automatically stores a number of the invoices (or other forms) that you've printed. So if you need to print
an invoice (or other form) that you know is very similar to one you've printed before, you can just click the arrow buttons on the
Invoice Printer window until you find a similar looking invoice (or other form) to the one you know you want to print. Modify a
field or two as desired, and click the Print button. Voila! You get a professional-looking invoice (or other form) with hardly any
work. The Invoice Printer window also includes a few buttons to speed up some standard chores...one button will automatically
insert today's date, another button will automatically copy the "Bill To" name and address fields to the "Ship To" name and
address fields just to save you typing. Other buttons automatically change the field names to those suitable for Invoices,
Estimates, Proposals or Statements.
Advanced Note: You might also like to know that you can customize the look of the invoice (or other form) so that it matches the
"style" of your company. TinyBooks Pro uses the information in the Company and Tax Information dialog (in the Utility Menu)
to print the "Company Area" of an Invoice (or other form.) It will use the company name, address, phone, website (and more) that
you have entered into that dialog. But, if you have a standard company font, or wish to include a custom company logo on the
invoice (or other form), you can do that too. TinyBooks Pro has a facility where if you include a picture (CompanyLogo.jpg) that
includes this information, TinyBooks Pro will print that picture in the Company Area of the invoice (or other form) instead of
printing the information on its own. Please see the Invoices section of the Help Window in TinyBooks Pro itself for more
detailed information.
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