QuickBooks used to be the go-to. I used it for years.
I guess Quicken was the home version.
I am no longer running a business (although I may again in the near future). I want a SIMPLE system that can handle a few basic accounts, household budgeting, do a little bit of investment management work, and be accessed from any internet connection.
Is QuickBooks still the answer?
Are you looking to do AP and AR later (as well as create a chart of accounts and maintain a GL) or are you strictly looking for functionality which handles budgeting and monitoring of account balances?
If the former Quickbooks, Xero, and Freshbooks basically dominate the lower end the market. If the latter YNAB, Tiller Money, Personal Capital, Quicken and Mint (Mint is far weaker in the investment monitoring area.) GNUCash falls somewhere in between.
Based on the learning curve for anything computer-ey, I will stay with Quickbooks, because I have a pretty reasonable idea of how it works.
it's probably far more involved than it needs to be for what younow need, but does that really matter?
In reply to Streetwiseguy :
That’s a strong consideration for me. No desire to go through learning curves.
In reply to The0retical :
Good distinction.
AP is good- it keeps my finger on the pulse of things. AR is probably not a big deal- any business of mine will be a mostly cash business, or large steady payments (like rents).
Chart of accounts is definitely overkill for me, but the core of QB. It’s easy to use a pre-defined template for a CoA without too much pain.
Budgeting is a big deal for me, but I am still a little uneasy about balance monitoring. I had an account with YNAB for a year, and never activated it.
I’d probably start with bookkeeping I am familiar with for ease of learning curve, then add something like YNAB in a year or so.
Quickbooks, just for its ubiquity.
I'd probably also recommend looking at Quickbooks for that kind of situation.
I convert organizations off QB fairly often, but they're often in a position where they've outgrown the inventory system and need a real deal GL, as well as DRP, MRP, barcoding, and the litany of of other things that go with running a growing organization. That's also the big advantage of QB, if you decide you want to grow the business there are all kinds of toolsets readily available to migrate your data fairly inexpensively.
Since you're not using AR, the some of the tools Xero brings to the table aren't really going to be super helpful. That's also the major strength of Freshbooks from what I understand of it.
I'm not super familiar with how budgeting works with these packages but, looking at QB's documentation, it appears to be pretty similar to how most ERP packages handle that process.
As a disclaimer, I don't sell any of these. Usually I'm working to get organizations off of them.
Side note: Quicken still offers an offline mode for scraping your banking and investment data if you're uncomfortable with how YNAB handles it's data retention.
This thread is relevant to my interests.
Our car club's treasurer just resigned. He was an accountant that I had cajoled into being treasurer. We are a nonprofit corporation (I forget what type). He went full accountant using his firm's Quickbooks and got into depreciating our assets, etc, which I did not really think was necessary, but was happy to see as long as he was handling it.
However our replacement treasurer is just a guy and we are looking for something simple to manage cash flow and track our reserve balance.
The new guy is willing to learn QB if necessary, but it is not a cheap solution for a small club that really just needs to make sure we net positive every year.
QuickBooks online is pretty simple.
In reply to Duke :
What variant of Quickbooks are you using, are you using a recurring invoice to invoice members their dues each year, and how discretely do you plan on tracking your AP?
If you don't want to depreciate assets anymore, don't want inventory, and don't have a need to assign GL classes you can probably get away with QB Essentials for less.
I guess I should also ask what's expensive to you?
Does QuickBooks have an offline version anymore?
Can multiple “companies” be entered into one subscription, or does this require multiple subscriptions?
I’d like to setup a couple different “companies” (accounts). My personal, my aging parents, my business, my wife’s business. Looks like this would require 4 separate subscriptions... am I misunderstanding?
I used to use QB offline. It was a more expensive up front cost, but multiple companies could be managed, and it wasn’t necessary to upgrade every year, so the cost was spread out over a long time. $250 spread over 3 or 4 years is much less than $20 per month times 4 accounts.
I’d rather the online version, but I don’t want to pay for 4 separate subscriptions.
Thoughts?
In reply to SVreX :
It looks like they offer a locally installed version under the "Desktop" version.
It also appears, according to their message board, that Desktop is the only variant that supports multiple companies. The online version requires multiple subscriptions.
edit (because I wiped what I had here earlier): Normally I'd suggest segmenting the GL, if you didn't want to host multiple companies, but wanted to report on them separately. It doesn't appear Quickbooks supports that functionality.
The0retical said:In reply to Duke :
What variant of Quickbooks are you using, are you using a recurring invoice to invoice members their dues each year, and how discretely do you plan on tracking your AP?
If you don't want to depreciate assets anymore, don't want inventory, and don't have a need to assign GL classes you can probably get away with QB Essentials for less.
I guess I should also ask what's expensive to you?
I do not know what variant it was. The previous treasurer, as I said was a CPA with his so I assume he was using the full-house version.
We do not invoice membership at all. We send out reminders via email and members have the option of joining online via motorsportreg.com or mailing a paper check. MSR makes it easy to generate and export monthly reports which can be brought into the accounting system.
We have a membership chair who manages membership status, so frankly all we need to know is X number of individuals at one rate and Y number of families at another rate.
We don't really have an inventory per se, though we could incorporate trophies, etc. But frankly for that, all we need to know is how many trophies we gave away in a given year and what the total cost was, so that does not need to be directly integrated into the accounting with too fine a grain, as long as the bottom line number is captured as a liability.
Not sure what GL classes are...?
The number I was quoted for QB access was a monthly subscription running to a few hundred bucks a year, almost $500. Our cash position is somewhere around $20k and our annual profit is something like $4000 in a year without any capital expenditures. So paying roughly 10% of our profits every year to rent accounting software seems excessive. I'd rather build some reserves and make do with simpler / cheaper software.
I do not know which variant that number was for, and the new treasurer is no idiot but not terribly computer savvy. I will bring the QB Essentials to his attention. THanks for your input!
In reply to The0retical :
That’s gonna rule out QB. The cost is gonna get out of hand quickly.
Other suggestions?
In reply to SVreX :
This is interesting because I'm not as familiar with the low end of the market as I am with my mid and large cap competitor's offerings. Plus I can research these while the kids are falling asleep.
It looks like Freshbooks is one of the only cloud hosted platform one which offers the offers multi-company accounting. It also appears that they have a real deal CoA and GL which allows limited segmentation.
You could also look at Sage 50, which was formerly Peachtree. It's something like 4x the price though. If you want to explore the Sage route one of my dealers also does Sage I'd be happy to pass you his info. It's probably a bit overkill for what you're looking to do though.
In reply to Duke :
Quickbooks sort of bastardizes the commonly understood language in this instance. GL Classes (in QB langauge) are what's called a GL segment everywhere else. A GL class in other accounting packages is a way to categorize the transaction against a particular rule you have setup to write into the GL.
Using an easy example, let's use a tire shop.
In your Chart of Accounts you would create a GL account for income from sale of goods, say 10001, then below that you would create a segment for a particular category of inventory you want to discretely track, say 10001-200 for transactions related to selling tires and 10001-300 for wheels.
You then setup a GL rule which will assign revenue from the sale of that inventory to those account segments.
In your inventory you would then assign a GL Class of "Tire" to all your tires and a GL Class of "Wheel" to your wheels. When inventory is sold, the invoice knows exactly the class each line item is assigned to and can write the GL journal entries to the correct GL account and sub-segment automatically.
If you want to know what your total revenue for the year was for selling tires you would run the report for the 10001-200 account and you'll only get tire revenue for the period. If you want to know your total revenue from sale of goods out of inventory you can run it for the 10001 account and it will include all of the sub-segments.
You probably don't need an inventory from what you're describing. Since you're really only buying the trophies once or twice a year I'd just put a note in the PO as to how many were ordered. It should be easy enough to find it later. Otherwise you sound like you're just doing GL journal entires as if you're operating on a cash basis.
The0retical said:In reply to SVreX :
This is interesting because I'm not as familiar with the low end of the market as I am with my mid and large cap competitor's offerings. Plus I can research these while the kids are falling asleep.
It looks like Freshbooks is one of the only cloud hosted platform one which offers the offers multi-company accounting. It also appears that they have a real deal CoA and GL which allows limited segmentation.
You could also look at Sage 50, which was formerly Peachtree. It's something like 4x the price though. If you want to explore the Sage route one of my dealers also does Sage I'd be happy to pass you his info. It's probably a bit overkill for what you're looking to do though.
Yes, but Freshbooks will still be charging me for 4 separate subscriptions.
In reply to The0retical :
Yessir. Like I said, as a nonprofit we don't really pay taxes and we have replacement value policies on all of our capital equipment. So as long as we're budgeting decent reserves towards eventual replacement, I don't really need to know that our trailer is worth $2500 this year but only $2300 next year.
In reply to SVreX :
Ah crap my mistake. I missed the FAQ on how billing works scanning through. Let me poke around a bit more. I was reading it the same way that my company's software works, we allow that under a single license, but we're way out of the price range.
I've already looked at QB, Zoho, Freshbooks (oops), and Xero which are the big names in that end of the market. All of them appear to be single entity only.
I'll call the dealer tomorrow to see about Sage 50.
What about Quicken Home and Business?
Seems like a reasonable price point, and appears to have the capability to keep personal and business expenses separate (plus some basic investment stuff).
That may at least allow me to cover personal and my business- that would kill 2 birds with one stone. Might still need another subscription for my parent's stuff.
And if the business grows enough to matter, I can import the data from Quicken to QuickBooks.
In reply to SVreX :
Interesting, I didn't realize that Quicken had an AR and simple property management vertical. I thought it was more inline with YNAB and Mint.
It's not cloud hosted though. From what I can tell it's locally installed and sync's up to a database hosted by Quicken where it can be viewed, but only supports limited write backs by splitting or manually adding transactions. It doesn't look like you can edit budgets etc., at least from the mobile app.
In reply to The0retical :
I’m not sure that would be terrible.
I need the ability to see and manage expenses while traveling, so my wife and I can better communicate. That doesn’t necessarily mean I need full functionality on the road.
The only reason I would need full functionality on the road is if my business stepped up to something much more active. But I think I could transition to QB easily at that time.
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