e-conomic

e-conomic is an accounting software for SMEs but comes with major turn-offs and relatively expensive fees. e-conomic has a lot to re-organize and is definitely not an option for small businesses, as even professional accountants need to be re-educated to cope with simple bookkeeping. (Compare e-conomic with other accounting applications)

Getting Started

Starting with e-conomic proved relatively simple yet comes with a feeling of incompleteness at first. As we learned, e-conomic waives dashboard fidelity of accounting applications we have reviewed so far.
From managers' perspective, it would reflect on a waiters tip were they in a restaurant. But nevertheless, this is not a deal breaker. So we moved on.

e-conomic has an easy to navigate layout and we felt comfortable locating the right functions. However, when it came to fine tuning the chart of accounts for our imaginary entity, we were astonished at how lost we were in a supposedly easy task.
Misplacement of terminologies
and unnecessary adversity indicate lack of accounting expertise behind the application which you can witness by zooming the image to the right.

Contacts

 

In e-conomic, adding customers/contacts posed no snags at all, however it is little inconsiderate when it comes to adding customers with beginning balances, that was not accounted for.

We also tried bulk uploading customers/contacts into e-conomic and had to struggle with the software-centric required fields along with the clumsy matching of fields. In the end nothing came out even after e-conomizing the CSV file accordingly, as the new fields were not available for matching purposes, so we gave up.

Products

Since we signed up for a Free Trial to review e-conomic, we were unable to study "Inventory Management" which comes as a very expensive add-on for 50 GBP/month on top of your subscription fees.

As for whatever was available to us, adding service items was as usual as in other applications.

Invoicing

 

Invoicing with e-conomic is simple yet unorthodox. Instead of "Save", "Approve" and other commonly accepted naming conventions it comes with different terminologies that brings unwanted wondering.

Not to mention recognition of PDF to the exclusion of other file formats, document attachment is a value adding feature that e-conomic should enhance.
Receiving payments from customers is another puzzle, and I bet e-conomic offers extensive re-educating courses to accounting professionals to be able to do bookkeeping normally.

Expenses

 

Registering expense is another masterpiece riddle by e-conomic and to be frank, this is the first"accounting" application that strained our brain more than FreeAgent.

Contra account that gives us an unknown pop-up window, redundant debit/credit options to choose. All in all it boils down to unpleasant expense recording.

Reports

 

e-conomic offers a range of vital financial reports such as, Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, General Ledger, Trial Balance and Budget.

Unfortunately, not all basic reports offer drill-down into numbers, that leaves us wish better transparency in the future, and not all are accurate. As our sales invoice amount is recognized with negative sign in Equity section of the balance sheet, which totally screws up the whole image.