Accounting Software

[markcw]

I use QuickBooks for my small business accounting.

End of the year I create a diskette and turn it over to the accountant. he gives me some magical numbers to enter that keep the books in balance when he completes my tax return.

I was wondering if anyone uses any other software besides Quickbooks, a spreadsheet or word document to automate accounting for a small business.

[allan]

Originally posted by markcw:
I was wondering if anyone uses any other software besides Quickbooks, a spreadsheet or word document to automate accounting for a small business.

When we first started our now defunct hosting business we used Peachtree, but it was not as intuitive not a non-accountant as quickbooks.

[interactive]

My mom is an accountant, she prefers Quickbooks, but Peachtree isn't too bad. I'm sure you could easily designed some sort of a web based system pretty easily.

[geografx]

I use MYOB and have since 1992. It's made for the accounting challanged, so it's something I can deal with. Also has a section for payroll that worked well when there were employees.

[Locke]

I use Quickbooks inevitably, although I use Excell to track sales, profit, etc. and make graphs for presentations, quite useful on both ends :)

[JeremyV]

I use quicken for home and small business. It has many of the more basic features of quickbooks, but without the high pricetag and without a lot of the quickbooks feature I don't need at this time. The best part is since they are both Intuit software it will be an easy upgrade to QB if/when I need to :)

[KualoJo]

Have you looked at Sage? Its very advanced, will do your whole invoicing / accounts etc. and I believe different versions are available for each different country and their tax regulations and business laws...

http://www.sage.com/

[Kawartha]

I mentioned to my accountant that I went and bought some accounting software. His first reaction was,"Tell me you didn't buy Quicken."
I had to say, "Uh, yes that's what I bought."
He just went, "Arghhh...Quicken is sh*t...you should have got QuickBooks!"

...this from a very, very conservative accountant! I had to laugh. So, I will go and pay the fee for QuickBooks. It will be compatible for bookkeeping purposes with my accountant, too.

As a side note, I also learned later there was a secuity problem a couple years ago with Quicken, which a German cracker figured how to take a slice of every transaction made by Quicken online and divert payment into a separate account for himself.

That was fixed I'm sure, but did raise the fear factor.

[matrosov]

We use Quickbooks and I think it is a pretty good value for the money my only wish that they had third party billing integration as it stands right now we use Hsphere and Verisign merchant account to take care of all the billing, which means I have to manually transfer all the sales data into Quick books and make the two sink with each other. The export feature they have is not as easy as it could have been , for the past 3 or 4 month I was not able to make my test file where I try to export transactions from csv to match my manual entry file. Hopefully psoft will come up with Hsphere merchant account integration soon. If you are looking for a solution from scratch I would assume that their merchant/billing account will take care of your needs and the pricing seems competitive.

Whatever you do, don't rely just on a spreadsheet to track your sales and expenses as things will get fuzzy really fast. I think it is crucial for a small business owner to see Income statement Balance Sheet and Cash Flow at any given point of time and compare trends. Excel will not readily provide this for you. What I use Excel for, is to track prepayments on multi period plans since I cannot do it in Quickbooks, because of the way I set it up.

Finally I've had exposure to PeachTree but I find QB to be more intuitive of the two, but that's just my opinion. :)

[dynamicnet]

Greetings:

We started with Quickbooks, but moved to Peachtree for reporting reasons.

Both of them are very good products.

Thank you.

[Roberto]

Quickbooks and PeaceTree are my favorites. Quickbooks seems to work well for us since we are quite a bit smaller and don't need to many features.

[Blank]

Agreed, We use Quickbook as well. It seems to handle all our needs so far.