Microsoft Office Accounting Discontinued

As of November 16, 2009, Microsoft Office Accounting Express will no longer be distributed in North America or the UK.  Microsoft announced the discontinuation of the simple accounting software for small business and home business with the reason, "we have determined that existing free templates within Office used with Excel was a better option for small businesses...". Hmmmmm, it doesn't say much for accounting software when it can be replaced by spreadsheet templates.

So, what's an Office Accounting Express user to do? You're going to have to switch to another accounting software, eventually. Microsoft will support the software for 5 more years, and customer invoices can still be paid through PayPal. eBay and Equifax features are gone as of December 15, 2009.

Intuit is offering a free tool to convert data for use with QuickBooks software and QuickBooks Simple Start 2010.  If you want to make the move to the convenience of online accounting software,  NolaPro has documentation showing how to convert and import Office Accounting data into NolaPro.

Bnet Business Hacks has some good suggestions for replacing Microsoft Office Accounting, and one of the choices from this list of small business accounting software would work as a replacement as well.

• Read the Microsoft Accounting Discontinuation FAQ's for more details.
• 6 Tips for Choosing Small Business Accounting Software