The Accounting Software Library (TAL) is a tool designed to help you select accounting software that is appropriate for your organizations needs. You enter your software requirements into the program, and it analyzes the more than 110 accounting software products in its database, comparing them against your requirements.
TAL is modeled on a generally accepted software selection process and comes with documentation that provides information about how and why this methodology should be followed. TAL is not designed to make a software choice for you, but will reduce the time it takes to define your requirements and analyze the available products.
Getting Started
After a quick and easy installation, the first step in using TAL is to create a question set that encompasses your requirements. TAL comes with more than 2500 questions and several sample question sets to get you started. In order to develop your questions set, identify which of the specific requirements (questions) apply to your organization and give those an importance weighting of one to nine. Each question provides a full explanation at the bottom of the screen to define terms that might be unfamiliar.
Product Analysis
Once the question set has been completed, TAL ranks the software vendors in its database by comparing your weighted needs against each product's feature set. Solutions, the Richmond, Virginia-based company that publishes TAL, keeps the database current by querying vendors about whether or not a specific feature is supported, whether the product can support the feature using reporting tools , third-party products, additional fields, and modifications and customizations or whether a future release of the product will provide the support required.
You can select specific products or groups of products for analysis by price range, by specialized distribution and manufacturing, and by certification through Solutions, which meets with each vendor annually and verifies their responses against the software's functionality. Currently 12 vendors representing 19 products are certified.
Versions and Costs
TAL comes in four versions:
- The standard Edition features more than 110 products and 2500 questions covering the core financial and distribution applications (including assembly and light manufacturing). It sells for $395 US and is aimed at small to mid-sized organizations.
- Both the Enterprise and Modifiable Editions contain more than 150 products and 4000 questions, and add detailed manufacturing and multi-currency to the applications covered. They are aimed at mid-sized and large organizations with more complex requirements. The Enterprise Edition sells for $750 US. The Modifiable edition, at $1295 US, also includes the ability to both add questions and products to the database. This allows you to adapt TAL to include industry-specific applications, questions and products. You can create a customized requirements definition, send this to your candidate vendors, and import their responses for analysis.
- The Reseller Edition is sold to software vendors looking for the same software as the Standard Edition. It is the same price, but resellers receive manuals to increase their services to potential customers, including Business Excellence, a manual of business process concepts. All versions come with a 30-day guarantee. Free updates and support are offered for six months, and after that you can subscribe to updates for $150 US per year.
The Bottom Line
Would you buy this product? Definitely. I firmly believe in conducting a properly structured software selection analysis to reduce the costs and frustrations associated with implementation (which are far more than the actual cost of the software). The selection process can be laborious and expensive, and the tools, product database and analysis engine provided in TAL are well worth the price to reduce the time it takes to select the right software for your needs.
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