Amiga Accounting Software

[Pat the Cat]

What accounting software you can use on the Amiga depends on 2 big  factors. Your local trading laws, and what Amiga you want to use.

Typically,  most people doing this are very small businesses to medium businesses  doing their own accounts. So even a very simple package like Easy Ledger  might fit the bill. If you do your own, you certainly can use an Amiga  for basic accounting. Accountants aren't allowed to anymore.

https://www.mcguirewoods.com/Client-Resources/Alerts/2015/2/New-EU-Accounting-Directive.aspx

If  you are SELLING accountancy services, for use in the EU, it just won't  do what is needed to comply with the new EU accountancy regulations.

Why  is complex, but it boils down to this with Amiga releases and EU  history;- Prior to 1993, nothing had to be compliant with an EU  standard, but might require local rubber stamping as "suitable for use"  when selling accounting services. Most packages didn't really take  import/export affairs into consideration as well as you would need now,  but were OK, if you can stand the look of the thing. Some of it was  written in Hisoft Basic or even AMOS, the PD versions (freeware, not  open source usually). Even that could do your job, if you look, and  check it will run on your local Amiga.

If you are doing your own  accounts, it doesn't matter. If you are using accountancy services, THEY  have to comply and are hiking their prices.

In my neighbourhood, UK, All PLCs have to be  independently audited, they pay the bill, but don't have to use EU compliant accounting software so long as they can present legitimate records to the auditor (who must use EU complaint methods to assess it and either pass or fail the set of accounts). Sole traders do their own accounts, don't get  audited very often, and wave two fingers at the EU and everybody else  except their local tax service. Who don't have to talk to anyone except  the local ruling class.

What does matter if you are a sole trader  is submitting tax returns, and I'd better get mine sorted quickly, I'm 4  years late already. Got another 16 years before I'm as bad as Donald Trump with things like that.

[Pat the Cat]

Well, I don't know what happened. Because there were DOZENS of choices released. I don't know what happened to this one, but they were out there, and probably still are, mostly. I find it hilarious that the Amiga is being considered for this role 25 years later, but economics plays funny tricks on us all.

http://amr.abime.net/issue_194_coverdisks

Guess who wrote. And had to get corrected multiple times doing so, it's true.

That one was good with a real time clock, did cashflow in real time or near as dammit. I don't know if it's suitable, but you could get SuperBase  (SuperCalc?) for the Amiga, so you have thousands of possible archaic choices really. PFM an early one that was OK. Not for large operations. Time is not easy to account for on a global scale, not much from that era did really. Ideally you would want to check and correct the clock every so often, they were not that accurate to the second for an infiite period. It's not Rugby Radio clock or whatever internet standard.

PFM sticks in my mind, the Superwhatever option(s?) were very expensive and very powerful for datacrunching. That isn't what you want unless you're a crazily talented with them already. Real people and real companies used PFM, it hung around for a while. Pretty solid coding in C I think.

Don't do accounts on a 1.3 Amiga if you can avoid doing so, because you can't use keymaps at all well for different currencies I think. Use 2.0 or later, you want locales etc. 3.1 onwards does it best, but you need a fast system with fast RAM whatever Amiga OS ideally. 7MHz is too slow sometimes, especially later releases that expected more punch. The pretty graphics are a real processor eater sometimes, if you want 256 colour graphics. It's better to stick to lowres or hires grayscale. Or similar simple colours that aren't crippling eyestrainers. If you try and make it look like a half modern PC, it runs a lot slower. It can look like accelerated Mac Classic, pretty elegant and responsive.

The equally free (? Some versions PFM I think) HomeBank app appears to  have been sourced from this or other developed Amiga accountancy tool.  It is not available for the AmigaOS on a native Amiga machine.
http://homebank.free.fr/

[Pat the Cat]

... Or simply delete a check or entry and invalid financial statements.  Fraud controls like vendor level tracking and requiring a reversing entry to adjust balances are hard to find in Amiga circa 80-90's software .

This is true, none of the software from that era can do proper anti-fraud measures, they are NOT implemented. At all.

I guess it would be possible on some solutions to add those controls via an Arexx port, if that software has such a port that gives forwarding and receiving commands to the accounting system. It is no trivial thing to do that do any good measure. Don't do accountancy for somebody else, but a company does itself not have to comply if they are doing their own accounts. They still have to keep fair accounts and present them for auditing. In England and Wales, they do. "fair" covers quite a bit of ground here.

You could not do that live on an Amiga, hooked up to the internet, doing other peoples accounts, using an Amiga. You could do it on an Amiga, entering data manually. That's two different things entirely. Hooking it up to a network is a little risky. Keeping it offline and feeding written or printed data to it (easily kept for verification) is the more sensible way to go. You don't need accounts to get second by second updates of stock expenditure usually. If you have lots of data you could burn that on a CD-ROM and feed it. You also need to securely record the information you get back out of the accounts package. For further verification, obviously.

I did a search of aminet on "Finance", nothing usable in itself for purpose, some demo contenders maybe, also good demo if you want to learn how Stock Exchanges are played, for real money, in the real world (it's a sim, don't get that amazed).

http://aminet.net/search?query=finance