If home is where your heart is, then there’s a pretty good chance that home—or at least your Home Folder—is where you prefer to keep your business’ financial information. While there are plenty of excellent Web-based apps you can use for tracking your business finances, if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of working within a browser and keeping your business’ financial information in the cloud, a traditional Mac application is your best option.

I looked at four apps for managing your business invoicing and finances: Cognito Software’s MoneyWorks Gold, The Acclivity Group’s AccountEdge Pro, Intuit’s QuickBooks for Mac, and Marketcircle’s Billings Pro. The first three are traditional invoicing and accounting applications, while Billings Pro offers compelling features, but also requires additional software to complete the package. Though all of these apps offer excellent tools for managing your business finances, MoneyWorks Gold stands above the rest, for an excellent user interface.

Top choice: MoneyWorks Gold 7

If you’ve been around the Mac accounting game for any length of time you’re likely already aware of the more well-known players, QuickBooks and AccountEdge. The one application that probably hasn’t made it onto your radar—but should have—is Cognito Software’s MoneyWorks Gold (; 9). MoneyWorks Gold is a solid, full-featured business accounting application that is networkable, supports multiple users, and works on both Macs and PCs.

MoneyWorks offers simple access to all your business data and the options for sharing your data with Mac and PC users on your network.

MoneyWorks uses a flowchart-like interface similar to what’s used by both AccountEdge and QuickBooks for Mac. The application’s interface consists of a sidebar with navigation links to MoneyWorks’ collection of financial tools and a larger main window that displays a flowchart that changes depending on which item you’ve selected in the sidebar. As is the case with both AccountEdge and QuickBooks 2014, the flowchart attempts to create a visual relationship between various business activities. While this makes all of these applications a bit more interesting visually, in practice I’ve rarely used the flowchart to figure out how the many aspects of a business are related.

Most of the tools you’ll use on a regular basis appear in the navigation section entitled Day-to-day. Here you can create quotes, sales orders, and invoices, reconcile your bank accounts, create and receive purchase order items, and review accounts payable. Each of these same tasks are also available in other areas of the application and selecting other Navigation options provides you with access to a deeper set of tools and features. For example, when you select Items and Inventory you have tools for receiving stock on items you’ve ordered, viewing a journal list of all the stock you have on hand, and building new stock items from items you have in your existing inventory.

With multiple users enabled, MoneyWorks makes it easy to manage which users have access to what in your company’s data file.

Source: www.macworld.com