Online Business Accounting Options for Small Business
One of the easiest ways to keep your books in today’s day and age is to do it online. After all, why keep cumbersome files and records around if they can all be digital?
Here’s what to look for in an accounting solution, as well as a few potential choices.
What to Look for in an Accounting Solution
First of all, know what you need to do with your accounting software. Do you need to manage payroll? Create profit and loss statements? Invoice clients? Or just track expenses?
The more complex your needs, the more you can expect to pay for accounting software. Naturally, if all you need are simple features, then you can save a bit of money and learning time and go with a simpler choice.
That said, take the future of your business into consideration. If in twelve months you expect to have substantial growth and need additional accounting features, it’s best to just start with a more powerful application now rather than make a switch a few months down the road.
Here are three popular choices for online business accounting.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is a unique online solution that makes it very simple for anyone to create invoices and send them out online.
Gone are the days when you needed to create Excel spreadsheets, print them to PDFs and mail them to your clients.
Today, with FreshBooks, all it takes is about 30 seconds to send out an invoice. You can track all your invoices, your clients and your income from FreshBook’s easy-to-use interface.
FreshBook also ties into several other popular online applications. For example, you can manage your projects in Basecamp and then bill for those projects using FreshBook.
Less Accounting
Their name pretty much explains their philosophy. They aim to help business owners do “less accounting.” Meaning less paperwork, less maintenance, less “stuff” to keep their books in order.
Their user interface is extremely simple and can be learned in about an hour. They have all the features you’d expect in an accounting solution, but laid out in a very intuitive manner.
Keep in mind that Less Accounting shouldn’t be used for large businesses, as it’s not GAP (Generally-Accepted Account Procedures) compliant.
It’s great for a small business to keep accurate books, but isn’t great for businesses that need to be technically correct in their accounting (e.g. venture-backed firms, companies preparing for a sale, etc.).
QuickBooks is the heavyweight champion of online accounting solutions.
It has everything from vendor management to employee payments to accounts receivables to financial statements.
It has cross functionality with Excel, Outlook, Gmail and of course its offline counterpart.
QuickBooks is the ideal solution for a medium-sized business that needs a robust accounting solution. It’ll take considerably more time to learn than FreshBooks or Less Accounting, but the payoff is in its wide variety of features.
QuickBooks also has free, unlimited support.
These are three of the most popular choices for accounting online. Each of them has a different specialty. FreshBooks is great for consultants and freelancers whose primary accounting needs is invoicing and tracking receivables. Less Accounting is generally great for the small business that wants simple accounting. Finally, QuickBooks Online has the all-purpose industrial grade accounting power than larger businesses need.
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