Cognito Launches Major Version Upgrade to MoneyWorks Gold, its Premier Cross-Platform Accounting Software

Cognito Software, the developer of the MoneyWorks range of accounting solutions for small and medium businesses, today announced the availability of MoneyWorks Gold 5, a major upgrade to the popular MoneyWorks Gold 4 package.
“One of the main thrusts of this upgrade,” said Dr Grant Cowie, the Managing Director of Cognito, “was to streamline both the entry of data and, more importantly, provide the capability for better management and financial reporting. An accounting system is of not much use if it can’t provide the information you need.”
In addition to the significant enhancements to the inbuilt report-writers, MoneyWorks 5 contains over two hundred other refinements and new features. “The major new ‘check box’ feature is the implementation of full accounting for multiple currencies. But the minor refinements add up to much better user experience which results in easier, faster, and more accurate accounting,” said Dr Cowie.
MoneyWorks Gold 5 also supports the latest technologies, including Windows Vista. For Mac users, it has a full “universal binary”, meaning it runs natively on both PowerPC Macs and the new-generation Intel-based Mac.
MoneyWorks Gold 5 has exceptionally fast networking for multi-user access. “In this interconnected world, even small businesses now demand fast, simultaneous access to the accounts from several computers”, says Dr Cowie. “We go further in that we allow users on both Mac and Windows to simultaneously access the same data—we are finding that increasingly businesses are running their accounts on a Mac in an attempt to protect them from viruses and other malware.“
Highlights of MoneyWorks Gold 5
Multi-currency support — Designed for small and medium businesses who have customers and suppliers in other countries, the multi-currency features of MoneyWorks Gold 5 will track bank balances and invoices in any currency. With automatic handling of realised and unrealised currency gains and losses, MoneyWorks Gold 5 takes much of the complexity out of handling foreign currencies.
Extensive new report writing capabilities — Recognising the need for organisations to prepare information in a myriad of fashions, Cognito has significantly enhanced the report-writers within MoneyWorks Gold. These now allow users to create complex reports based on any of the information within MoneyWorks. Examples include commission, rebates, committed funds, material requirements, sales trends, and top salespeople. Reports can also include pie, bar and line charts.
Off-ledger time-series data — MoneyWorks Gold 5 allows organisations to store actual and budget time series data that is not “finance related”. Examples include the number of staff, working days in month, and the number of students (for a school). This, in association with the powerful report-writer, allows for the easy creation and monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) for the organisations.
“There are over 250 new features in MoneyWorks Gold 5,” said Dr Cowie, “from a vastly simplified bank reconciliation to more powerful bank statement importing. We’ve refreshed the user interface and managed to make the networking even faster, so that a complex 58 page report on 8000 stock items with hundreds of backorders now takes less than a minute. The feedback from our extensive beta test programme and early adopters has been overwhelmingly positive.”
Pricing and Availability
MoneyWorks Gold 5 is available now at $895 (including GST), with additional per-user client licences at $300 each (including GST).  It can be purchased on-line at www.moneyworkssystems.com.au, or from selected resellers (call 1800 105 449 for details).
Trial versions of MoneyWorks Gold 5 are also available for download at www.moneyworkssystems.com.au.
About MoneyWorks
First released in 1992 for Apple Mac computers, MoneyWorks has evolved into a powerful, cross-platform business management platform for small to medium business. MoneyWorks products are designed to inter-operate with other systems (such as FileMaker Pro, Excel, Access, Delphi), making MoneyWorks a natural accounting hub for larger, integrated systems. MoneyWorks products are now used by more than 12,000 organisations in over 35 countries.
About Cognito Software
Cognito Software is based in Auckland, New Zealand and launched the first MoneyWorks accounting system in February 1992. Designed from the ground-up to provide the best possible GST support for both data entry and GST reporting, MoneyWorks products are localised or self-localising for GST/VAT in Australia, New Zealand, Canada (including support for Provincial Sales Tax), U.S.A, Nepal, South Africa and the U.K.