Accounting, despite being perhaps the least fun, is one of the most integral aspects of your online business. Keeping good and accurate accounting records will save you both time and money in the long run. There is a huge variety of accounting software in both the desktop and the cloud. Choosing the service that best fits your needs and budget is essential. Here is a list of the best options out there for you in each price category.
These cloud accounting programs are perfect for businesses with less than 5 employees, and are much simpler and less-time consuming to use than the dreaded Quickbooks.
Software: Wave Accounting
Price: Free
Features: Automatic importing of transactions, business reports, email invoicing
Wave accounting is the tool of choice for bootstrappers. Wave accounting is the tool of choice for bootstrappers. It is absolutely free, which is surprising considering the robust amount of features it offers. The biggest concern people have with Wave is the fact that is it free, so is their data secure? In a word, yes. They use industry standard security practices, and are on par with online banking. Their service is impressive, especially for the amazing price point. Their email invoicing is perfect for billing customers, and they allow you to customize invoices with your own logo and branding. Automatic importing of transactions is also a very useful feature. It allows you to split and categorize deposits into your bank account and match them with invoices you’ve created. The only problem I have with Wave is its lack of Auto-Import for Canadian Credit cards. They can be found at WaveAccounting.com.
Software: Less Accounting
Price: $30/ Month for Unlimited Transactions
Features: Custom invoices, Contact management
Less Accounting has goals of helping you spend less time doing accounting. And they do it well. For $30 a month, it is a great value, and the interface is elegantly designed and simple to use. A few points of differentiation from Wave Accounting are the customer management software, which can be a good replacement over your current writing-them- down-in-a-notebook method, as well as their options for professional bookkeeping help (starting at $240 per quarter). Their website is lessaccounting.com .
One of these two services are all you’ll need to get your business off the ground and running. They are secure, robust, and effective. Having your accounting on a secure server can actually be safer than Quickbooks on your desktop. The data is trusted to companies who specialize in keeping it safe, while you’re busy running a business, and there is more potential for a laptop to be lost or stolen. In terms of overall design, both apps are great, and blow Quickbooks out of the water due to their simplicity.
Additional Accounting Services
Shoeboxed is an excellent service for small, and perhaps unorganized, businesspeople. How it works:
You mail in your receipts and business cards . They then scan, store, organize, and turn these receipts into expense reports and contact lists. The expenses and contacts can be exported in various formats. Pricing starts at $9.95 a month, which gives you up to 50 scans per month. This is an excellent addition to cloud accounting software for those that tend not to stay on top of their receipts.
With these cost effective solutions, you can spend less time crunching numbers, and more time growing your business, without any initial investment.
