synergia

A recurring nightmare for many small business owners in East & Central Africa is that the Piracy Police will come knocking on your door. As soon as they ask to see your licenses, you know your goose is cooked. That’s simply because many small businesses in the region use 90% pirated software. My basic survey showed that this is the biggest reason some have been forced to use spreadsheets for their accounting.  Legit accounting software is priced out of their reach.  At SYNERGIA, we encourage small businesses to use software they can afford.  Accounting software is not an exception.

I first came across Turbocash in 2005 and I immediately knew this was a product that provided a serious solution for capital-challenged small businesses in Africa. I had used Pastel 5.2 for a couple of years and the prospect of a system as good (even better in my opinion) without the steep cost was irresistible. The new version (Turbocash 3.75) is even better.

A couple of our clients in Kenya are using Turbocash and it works very well for them. One is a fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) distributor based in Mombasa, Kenya. The other is an ethnic interiors business based in Nairobi. The FMCG distributor is more interested in monitoring stock movements, inventory levels and cash flow while the ethnic interiors shop is more interested in point-of-sale functionality and inventory levels. It is not a perfect system in its ability to fulfill your every whim (speaking from an accounting software perspective), but it will get the job done. Every time.

It uses a fairly good system for storing data (Borland’s Database Engine [BDE]) and works well on Microsoft’s Vista operating system. I also spotted a plug-in that allows a business with many branches to use a multi-branch feature which I will investigate and let you know exactly what it does.

This may seem like a vague review of the software but the point is to point you in the direction of an alternative to the more expensive systems available in the market. Put that $600 in what your business is really about and download Turbocash instead. If you really like it, consider purchasing something from their online store to support the project. That’s how we keep great free software around longer.

And did I mention it has some integration with Microsoft Office?

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