Accounting is an important part of all businesses. Larger companies have entire departments to manage the accounting records for the business but when you are operating a new business that is just starting, there isn’t a budget to hire this kind of team so you must do the accounting on your own. This can be a daunting task if you haven’t taken any accounting classes and don’t have any experience in finances. In order to simplify your life I would suggest using a software package such as Quickbooks to keep track of your businesses finances. When I first started my web hosting business I used excel to keep track of what clients owed and what they had paid. This worked for a while but as I started getting more business it became unfeasible to keep track of everything this way so I started looking for more professional alternatives. This is when I came across Quickbooks.
Quickbooks allowed me to keep track of all of my clients along with invoices and account balances without having to know a great deal about accounting. This doesn’t mean that I suggest not getting educated on account but it is not mandatory in order to use the software. Before Quickbooks it was difficult to keep track of my companies accounts and how much was actually being made or lost. This also caused major problems when tax time came around because it was difficult to calculate how much the business owed for taxes. Now it is as simple as printing off a few forms that have all the numbers that I need for the taxes.
Depending on the size of your business you may be very limited as to how much you can spend on this type of software but there are a few different options that you can use in these situations. If you have the available cash you can purchase the software and use it for a few years before upgrading to the newest version. This will work best if you have your own work computer to install the software on and you feel comfortable managing the software yourself. The other option is to go with a service where you pay them monthly and they maintain the Quickbooks Online installation for you and you have web access to all of your Quickbooks Online information. This can be the best option when you would rather not maintain or purchase the software yourself but over time this can get very expensive as you are paying a monthly fee. The services that I have found that offer this charge $30+ per month depending on the size of your business.
Purchase Software:
Advantages:
- Cheaper over time
- More flexibility
- No limit on size of company
Disadvantages:
- Must conduct your own backups
- Your responsible for managing the software
- No web access
Hosted Software Solution:
Advantages:
- Backups are taken care of for you
- Web access
- Reliability
Disadvantages:
- More Costly
- Limited by size of company
- Less flexible