Anyone Using Quicken for Business?

[Travis Cossel]

I currently used a "made-for-business" accounting software program called FirstEdge, but I'm considering switching to something like Quicken. I'd rather not go the route of Quickbooks, given it's extra expense and learning curve.

But I've never tried to use Quicken for business purposes. Anyone here doing that? Thoughts?

[Oren Arieli]

I can't claim to be an expert in accounting (shouldn't have skipped out on all of those business courses back in college). Quickbooks has served me well as an accounting program since I started with it in 2001. I can't compare it to any other software though...so you might want to look at MYOB (Peachtree software?).

QB is relatively easy to use as far as keeping on top of the money trail, but I use less than 15% of the available features. Also, as a sole-proprietor, my books are probably a lot easier to manage than a bigger outfit.

[Travis Cossel]

I totally understand. I'm refocusing my business even more right now, so I don't need the gazillion features of Quickbooks, but I do need something solid that can create good reports and so forth.

[Glenn Davidson]

We use Quicken for personal use and Quickbooks for the business. I find that Quickbooks is easy to use for invoice creation and the reports feature is a great tool to see how the biz is doing.

About 25 years ago we tried Dac Easy. That was horrible.

[Larry Kamerman]

Have been sing Quickbooks for years. It does have more features than I need, but works very well, for keeping the books in order, sending invoices, etc. And the accountant loves it. The organization saves him a lot of time, which saves me $$$.

[Reid Bailey]

Quickbooks may be too "big" for what you think you need right now, but it will grow with you and so many accountants swear by it.

When I had my consulting business a few years back I had an accountant come in and set it. She told me what figures to put where and which reports to print. It's money well spent.

I'm transitioning to more more video work and am planning to do the same thing again. The couple of hundred bucks spent will save so much time and aggravation.

You can go up to their website and do a search for "authorized quick books" people.

Also, I think they came out with a low cost entry level thing to address Microsoft's free version.

Also you can go out to www.videoprofessor.com and take the level one course of quickbooks for free. There are annoying popups until you buy more training, but it will let you take the whole first module. I just ran through the photoshop version and it convinced me to pay for the other levels.

[Travis Cossel]

I guess my issue with Quickbooks is that I'm paying for much more than I'll ever use. I used to own a copy of it many years ago, so I know how feature-packed it is. The software I'm using now only cost me $100, and it's worked pretty much fine for 4 years. I just wish it had reports that were more customizable. That's about it.

Thanks for the responses everyone!

[Russ Jolly]

Our business decided to use Quicken Home & Business several years ago because it was "easier than QuickBooks" and we "wouldn't be paying for features we didn't need". Huge mistake. Once we realized we should be using QB it took a lot of time and pain to make the transition. Get QB Pro and hire a consultant to help you set it up properly. It is worth the investment. My .02.

[Travis Cossel]

Thanks for the advice!

[Dana Salsbury]

We just bought Quicken Home and Business. You'll love it. You can buy it on Amazon and be completely organized in no time. It's perfect for videography, and my accountant recommended it for my situation.

[Travis Cossel]

Originally Posted by Dana Salsbury

We just bought Quicken Home and Business. You'll love it. You can buy it on Amazon and be completely organized in no time. It's perfect for videography, and my accountant recommended it for my situation.

Awesome! I'll have to look into switching possibly. Thanks.

[Jim Andrada]

I've been using Quickbooks for my consulting business for 12 years now --- and I absolutely hate it! It's so bad it's dangerous! I've played with Peachtree Accounting and I think it's more of a real accounting package, but converting after the fact would have been too traumatic.

The problem I've always had with Quickbooks is precisely that it's too easy. You can go in and change anything after the fact and it doesn't impose any real accounting discipline. I'm not an accontant, so I get the jargon all mixed up, but as I understand it, Quickbooks doesn't really implement best accounting practices As I recall, in a true accounting system, every transaction has to go from somewhere to somewhere else and everything has to crossfoot at the end.

In Quickooks there's nothing to stop you from making a change to a previous invoice by just changing it. The fact that the original items would no longer add up to the total on the invoice seems not to bother Quickbooks at all.

For example, if you have several expense items charged on a credit card, and you then invoice them to a client. the expenses for that client are summed up as they should be. But you cn then go in and make arbitrary changes to the invoice after the fact, and the original charge items no longer tie to the invoice. There's no trail of what you did to fix the invoice.

I seem to remember (long time ago) that in Peachtree you have to actually identify accounts and debit and credit them to get a chain of transaction to balance out to the changes you want to make.

I think Quickbooks has to be one of the worst programs ever written. I once had the pleasure (?) of a six month audit by the IRS and wound up having to pay a lot of money (a LOT of money) due to some errors I had made that Quickbooks let slide right through

Example - In a real accounting package you have to close an accounting year when all transactions for the year are complete. Once the year is closed you can't make any changes to that year without temporarily closing the current year and re-opening the previous year.

In Quickbooks, if you inadvertently type the year wrong in an entry, it's perfectly happy to just drop the current year transaction back into a previous year, and you'll never be the wiser to your error - until the Feds discover that income and expense don't balance for some year in question.

OUCH!!!!!!! Quickbooks can be hazardous to your financial health!

So why do I still use it? Easy - pure inertia and disinclination to learn another package, and the horror show it would be to convert.

[Travis Cossel]

Wow. Thanks for sharing!

[Dana Salsbury]

If you do change, I would look beyond Peachtree. The accountant at a nonprofit showed me all kinds of flaws in the software that drove her batty.

[Jim Andrada]

Thanks for the comment re Peachtree. I can readily see that there might be software problems.

And I think from reading the manual that it isn't particularly easy to learn.

Quickbooks is "easy", but therein lie a lot of the problems I have with it. It's too easy to do things that shouldn't be easy.

Did your accountant contact have any suggestions for other programs?