Upgrading is a topical subject in the light of Microsoft's launch of Office XP, or Quicken 2001, or Corel's WordPerfect Office 2002 or any of the other revamps that have hit the market at the same time.

There can be excellent reasons for upgrading, although it's always worth bearing Bill Gates' advice to wait until version 3 before buying and let someone else find out about any bugs. Keeping up to date is useful, though. Take Access Accounts, a company that writes accounting systems for the small business market. It issues upgrades periodically and tries to keep its customers on the latest one at all times.

"In keeping up-to-date and taking advantage of the new features and functionality available, users can move their systems on as an evolutionary process," says customer services director John Beech.

Accounting systems are more vulnerable to falling behind than most other systems because people depend on them for tax, payroll and other information that needs to be kept in synch with modern legislation. Less essential are the upgrades to things like spreadsheets - yes, they look prettier and can be viewed through a web browser, but the core adding-up tasks haven't really changed.

What does get people moving and removes any doubt about upgrading is pressure from other people. A number of small companies contacted for this article were adamant they didn't change their systems - why fix something that works? - unless they absolutely had to. By that they normally meant was "when people are sending us attachments in the new format, we're missing business if we can't read it".