News briefs

Help is at hand to automate one of accounting’s most exasperating functions. Psion has released Expense Tracker software to let users of its Series 3a and Series 3c palmtop computers record their expenses on the move. Taxi fares and other incidentals can be logged at the time they are incurred on electronic forms tailored to match the organisation’s normal expense reports. The end-of-the-month report can then be transferred to a desktop Windows accounting system. The software costs u29.95 and is available from Psion stockists such as Dixons, WH Smith and John Lewis.

Property company Land Securities has signed a contract with Coda to upgrade its financial systems to Coda-Financials. The software will run on Compaq network servers running Windows NT and Microsoft’s SQL Server database, and will support 210 users. Coda’s Purchasing and Fixed Asset modules will look after Land Securities’ #5bn property portfolio and Coda-Link will allow the company to integrate Financials with its existing property management system.

In response to the trend of more companies turning to Windows NT applications, Quarterdeck has upgraded its CleanSweep utility to run under Microsoft’s 32-bit operating system. CleanSweep searches for duplicate files, redundant DLLs and other disk detritus and removes them to save hard disk space.

The street price for Quarterdeck 3.0 is likely to be around #40.