Quickbooks vs other software for small business?

stevetuk

Hi

We're a small family business and we're currently doing all our paperwork manually: we have manual paper books and our invoices are just calculated manually and printed out.

Has anyone had any experience using software like Quickbooks and if so would you recommend it?

Thanks!

fishybusiness

Have an irrational dislike of QB!

Makes common sense accounting rather complex imo.

Have a look at Quickfile, FreeAgent, Wave Accounting, Pandle (very new), and Xero.

We use Quickfile for our ltd.

Pennywise

All softwares have their good and bad points. There are also different versions of the same software - not just different features, but some products are completely different between their "normal" version and their "lite"version. Comparisons are very hard.

I can recommend 10 different software to 10 different clients, simply based on their needs and abilities.

Are you on the "invoice" or the "cash" basis for your accounts/tax returns - quickbooks is the only one I know of where you can flick between reports on both bases with a few clicks, which makes it very powerful if you want to review both ways. Very few other products allow for cash accounting for tax returns.

I really like QB, but the full version isn't really for anyone who doesn't really "get" proper book-keeping, so I rarely recommend it for average traders as it's too easy to foul it up! A very simple one is kashflow which is one of the easiest to use and more importantly allow for very easy deletion and editing of entries so it's very forgiving for the amateur or first timer.

00ec25

another vote for Kashflow.
Just be careful if you enable bank feeds as the computer matches of bank transaction to your info can be pretty dumb at times and can be counter-productive if you have a reasonably high transaction volume at repetitive values. I had to "discourage" a client doing their own bookkeeping as it was taking longer to unpick the matches than if we'd simply input from the paper statement in the first place.