Recommend: small business accounting software

Quoth

Hello, helpful advisers. My husband is planning to incorporate and get his business act together, and is looking around at the available software options to facilitate his daily operations. He'd also like to make tax filing time easier and faster. Different reviewers seem to recommend different things for different reasons, so I figured I'd ask you guys if you have any personal experiences, good or bad, with particular programs.

Stuff on his wish list:
Expense tracking
Mileage tracking
Invoicing/billing/payments
Some kind of iPhone app
Mac platform
Exports to TurboTax in some fashion

Things I have looked at so far:
Quicken
QuickBooks
Peachtree
AccountEdge
Less Accounting
Freshbooks
Numbers
Expensify
Xpense Tracker


His business is doing freelance film/TV/music work, so mostly what he does is give people an estimate, do the job, send them an invoice and then get a check in the mail. He logs mileage and expenses for tax purposes, including his share of house expenses because he has a home office. He's been using combinations of spreadsheets and phone notes and he's driving himself nuts.

Let me know if there is anything else I can add. Thanks in advance!

superchewie

Full disclosure: I work for the company I'm about to recommend.

He could give Mavenlink a try. It's primarily a task/project management application (free) but also with financial tools (paid, but we have 30 day free trials). Of his list we do:

Expense tracking - yep
Mileage tracking - can be tracked as an expense categorized as Mileage
Invoicing/billing/payments - yes on invoices, also paypal payments
Some kind of iPhone app - HTML5 mobile site
Mac platform - we're a web app, so as long as he has internet access he's good to go
Exports to TurboTax in some fashion - not exactly, but if TurboTax can import from spreadsheet then one or a combination of our spreadsheet exports may fit the bill.

We also have an integration with QuickBooks (both desktop and online versions, as long as you're in the US) so you can sync your time entries and expenses between the two, as well as jobs, employees, vendors, estimates, etc. It looks like QuickBooks by itself wasn't the answer he was looking for, but maybe in conjunction with Mavenlink he can do the task reporting he needs?

If you have any questions you can PM me or just post 'em. Our support people are also super great (seriously), so I'm sure they can answer your questions too. And if they can't they'll eventually get to my team anyway

tyrannus

Mavenlink looks pretty neat.

I'm a CPA and at my firm I do a lot of work with small businesses, so I've seen a lot of clients in QuickBooks. just remember that QuickBooks is pretty great, but if you do a little research on accounting and get at least some idea of debits and credits, you will save yourself so much time when it comes to filing out the tax return.

zepherin

I've had no problems with Quickbooks. I'm not a fan of peachtree though. I think there is an open source one for cheap fuckers, GNUcash.

However Quickbooks is easy to use and will do most things you need.

Quoth

Mavenlink looks nice, but $30/month is a bit steeper than he can handle at present, I think. And he'd definitely need a Pro plan.

I hear that QuickBooks for Mac is pretty blah in comparison to the Windows version? Right now we're leaning toward AccountEdge plus Expensify, but QuickBooks is in second. Freshbooks seems to lack some of the features he needs, and is also at that $30/month price point at a minimum for him.

superchewie

From what I've heard, if you're going the QuickBooks route it'd be better to use QuickBooks Online than the Mac desktop version. As you mentioned, the Windows version has the most support.