Why Grid-Based Accounting Software Still Works

We think Excel may be the best business product ever made. That probably tells you quite a lot about how we think accounting software should work. 

Excel puts a lot of relevant information in front of you and lets you work directly with it. You can compare, select, change, copy, fill, sort, filter and calculate without constantly moving into another screen. Someone can understand the basic idea of rows and columns within minutes, while an experienced user can become remarkably quick. 

Business software should work in much the same way. It should be easy enough to learn, but it should also reward familiarity. Someone who has used a product for ten months or ten years ought to be able to work materially faster than someone opening it for the first time. 

Much of modern SaaS design has moved towards cards, widgets, dashboards, generous spacing and guided workflows. Xero and QuickBooks are obvious examples. For a novice sole trader processing only a handful of transactions, the productivity cost of that approach may be fairly small. Add volume, repetition and professional users, though, and the trade-offs become more obvious. 

A screen can look simpler while making the work slower. 

Those principles led us to Red

Red isn’t another accounting package and it isn’t another AI model. It’s a conversational connection between modern AI assistants and the information already held in Big Red Cloud. Instead of navigating menus, building reports or exporting spreadsheets, you can simply ask questions about your business.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been using Red ourselves in ways that would have seemed unusual only a year ago. We’ve used it to draft statutory accounts, prepare monthly management accounts, produce business performance reports, investigate accounts receivable and accounts payable, identify possible bookkeeping mistakes and suggest how they might be corrected. We’ve also used it to carry out authorised actions such as creating invoices.

None of those activities are new. What is changing is the interface. For decades we’ve expected people to learn how to use accounting software. Increasingly, accounting software is learning how to communicate with people.

The Right Amount of Information

There is nothing wrong with dashboards, cards or guided processes. We use them in Big Red Cloud where they suit the task. Someone setting up a company for the first time benefits from guidance, and the Purchase Importer deliberately takes users through extraction, review and posting because control matters before accounting records are created. 

The problem comes when visual simplicity becomes the objective regardless of the work being done. 

Accounting often involves comparison. If you are reviewing transactions, the date, customer or supplier, reference, account, VAT treatment, amount and status may all be relevant at once. Hiding some of those fields can make a screen look cleaner, but it does not make the underlying accounting any simpler. It can simply force the user to open records individually, move between screens and remember what they saw elsewhere. 

Good UX tries to minimise that burden. One of the oldest usability principles is recognition rather than recall: users should not have to hold information in their heads when it can sensibly remain visible. Another is efficiency for experienced users, including shortcuts and accelerators that make repeated work faster. 

A grid is particularly good at both. 

Big Red Cloud’s existing books already work this way. The Sales Book presents entries for a period together and allows them to be reordered by column. The Cash Book keeps transactions and analysis information visible in a columnar layout and supports keyboard navigation. Transaction entry includes shortcuts for completing allocations and copying existing entries instead of making the user start again each time. 

The Purchase Importer follows the same logic at higher volumes, with search, filtering, saved views and lockable columns. Bank feeds use rules to classify recurring items and allow transactions to be reviewed and created in batches. 

These are fairly ordinary-looking features. They are also the kinds of features that save experienced users time every day.

More Information Does Not Mean More Clutter

Information density and clutter are not the same thing. 

A cluttered interface contains things that compete for attention without helping with the task. A well-designed professional interface can show a great deal because the user genuinely needs to see a great deal. The job of design is to decide what earns its place on the screen and organise it well. 

SAP makes this distinction explicitly in its Fiori design system. Touch interfaces get larger, more spacious controls, while desktop applications used with a mouse and keyboard can use compact layouts where higher information density helps. Microsoft takes a similar approach in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, where its grids support grouping, frozen columns, calculated values, keyboard selection, copy and paste, and rapid data entry. 

That distinction is useful in accounting software because different jobs require different interfaces. Looking at the overall health of a business may call for a dashboard. Entering, reviewing or correcting 200 transactions is a different problem, and an information-rich grid may be much more efficient. 

Some of the changes Xero and QuickBooks have made recently point in the same direction. Xero has added keyboard navigation and drag-to-fill to transaction forms, while QuickBooks has expanded keyboard shortcuts and talked explicitly about reducing unnecessary clicks and switching between mouse and keyboard. 

As transaction volumes rise, shortcuts, keyboard navigation and direct manipulation become increasingly valuable. Big Red Cloud has long used sortable books, keyboard-assisted transaction entry, reusable entries, bank rules and other mechanisms aimed at exactly that kind of repeated work.

What Excel Got Right

This is also why we keep coming back to Excel. 

We are not suggesting that businesses should replace accounting software with spreadsheets. Proper accounting software gives you controls, audit trails, automation, compliance, collaboration and a dependable system of record. 

What Excel gets right is the relationship between the user and the information. The data is visible, the interaction is direct, and the product becomes more powerful as the user becomes more experienced. 

Forty years of spreadsheet use have also created a huge amount of learned behaviour. People already understand rows, columns, cells, filters, selection and filling. There is little value in discarding those conventions simply because cards and oversized controls look more contemporary in a product screenshot. 

Big Red Cloud’s Power Accounting add-in reflects the same philosophy. It lets users work with BRC data through Excel and move information in both directions, including customers, suppliers, products, sales entries, invoices and purchases. We built it because there are times when a spreadsheet is simply an efficient place to work.

The Pay Run Should Be the Screen

We are carrying the same thinking into our new Big Red Cloud Payroll for January 2027. 

Payroll is a good example of a task where seeing more at once is useful. A person running payroll needs to understand employees, hours, rates, gross pay, deductions, tax, employer costs, net pay and exceptions, often while comparing one employee or one pay period with another. 

Our approach is to make the pay run itself the workspace. 

Rather than making someone click into employee after employee just to understand what is happening, the new payroll will provide the information needed to run payroll on one screen. The user can scan the workforce, compare values, notice an exception, make a correction and continue without repeatedly losing context. 

AI and automation can support that workspace by highlighting anomalies, removing repetitive work and helping explain what deserves attention. Big Red Cloud already uses automation in areas such as purchase invoice processing and bank-feed rules, while RED lets users interrogate their accounting data. The useful role for AI is to make the work easier without obscuring the information behind it.

Mobile Should Suit Mobile Work

The same product philosophy leads to a different answer on a phone. 

A mobile device is useful because it is portable, always with you and has a camera. Big Red Cloud’s mobile app therefore concentrates on jobs that genuinely benefit from those characteristics, such as raising an invoice while away from the desk or photographing a purchase invoice with Snap & Send and sending it into the Purchase Importer. 

There is little sense in shrinking an entire desktop accounting workspace onto a phone, just as there is little sense in making the desktop product less efficient so that every screen can resemble a mobile interface. A business owner checking something quickly on a phone and a bookkeeper working through a morning’s transactions on a large monitor may be the same person, but they are doing different jobs. 

The interface should reflect that.

Design for the work

We want Big Red Cloud to look good. Clear typography, sensible hierarchy, consistent controls and pleasant visual design all contribute to usability. But the amount of white space on a screen is not a useful measure of how modern the software is. 

What matters is whether users can see the information they need, compare related items without losing context, work efficiently in bulk and take advantage of the keyboard, camera or touchscreen when each is useful. 

Those principles have shaped Big Red Cloud for years, from its accounting books and bank-feed rules to Power Accounting and the mobile app. They are shaping the new payroll too. 

The grid has survived every generation of business software for a reason. For the right job, it remains one of the most efficient ways for people to work with information.