Some (actually quite a few) years ago we looked at whether we needed something more sophisticated than paper and pencil, and found that a lot of accounting businesses were single-person operations who wrote their own "programs." Credentials (especially the believability parts) were vague for a majority. Within a very short time we saw several of those "liquidated," - leading to our conclusion that if you really need a program it may be difficult to feel that you've found one that will outlast your business, without going to the better known "establishment" programs.

There is, of course, the option of just hiring an outside "bookkeeper" to take care of it all for you with whatever program the keeper uses.

A lot depends on whether you'll have to provide a lot of details to your customers since some programs can make it a lot easier to fill in the blanks for those kinds of reports. If transactions are fairly simple the reports likely will be similarly simple, so you'll have to decide how much program you need for that.

There's also some impact from whether or not you're in a "regulated industry" that may require audit information to a government agency. It's less a problem from the amount of information you'd need to keep than for being able to organize it the way the lunatics running the government agency demand it be done.

If you sell products to the public, keeping track of sales taxes charged/received/sent in to the gov can be burdensome, and if you sell merchandise to resellers you may have to keep track of "exempt" sales for them. If you sell services to the public there sometimes are some rather strange rules that depend on the kinds of services.

If you employ "office help" or similar, there's a fair amount of extra tracking for wages and withholding and the like, and of course for "employee benefits;" but part-time "contract" employees generally are just a once per year form to the IRS with copy to the worker. How the "partners" in the business take their pay would also be a consideration.

From what I've seen, there's been little change in recommendations among the "major players" over the last decade or two, with the same ones appearing at the top of the published rankings and in about the same order. Lots of smaller programs have come - and mostly gone, although there's never been a shortage of them.

Recently published "comparisons" are about the same as 15 or 20 years ago when we looked fairly seriously. The Peachtree suite (with more version options now) sits near the top, as "most versatile for a wide range of businesses" but with "some learning curve" and somewhat higher price; and Quick-Books appear to be still around and rated favorably for really small businesses. ("She" decided to use Quick Books - Quicken - for her "official" records, and it was basically her business; but I backed it all up in Excel, and we used the Excel recordes at tax time. Her cheap "My Invoices" program did make it easy to send "officious looking" invoices to her custormers.)

A search for "businss software" or "accounting programs" with "reviews" added to either, or something similar, should fill in the blanks.

And note that the ones I mentioned are "an observation" not a "recommendation."

And of course I'm in the US. Canada or the UK may pose different requirements, and even some states here have "different" rules.

John