Is there a good substitute for QuickBooks (to be used in Europe)?asked by Mihai (Romania)

Mihai, there is a hughe number of alternatives. As other mentioned before the market leader for SME accounting package in the UK is SAGE, in the Netherlands EXACT and AVAST, in Germany SAGE KHK and as you probably figured by now, each national market has its specific application favourite. Since in most European countries accounting principals are very regulated by the authorities ( the common rule is the more south of Europe the higher the grade of regulation by authorities) accounting application for SME are developed for each particular country to comply with its national local requirements. Even Quickbooks has different versions running in Europe (UK/IRL, DE, ES, FR) in order to comply with the regulations of the relvant market (unfortunatly they are not really compatible with each other, only lists of master data are exchangable but not transaction data). If you can afford it I recommend to use MySAP the SAP plattform developed for SME, another alternative would be Micrsoft Dynamics, kind of a MS Navision succesor. So to recommend a software for usage in Europe, you need to clarify the tax jurisdiction concerned . If you deal with more than one jursidction, than you are probably best served with one of the greater and costlier packages as MS Dynamics, Sage Line100, EXACT Globe 2003 etc. They do not differ much in their features ovarall, its rather the support service levels and the price.
We use QB premier (UK version) and customized it to fit all our tax jurisdiction we operate, but this has the disadvantage, that we have to key all fiscal forms for the relvant authority by hand again. For us this is okay, but if you are not familiar with the various requirements in our very diverse Europe, you better rely on application made for a particular tax jurisdiction.