While I was rather fixated on the smaller accounting solutions, the mention of SAP does point out that even the much larger and more expensive software (often customized) still doesn’t solve the challenges many businesses have, so they use Monarch.

Do you use Monarch, or any other relatively inexpensive software, to fill in the gaps in your accounting and management software? How’s that working out for your company?

What’s not doing the job for you that we should know about? What’s forcing you to look for alternatives?

Grasshopper

My own personal business accounting package has several years of data which I don’t feel like trying to convert but was discontinued a couple of years ago. I can do what I need to do with what I have – except that one of two reports related to periodic reporting (quarterly in my case) for a Government Tax collection scheme just don’t work as I need them to. Not even as well as the previous version in this case! No wonder they abandoned the product.

So, each time I had to produce the numbers I needed to go through the detail to move some figures around (it does not help that some of the transactions required don’t seem to be allowed for in the way the application expects to be set up) and that, being only a quarterly ‘necessary evil’, I often forget the precise detail of how I get the right numbers in the right boxes on the form.

One day I decided it was just really dumb not to use Monarch. Not only could I make the number come up in the right places, I could present the information in a way that had built in anomaly checking and a much easier method of checking back if it looked necessary to re-allocate something across categories (something mis-coded perhaps, or where tax rules had changed.)

Better still the Monarch process acts as documentation to support the activity (and remind what it is all meant to be doing. Hey, it’s a Tax I am collecting for the Government for free – why would I want to become an expert at it? )

So now the task takes much less time than it did – or rather I have more time to ensure that, being a cautious person where taxes are concerned, the input and output numbers do not favour the Government more than they should according to their rules!

I save and print both the original reports and the new Monarch Table with its additional calculations. The the cell based structure of the Excel is a great place to store the table as ‘active’ data for the detail of the transactions being reported and the summary that is the basis of the simplified reporting form to send of with any payment or request for refund.

A little project that was time very well spent, in my opinion, and worked around two or three limitations of the application which, now that it is discontinued, will never be fixed.

Grant