Aimed at companies with up to 50 employees, Avanquest’s Small Business Manager 2007 is something of a curate’s egg.

It is good in parts, but the good bits are spoiled by an interface that is far from intuitive, a lack of supporting advice and information, and an approach to business management we found hard to get to grips with.

On the plus side, it comprises a suite of seven integrated modules that can be purchased together, or mixed and matched to suit your requirements.

Key among these is the accounting module, which provides basic profit and loss facilities, with a useful optional 1Click Accounts add-on that can generate accounting records direct from online bank statements.

Invoicing, however, isn’t included, so most companies will also need to buy the separate invoices and estimates module, plus the bank reconciliation module.

Each of these modules costs £39.99 ex Vat, with inventory control another £49.99 on top. A basic customer management module is also available for £39.99 ex Vat, which can import contact and appointments information from Outlook.

Plus there’s a business forecasting module (£39.99) and a point-of-sales module (£99.99), the latter adding support for cash registers and PC terminals for customer transactions.

Payroll, however, isn’t an option, which means outsourcing, handling the payroll manually or using a specialist payroll application, which wouldn’t be able to exchange information with the Avanquest suite.

The software supports multiple users, has built-in security and can be installed onto a single PC or a network with a shared database. However, you can’t host the database and a network client on the same server, as with some rival products.

Installation is straightforward, but you get very little help to, for example, configure your company, add customers and customise invoices. Product and service-based companies are both supported and some wizards are provided, along with a modicum of local and online help.

But there’s a lot of jargon and we weren’t sure what we were being asked, or why, a lot of the time.

Also lacking are the tutorials and access to online support we’ve come to expect from all-encompassing small-business packages. There’s only one Pdf manual, and the only link provided is to the Avanquest website to buy other software packages.

Another big problem was the user interface, which mixes web and Windows GUIs, neither of which proves particularly intuitive. It’s all there, but presented in an unfamiliar way and we found it easy to get lost as we tried to work through some of the basic procedures.

Similarly, it was difficult to navigate the steps required to complete common transactions. Added to which we were concerned to find passwords displayed in plain text when setting up new users or editing their details – something you don’t expect to see in this kind of application.

Lastly, most small businesses want to be able to share financial information with accountants and advisors. Competitive products from companies such as Sage and Intuit may cost more, but they make this easy, especially when the same or compatible software is used by the accountants/advisors involved.

The Avanquest package struggles to meet this requirement and isn’t something most financial professionals would be familiar with.