Posted on 03/03/2010 5:47:23 PM PST by MaxMax
Hello fellow DBA and other small business owners, I'm seeking advice about
accounting software for small business operations.
I've used Quickbooks for decades and I'm looking for a new application since
my business has upgraded to Win-7, which is WOW btw. QB has become a tiresome
and time consuming ordeal since the old school support has become a memory of the past.
What app do you use and how long?
Does it fare well with small DBA’?
And any other input would be gratefully appreciated.
/Salute
Please let me know what advice you get. :)
the solution I keep hoping for is to be able to hire a book keeper to work in QB.
What does QB not do that you wish it would? If you are looking for free support....good luck. Peachtree is okay but their support isn’t free either.
How much effort have you put forward to really learn all QB can do?
Tried them all. QB sucks the least.
Tried them all. QB sucks the least.
I’ve read your post again and I still don’t get it. What is tiresome and time-consuming? All bookkeeping is. Are you using QB live or after-the-fact? If you are using it live it is much less time consuming.
Or are you just looking for something new to go with the new computer? You really want to go through the learn curve and setup time (entering vendors and customers and chart of accounts, etc.)?
One final thought...I find most people who think accounting software sucks don’t no $hit about accounting to begin with and think they don’t have to ‘cause the software will magically do the work correctly. On that point, QB can get more screwed up by someone who DOESN’T know what they are doing than any other program out there. But that’s okay ‘cause I get paid big bucks to straighten it all out.
I don't mind paying for support at all if it's good. I'm actually looking
for another product that is more simplified that I'm unaware of for
an independent company. Sorry I didn't make that poimt.
/Salute
I agree with others - accounting/bookkeeping is tedious and even with the best integrated systems, regardless of the cost, it remains so, nature of the beast. Like everything in life, if you change to something new, how important is it for it to work with what you already have. Perhaps you kept your old system so that you can run your QB on it by itself?
Depends on your needs, Quickbooks is popular, but I can’t comment on it, haven’t used it in 7 years. (Its improved I hear)
Peachtree is good, if you’re going to move into a pro system like MAS 90, but that really is too much package for most businesses.
Oh yeah, what type of biz... theres alot of Point of sale stuff for quickbooks if you need that.
“I love the work, But I hate the paperwork.” See #10
Hire a clerk.
I agree that Win 7 is WOW (Way Over Weight). Who needs to make Bill Gates even richer by proclaiming “I have the newest bloatware Windows”. As for Quickbooks i feel your pain. I recently installed Quickbooks Invoice on a WinXP-SP3 machine i built for a client and i had locked down Internet Explorer security settings to “High” as usual, but Quickbooks wouldn’t run proclaiming my security settings were to high. Can you fathom an accounting program complaining that the internet settings are to high? Its not just for updates to QB, Its the whole program uses Internet Explorer settings. Looking for solutions on the official QB forum i saw posts to 1996 that were still unanswered by Intuit regarding this “feature”. Mind-blowing for sure. Especially seeing how the program is linked to Internet Exploder. They must be the stupidest people to walk the earth. But the program is so simple an wizzard could use it.
Unfortunately there is not alot to recommend in that market area either. Peachtree Accounting used to be OK but its been 10 years since i have installed it. Usually i encourage open source software to avoid vendor lock-in -IE.. Great Plains Accounting(now owned my Microsoft)- but there really is not alot of viable recommendations. GNUCash felt a little to clunky for me to recommend and i didn’t like TurboCash. I look forward to hearing others recommendations.
One of my older friends used to be an accountant and she works a few hours a week for 6 different self-employed accountants and just goes in and posts data. She’s really fast and accurate, knows what she is doing, doesn’t need breaks or benefits, started her own little business so she is contract and no taxes and doesn’t charge much per hour. Just keep the coffee pot full, show her the desk and papers and go away! Lots of semi-retired seniors available for this kind of work. Oh, and they also speak English, generally don’t have weird hair or tattoos!
I learned a horribly expensive lesson last year when I hired a QB professional consultant, she pointed out that I had too much daily balancing and monitoring of credit card processors. We should just assume all the transactions come in and stop monitoring daily sales. We paid her and I came away sounding something like Rush Limbaugh, "Never doubt yourself!"
For years I've hoped to find an open source financial software for small businesses but the truth is if I found it tonight I would take months to transfer, if not years.
The only real problem I have with QB is that it's a private code. You'll never benefit in hours from something I've worked on for years because I can't alter the code. If I could and I shared it I'd probably go to jail.
I have a client who is not an accountant, hated quickbooks but loves this:
It is adequate to use for small business with limited accounting needs.
I only ended up using Peachtree support a couple of times, but they were able to resolve my questions. So I can only provide a very limited sampling on that account. I haven't used QB, so I'm afraid I can't give you an adequate comparison between the two. Peachtree isn't very expensive. My impression is that QB is the market leader from an accounting perspective (although I'd defer to accountants that could provide a more through analysis), but I found Peachtree adequate for the uses I had at my last position I used it.
Also, I used to use Peachtree at a company a number of years ago and found it deficient for inventory purposes, but the newer version addressed what we needed since that earlier version. (we needed to develop kits to reduce individual components from inventory).
Is there anything out there that’s designed only or mainly for preparing financial statements? I don’t need bookkeeping, invoicing, or any other miscellany. I just want something that provides the standard line items and flows to produce income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet, and statement of changes in equity. I don’t need it to be able to download or import any data from anywhere, or export its data anywhere.
I COULD build this myself (and have done similar things in the distant past, though for much more complex companies and investment vehicles than my own, for historical display and forecasting purposes). But it’s tedious and error prone, especially when it comes to being able to combine monthly into quarterly, quarterly into annual, etc, and would require me to brush up on a lot of accounting details that I don’t really want to brush up on to that degree.
If such a thing exists, I’d very much appreciate being pointed towards it.
These have a historical starting point and reasonable price”
http://www.nhorizontech.com/products/index.html
Thanks! That looks promising. Especially the lowest priced version, which integrates with QuickBooks. My accountant uses that and was trying to sell me on using it myself, but it just seemed to be crammed full of junk I didn’t need and looked like it would make it more difficult to create financial statements than just winging it on Excel.
“Mind-blowing for sure.”
Not really. QB needed some features that you elected to disable. If you want to use QB, you need to enable those features. Pretty simple really.
I have to second the opinion that QB works fine and is about the simplest system available.
I also second the fact that if you don’t know anything about accounting, you can screw it up really quickly. A friend was counting investments. She was overpaying her taxes big time.
Exactly the response Intuit would enjoy, but out in the real world I want my accounting system to have nothing to do with the internet. I want my accounting system to be secure. I want my updated tax tables delivered on a CD-ROM(like QB used to do) so my business records are not exposed to every Internet Explorer flaw that some 14 year old comes up with. If you think i disabled some “feature” you are wrong. I remove Internet Explorer from the machine and Quickbooks will not run. It is totally dependent on Internet Explorer. Do you realize what a gaping hole this leaves in your accounting system? Quickbooks prior to 1996 did not have this dependency on the Internet Explorer. I would call it a major design flaw. Some of the large companies i have worked with have accounting departments. They use a separate network where only the accounting machines are networked together. There is no internet access. Period, so their internet infection problems by someone playing some goofy flash game from yahoo does not exist. Does this concept baffle you? I know most Internet Exploder users are naive, but why do you think Windows Update has to fix their swiss cheese operating system every Tuesday. Oh because some 10 year old hole still is not fixed. And how often is it tied to Internet Explorer. Sorry but the last thing i need is my accounting records being available in China due to Bill Gates desire to add new features and not fix the real issues.
“It is totally dependent on Internet Explorer.”
Then the solution is easy. Find another software. But it would seem myopic to buy software, cripple it and then complain that it is crippled.
Sorry to be so testy there, and i meant Quckbooks has been dependent on Internet Explorer since QB2005. I did some more research and it is actually ActiveX that QB is using. But my point is that any accounting system really should not require you to lower your security. Google “ActiveX zero day” to prove my point.
As a side note the FoxPro accounting app i custom wrote for a accountant in 1993 is still working great. It was a simple mortgage interest/payments/reports app that still runs on DOS. How sweet it is to have something still alive after all those hardware upgrades i have done, and the program just gets faster every upgrade. I was really surprised it handled the Y2K rollover with no problems. And with no internet access! Getting tractor feed paper and printer ribbons is getting tougher though..
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it- is a good motto.
How secure is that Foxpro data if someone walks out with the machine?
Security is an illusion. The idea that your data is subject to hackers on the internet is saying that car is subject to theft in your garage so you need to park it in your house. If someone is going to hack into your machine these days, you are going to invite them to do it. The chances of a hacker randomly picking your IP address and making it through your router firewall and your PC firewall is the same as you winning a $100 million lottery....twice...in the same day.
If QB requires IE and Active-X, why can’t you unplug the computer from the Internet? After you have installed the software, downloaded updates, registered, etc., just unplug it from the ‘net. If you need Internet access for other things, get another computer for those things and keep your mission-critical QB computer off the ‘net. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Thank you for the link. /Salute
Hi,
You can try the online solution TioLive. It automatically updates so that you will never have problems whatever is your PC version. You just need to be connected to the Internet to access it.
Its accounting is as complete as Quickbooks’ one but in addition, you have the CRM and other functions. Before adopting it for good, try the free version to see if it suits to your business.
“TioLive is Privacy”
“TioLive will not provide your data to tax administration, to police or marketing companies. Unless a court injunction comes in, we will keep your data secret.”
“Because servers are hosted outside the United States, dispositions of the Patriot Act which go against enterprise freedom or privacy do not apply to TioLive.”
“TioLive is Loyal”
“Any incident which happens to our platform, whether it is caused by us or by an intruder, will not be hidden and will be reported to you as soon as we are aware.”
I dunno, keeping my business data on the ‘net seems risky. TioLive’s assurances don’t inspire my confidence. I’m not convinced that cloud computing is the safe way to go. Open source software is great, but I’d want to keep any apps and data on the local computer and not expose it to the ‘net.
It's just that I have no use for 99% of what's in QB, and don't want to be forced to use the parts I don't need, in order to get it to pump out financial statements. I know plenty about accounting -- have built detailed historical-projected models for fairly complex operating companies and investment vehicles, but it's not fun and is utterly unnecessary for my present or expected needs. Right now I just need to produce financials for an LLC through which I own a single house, split into two apartments, with one rented to a third party and the other rented most of the time to myself. I'm the sole owner of the LLC, but have put both equity and PIK debt into it, and need proper financial statements for boththe company's own tax preparation and to back my eventual personal income from the company.
It sure sounds like a simple manual system would do the job. You could even get Quicken to spit out the reports you need by categorizing your expenses and revenues.
The main functionality I need that’s a lot of work to set up manually, is the ability to input figures on a monthly basis, and then easily change them to quarterly and annual, including changing the fiscal year end to/from 12/31. I just wish I could find something inexpensive and simple to use that’s designed *only* to produce financial statments. The thing Raycpa pointed me to would work, but costs $200, because it includes a bunch of stuff I don’t need. I probably need to to do a bunch of Google searching for free software — not that I’m not willing to pay something, but I get the feeling that what I need is so small that I’m more likely to find it in the realm of freeware than commercial software.
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