One in four firms suffer accounting software failure.

The accounting software market has been blasted after it was revealed a quarter of accountancy firms have suffered software package failures in ‘a business critical sense’ over the past two years. Leading providers such as Sage and Iris were unable to escape criticism in the IT Usage in Accountancy Practices survey by the English ICA’s IT Faculty – which found 24% of accountants had experienced a failure in time and fees recording software. Paul Booth, technical manager of the institute’s faculty of information technology, said: ‘We are concerned by accountancy practices’ reports of shortcomings in IT systems which have resulted in critical business failure. Clearly work needs to be done by software providers to improve the reliability of their packages.’ However, David Guest, chief executive of Iris producers, Transaction Technology, said: ‘Often reliability problems are a result of badly configured networks and not a result of the software.’ A spokeswoman for Sage, said: ‘There is no such thing as perfect software, but we continually test internally and externally our software to continue to ensure there are no critical performance problems with all our core products.’ IT file, page 13.