Maybe it’s because I didn’t like accounting in graduate school, or maybe it’s because I hate data entry, but I seem to have a strong aversion to Quickbooks. I decided to update my finances today because I had neglected to monitor my cash outflow for several weeks. After entering 2 months worth of data, I noticed I had a discrepancy of $4.00. I spent 30 more minutes obsessively trying to figure out where I had made a mistake. At first I thought maybe I had accidentally bought girl scout cookies or something. Well, it turns out that there were actually two entries that I had mistyped. Doh. I’m pretty sure that once my business launches and I have to keep track of revenue, bookkeeping will be one of the first things I’ll outsource.
I also worked on my brand positioning today, so that my graphic designer would have an easier time with the website design. It has been hard to distill everything about my brand into just a few words and sentences. I’m still working on the positioning wording, but so far I think I have enough to help my graphic designer get started on the website development. I’ll also need to work on web copy this week. Yikes!
Busy busy busy. Hasta manana.
No, no, no. It’s because Quickbooks sucks. Now, I haven’t found anything that’s better (and not unusable for some other reason), but that doesn’t change the basic fact that Quickbooks is an abomination.
Have you seen the graphic interface of Quickbooks 2009? It’s supposed to be “intuitive”…and it’s not.
Problems arise from the way we process our accounts.It’s not the tool its the way you are using it. Try reconciling your bank statement one page at time instead of a month at a time. This is an easy way to find errors.
But what if my monthly bank statements are only 1 page long?
Is there a reason to stick to QuickBooks instead of moving to a SaaS solution? For my business SaaS is the only thing that makes any sense at all, and I’m often very surprised to find so many people insisting on keeping things locally — especially given the horror stories of QuickBooks local data store corruptions. One of the reasons I like the solution I use (WorkingPoint) is that, aside from being more affordable, portable, and capable of handling multiple contributors, it’s not something I have to manage myself.