Is Quickbooks for me?

[nkmaurer]

So I started my business in may and I currently just have all my revenue and expenses in Excel sheets. I figure out the profit from each order and a certain percentage is saved for taxxes, back into the company, and then I pay myself. So far, works good. But, I am hand writing my orders on my order forms that I had made. Worked fine, but it gets old and timeconsuming making two copies. Luckily business is really picking up for me now and I know I need to change......especially the invoices!!! I have experience in invoices and sales receipts in quickbooks from a previous job but that is it. How hard is the expense part? And most importantly figuring out the profit from each order and seperating all the percentages that I do......does that make since????

If I am going to go with quickbooks now is the time to do it, get it set up for the new year. I just want to know if it is easy to figure out, and will I be happy with it?

 

[tbsdphotog]

Quickbooks is surprisenly easy. You can divide income into precentages, divide cost and profit, and generate easy invoices while keeping a copy in your hard drive to pull up by date whenever. Quickbooks also interfaces with quiken and a few other financial programs so that you can calculate and pay taxes and employees quickly and easily. If you have specific questions about quickbooks PM me. I'd be happy to help.

 

[nossie]

Nk with all the different tax systems we need to know where you are before we comment. I'm using a small cheapo small biz software called InstantAdmin. For the price and for small biz applications its ok.

 

[nkmaurer]

I am a sole proprietorship. Is that what you need? I saw of a quickbooks page, someone mentioned something about simple start 2008 being free? Anyone know anything about that?

 

[nossie]

I am a sole proprietorship. Is that what you need? I saw of a quickbooks page, someone mentioned something about simple start 2008 being free? Anyone know anything about that?

I meant USA/Ireland/UK/EU

 

[wildmaven]

I'm a sole proprietorship for our Art Gallery and my photography business. Quickbooks makes things so easy for the business. Plus, there is a lot of help on the web for quickbooks. I'm not sure if that's true for some of the lesser known software packages.

Marian

 

[ahphotography]

the free simple start quickbooks let you have like 20 customers or something close to that but because I do a lot of design work I made a customer for design and one for photography then I list each invoice under a different name - I love it a lot, it works really well and hey - it's free (which is always nice when you’re starting out!)

 

[nkmaurer]

oh that makes sense.....I am in the US.

I get the free simpe start now. If I did do that then does everything transfer when I would need more than 20 customers and would pay for the full program? And while it is free am I able to set up all my banking stuff??

 

[Christie Photo]

Well... I've been using Quickbooks for nearly two years now, and I absolutely hate it. I think it's because I'm trying to use it for something it's not meant to be... a point of sale program.

I used a program called Masterpiece for many years, along with Quicken. As the OS upgrades came, the support for Masterpiece did not. My portrait business volume does not justify buying a proper program for point of purchase, so I'm gettin' by with Quickbooks. I curse it every day.

 

[ahphotography]

oh that makes sense.....I am in the US.

I get the free simpe start now. If I did do that then does everything transfer when I would need more than 20 customers and would pay for the full program? And while it is free am I able to set up all my banking stuff??

If you go to the backup under file I do believe... you can save all your information to transfer it to a different version of QuickBooks - but save that file it creates - because you will need to use it to restore later. It's good stuff - trust me on that. Best advice I can give you is play around with it… a lot –learn all there is to learn before you purchase it. That way later when you do purchase it you’ll already be a pro at it and you won’t have down time learning a new software. Good luck on the business!