suggestion regards software

Hello friends,
I am working as a Programmer and our company got a project from a Chartered Accountant Firm for developing an Accounting package. First I want to tell you what that company will do. The job of that Chartered Accountant Firm is to prepare final accounts statements for their clients and to prepare tax workings for them. This is the activity they do. They have nearly 1200 clients.
The Accountants in their office will prepare Trading, Profit and Loss Account and Balance Sheet for each and every client.
The Statement prepared by the Accountants will come to the computer department.

Coming to my doubt now, the requirements given by that Chartered Accountant firm are :
They expect that the software should do the following things :
After the statement comes to the computer department, they want to feed that statement in to the computer. Its something like how we feed Profit and Loss Account and Balance sheet using Tally. After they feed these information's, the system should show these things :
Prepare profit and loss account with debit and credit sides and should show the Net profit.
Prepare Balance sheet, and the Assets and Liabilities should get tallied.
Prepare statement of Total Income.
Prepare Tax working sheet, which shows tax payable by the client.
After all these, the software should facilitate in taking print out of all these statements prepared. This is the process for each and every client they have. Also they don't expect too much of formatting in printouts. Just as we get print outs from ordinary notepads will do. But the main thing is they want the print outs to be faster. Text formatted with special fonts will take time to print. So they avoid this.
Now my doubt is given these requirements, which software I should choose??
as this is a very important decision, Please go through the requirements thoroughly twice or thrice and tell me a software which will satisfy all these needs?
The given time duration is maximum of one year. Plz consider this point also.
Ur sincere efforts in this regard will be of great help to me.
Thanx in advance.
Regards,
uma

At first it sound like you want to know how to develop something...but at the end you seem to ask for suggestions on existing programs....Are you creating the software or implementing existing products in new ways??

Those things can be functionally done using just about any development package: Visual C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, Borland.

The three requirements that you specified that I would consider most valid in determining the package is the one year timeframe, the number of clients, and the speed required in printing the reports.

The requirements that you should be thinking about are application speed, future expandability, amount of data to be processed, competencies of your developers, integration of third party apps, etc.

For some perspective at mycompany this project would be about a 2 month project (including qa and testing) done in Visual C++ and I would put two of my developers on it. Of course, I don't know the entire scope of your project so that's just a guess.

We'd choose Visual C++ because it'll provide the best performance and future scalability. It's also what we're most competent with.

And to throw in my pitch, if you need any help with the reporting requirement of this project, I have a custom written reporting component that supports onscreen display and printing. You can pass it data generically from any data source. It'll be available for license or purchase soon.

Anyway, enough of that. Hopefully some of this helps.