This article has been authored by Rishabh Gupta. You can also get your articles published on Chartered Club by mailing them to us at [email protected]

Following up from my last article wherein I shared various cost effective methods for CA’s to set up their own practice, I will now be sharing with you – various free accounting and office softwares which will help CA’s in managing their own office books  as well as your Client’s Accounting Books.

1. Accounting on-the-move->Busy Accounting Software

Busy Accounting Software has been around for more than a decade and has started gaining popularity in the past few years. With a better and more interactive Graphic User-interface than Tally and offering dongles synced with your central server, you can turn any computer having a busy software your personal accounting machine.

It is a highly user friendly software and the ease with which a user can access its features, makes it advisable for businesses to implement the Busy Accounting Software.

There are 2 editions of Busy Accounting Software namely the Standard and the Enterprise Edition and both these editions are available in 3 Variants. To supplement these software’s, Busy also offers Free Accounting and Inventory software which can be downloaded from:

http://www.busy.in/index.php?p=fas

2. Managing Expenses-> Expensify

This handy website keeps a record of all expenses of anyone, be it a person a company and prepares handy reports for analysis. You can also integrate it with your bank records, and sync it with your smart phone it also has an advance feature where you just have to click and upload a picture of a bill through your phone and expensify will automatically record and classify.

The Expensify software can be accessed online at

https://www.expensify.com/

3. Remote Access->Team viewer

For those who need to access the files of their client in a computer this remote sharing device is the most common where a user sitting at the comfort of his office can directly access another computer and carry out nearly anything possible.

The software can be downloaded from

www.teamviewer.com

4. File Sharing

  • Drop Box – If you have more than one office and want to send out office memos and files that more or less are relevant for everyone. This is your best option. Providing a certain amount of space on your computer, the files are synced across all computers, smart phones and devices that support this application. It currently gives a free 2GB space and an option to increase it by paying or using their promotional offer. It can be downloaded from

http://www.dropbox.com

  • Groove Folder SynchronizationThis feature comes with MS Office and allows you to choose which folders to share and with whom. As with all applications you need an account and also require an account for others. After an initial headache you can safely share data with your clients on a common platform instead of attaching and sending it as a mail.

5. Your Personal Assistant->Evernote:

This online application allows you to take notes anywhere, through your phone or on the computer, you can plan everything to the detail and put it here, similarly you can also take photos, videos, audio, web pages, scanned documents and store it here for reference later on, including daily planners, contacts, reports etc. Just like others it’s available on almost every phone. As this always keeps things arranged, you’ll have your documents whenever you need them.

The evernote version for windows can be downloaded from here:-

http://www.evernote.com/about/download/windows.php?file=Win&btn=grey