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[ Go to July 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by Joel T. Patz
One-Write Plus 6.0 is a general-purpose accounting package for small businesses that want the basics and aren't interested in learning about debits and credits. Despite its targeted audience (accounting novices), the program offers minimal help when setting up a new company. You get 13 sample charts of accounts based on business type, but no wizard or generalized help. Instead, there's only a clumsy menu option to assist in establishing account balances. One-Write Plus lets you add whatever you need-customers, vendors, inventory items-on the fly, and you can keep an unlimited number of open years. Although you can't choose which fields appear in any of the reports, you can easily set filter criteria, sort order and date ranges. Unfortunately, other parts of the program's interface are less friendly. For example, you must use two screens to split a payment among multiple invoices. The process for setting up and paying an employee is a convoluted one. That's a shame, because here the program is incredibly flexible-you can enter unlimited deductions, pay on a variety of schedules and handle 401(k) deductions. One problem we encountered: When we accidentally clicked the W2 button for a new employee, the system crashed, because there was no income to report. The printed documentation is sorely lacking. For the G/L Account field, for example, you're told to enter the right account number to be charged. A CD-ROM tutorial offers custom setup instructions, but we found the online documentation more useful. With so much power in Peachtree Complete Accounting and QuickBooks Pro 5.0 (both on our WinList), One-Write Plus will only interest DOS upgraders who don't wish to change accounting packages.
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