Accounting & Taxes
The topic is appropriate for this time of year. This is my first tax season with the new business and when I officially started Cagintranet in September, I had no idea what I was getting into.
Right off the bat, I knew I needed an application to help keep do my invoices in a professional manner that also was able to generate some minor reports come tax time. I first looked at the free version of Blinksale which looked like an amazing online tool. It was, but I quickly found that I needed something more robust in terms of reporting, something that even their paid versions lacked.
Having a budget of closer to $0 doesn’t help in my search either. After Blinksale, I looked at:
- The Invoice Machine and Excel – Umm, even worse tracking than Blinksale but at least I could crunch numbers (read: manual reporting) in Excel.
- Freshbooks – I didn’t even get past the first stage of the sign up because of the limitation of only 3 active clients for their free version. $14 wasn’t a bad step up for the paid version – but I wanted to wait to see if I could find anything cheaper.
- Old Reliable Quickbooks…
Quickbooks
I briefly skirted with the idea of downloading a pirated version of Quickbooks from Bittorrent. After being able to not find a version newer than 2006 on there, I decided to take a look at how much the software would actually cost if I was going to hypothetically buy it. I was a real business after all, right?
After gasping at the prices of the many different packages of Quickbooks ($199.95 and up), I found a small link on their product page for a free version of Simple Start.
Assuming that it was cripleware, I took a look at it’s feature list. I fully expected it to be able to create invoices but not save them or be able to handle only 3 clients, but I am pleasantly surprised. It does just about everything but download bank and credit card information – which I don’t plan on using right now anyway.
So anyway, I downloaded it almost immediately, and I haven’t looked back. It has done everything my very small business has asked of it, and probably could do more, but I haven’t even begun to look at it all yet.