>>>>>>>>> Admins, if not appropriate for the forum, please delete.
Many of us will be selling what we make.
What software is being used for bookkeeping? Sales/purchases/inventory/equipment costs, etc.?
Thanks!
Jim
I can only answer this somewhat obliquely (the wife’s a CPA) but it seems like many small businesses use Quickbooks from, I believe Intuit.
I’m not certain on the learning curve or wether you need to be a bookkeeper to know the proper methods of booking entries, but we’ve certainly talked about (yes, our dinner conversations are TRULY riveting!) people using it to do invoicing, track depreciation of equipment and do double entry bookkeeping in accordance with GAP standards. Apparently it has at least some functionality for generating reports/forms to help you do your taxes, particularly for small business’s.
There most likely are industry specific more easily learned software available, which with luck another member of the community is aware of.
Jim - I’ve looked into just about everything from free, to web, to client. Either they don’t offer the features I want, or they are simply too expensive for a part-time side-hustle. Quickbooks is insanely expensive and some of the new SaaS solutions are equally expensive (Zoho, Xero and others). Plus, to get a reasonable set of features, you usually need to jump to some premium tier that offers a bunch of unnecessary stuff just to get basic stuff - anywhere from $27 to $59/month for the most basic capabilities - that is insane (IMHO).
So I keep expenditures and revenue in Excel, and do any invoicing and estimates in Square (free version). If I made more money, perhaps one of the online solutions would make sense, but they are financially out of reach for me at almost a $1K per year.
I do pay for Turbotax Business for taxes, but even that is reaching the ‘too expensive’ tier - it has doubled in cost with no new features in the last 4 years.
I really do think there is a significant market for basic accounting capabilities for like 5-10/month.
+/- 0.02
-Tom
The desktop version of Manager.io accounting software is free. There is a cloud-based version that is functionally identical, but you would have to pay for the cloud access.
My daughter has experience with both Manager.io and Quickbooks (Desktop and Online), and functionally she doesn’t really see much of a difference (though she doesn’t use either for payroll tracking so she can’t provide any input on that).
Manager.io allows for project tracking both expenses and income, beyond just overall income and expense reporting. You can create estimates, sales orders, and purchase orders, beyond just invoicing. It also allows for capital asset tracking and depreciation. She does mention that Manager.io requires a bit more initial setting up than Quickbooks, but overall finds it less of a pain to work with. There are also guides and a forum available on their website.
Another caveat is that Manager.io requires a bit more tinkering with the reports to generate specific tax reports.
Hope that helps.