The Accountancy Co-operative provides a wide range of services and advice to help you meet the demands for the safer business environment.

Try B.4.U Buy
AVG v9
Internet Security

StuffIt
File zipping and encryption for Windows and Mac

TrueCrypt
Disk and File
Encryption
for Windows,
Mac and Linux

Free Software

Below, you can find links to useful (and also some free) software which is great if you are running on a smaller budget, or you just need a no-cost option for use at home. We have been using software listed here in at the Coop for at least a few of years or so and have found it to work extremely well for us. We hope you will find the same. These programs have won recognised awards around the world! We are an Affilliate for SyncBack and AVG, our links connect you to the authorised download servers so you can try before you buy.

Open, edit and save Microsoft Office documents with the Free suite for Microsoft Windows™, Mac OSX, Linux, etc. Latest Release LibreOffice which was born out of OpenOffice. If you share your documents over a network and need to use both LibreOffice and Microsoft Office 2000 on the same network then we recommend OpenOffice2.4.2 instead which operates on the same File Locking method as older versions of MS Office. Only use LibreOffice if all your computers will be running this. (Otherwise one vendor's suite will not be aware that the other software is accessing documents at the same time resulting in possible overwites.)

Simple Internet Browser, really easy to use, (we like it better then IE) from open source vendor, Mozilla Firefox®

The most useful and simple backup software we have seen which is so cheap you can't afford not to have it! SyncBackSE. There is even free version. Works great with USB storage, Network Drives and FTP servers.

Award Winning Professional Internet Security for Business, Enterprise and Home Users: The New AVG Internet Security Suite. Also popular free Anti-virus solution for the Home User AVG Free. AVG also make a free product for Apple Mac. If you want antivirus for Mac OS-X, try this new release from Sophos!

Another free internet security package called Microsoft Security Essentials is available for home users, and from October 2010 Small Business (up to 10 computers) can also be protected for free!

Data encryption is now a necessity rather than a luxury. For easily zipping files into an encypted archive and getting them out again across platforms, try MEO by NCH software. Also available (Windows only) is iZArc which is also free. Alternatively if you need to encrypt whole disks, flashkeys, or larger volumes, try TrueCrypt. All products are free and reliable. Even the FBI could not break the TrueCrypt encryption!

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community. Click here for more about the Open Source Initiative.