I like the Quicken interface. I think I have reviewed all of the other products, and in my opinion, Quicken is the best. So unless another product will get me leaps and bounds above Quicken, I would like to stick with it.
I am a sole proprietor with myself and three additional employees.
My business and personal accounts are fully separated, except on occasion I might use a personal credit card to buy business items because of various cash back promotions, or for larger than $7k purchases because that is the limit of my business credit card.
I would like one piece of software to track my personal and business finances to give me a complete picture of my financial health, along with budgeting tools for both together.
Obviously, I need payroll services (and I use Intuit Payroll, so as long as I can integrate with that, things are fine), Schedule C prep, estimated quarterly taxes calculation, health care for employees, 401k, etc.
I would like an employee to have limited access to the data file to enter hours worked, run payroll, pay bills, etc. but not have access to things like the wages of other employees, access to my personal financial data, or the overall business financial data. I realize that this may be difficult, so as an alternative, could I have a third party accountant have access to the same data file I use to accomplish the same tasks?
Am I asking too much of Quicken 2016? What is the best option for my situation?
Does Quicken do all of that payroll and tax prep stuff? My instincts say no, since intuit has another product called Quickbooks that does.
I have used Quickbooks for my small business forever. I don’t put my personal stuff in there though. There is one credit card that is personal that gets used for the business but input it as just a loan account and only record “loans” the business gets from that card and payments it pays to the loan.
Quickbooks has an accountants version of your company file. Not sure you could hide any account info from them, it just keeps them from being able to edit. I’m not sure what sort of locks you could put on another user. They definitely need to see wages to run payroll tho.
Quickbooks is very adequate. I don’t think you will find what you are looking for in Quicken.
Intuit is now selling off Quicken, but keeping Quickbooks. (QApparentely too many customers were finding Quicken adequate, and not moving on to the more expensive Quickbooks.) Hopefully, this will mean better maintenance & updates of Quicken, which Intuit has left to languish lately.
I use QuickBooks from 1999, which still does all that I want it to do, but requires being launched in XP mode in Win 7. Win 10 won’t support that, so I’ve been looking at other small business accounting packages.
Based on all the terrible reviews that new versions ofQuickBooks get, and not wanting to rely on a cloud-based service that I’d have to pay for every month, I have been testing Account Edge. Their basic package, for a one-time paymentioned of $99, looks like it will work for me.
On point 6: I’m not aware of any multi user or permissions features in Quicken, so if you give someone access, you give them the entire file.
Quicken and QuickBooks Desktop both require people to be on your computer or your local network to connect to your data file. Either will work for multiple users if only one uses it at a time. QuickBooks allows multiple users (up to 5) simultaneously, if you purchase enough licenses. Remote log in is one option that could solve some of these problems for either program (something like LogMeIn).
QuickBooks has features that will save your accountant time and allow them to send back changes to you for import, without needing remote login or local access. As an accountant myself, I tell Quicken users they’re looking at $50 to $150 additional cost on a business tax return because Quicken lacks those time-saving features. Only the very smallest/simplest businesses see no difference.)
Regarding commasense’s comments on QB reviews: Many of the terrible reviews relate to bugs that take about six months to fix. The QB 2017 software will be released somewhere around October 2016, but I’d consider that the beta-testing release. The “final” release will be ready somewhere around May of 2017. QB 2017 will be fully supported until May of 2020. If the 2018 and 2019 editions don’t offer any features you can’t live without, don’t upgrade until 2020. The net cost of this is about $50/year.
So customers shouldn’t gripe about routinely buggy releases that waste their time and effort? ISTM that many people want to update their accounting software in advance of the tax season, in which case waiting till May is not a big help.
And a lot of the griping is about Intuit’s planned obsolescence business model that enforces updating at least every three years by holding all of your business’s data hostage. It’s a scummy practice, IMHO.
QB 6.0 (the version I got in 1998) has worked fine for my (admittedly small and simple) business for the last 18 years. If I had bought a later edition, after they began the mandatory update process, I would have paid (by your reckoning) at least $600 in addition to the original purchase price just to be able to continue accessing my own data.
I’m not saying that it’s OK for Intuit to release crap software and work the bugs out later. However, this is what they actually do, and one solution is to simply wait six months before you upgrade.
Furthermore, you’re exaggerating to the point of dishonesty when you say that they’re holding your data hostage. You lose features like payroll, invoice emailing, the accountant’s copy, etc. but there is never a point at which you stop being able to access your data. If all you want is a write up system for financial accounting records, there is no reason to ever upgrade.
Also, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that $600 over 20 years is probably not a very significant expense for a business with one employee.
AccountEdge is a great product too, but there are reasons I prefer QuickBooks. Among those: I don’t like how AccountEdge forces an annual closing process. Most small companies can keep decades of data at their fingertips in QuickBooks. For AccountEdge, you have to “clean up” old data, a process that is optional in QuickBooks.
Okay, I admit that my comment was based mostly on what I’ve read, not on my own experience, so I’ll take your word for it. I wasn’t trying to be dishonest. Honestly!
Well, in absolute terms, perhaps not. But it’s the principle of the thing, dammit. And if I don’t need any of the new features in the update, but do want to continue with the things you mention above will be killed if I don’t update, what the heck is Intuit doing for that $600, other than forcing me to install possibly buggy new software? It’s blackmail. I’m still using Office 2003 for the same reason, and I have sworn I will never move to Office 360 or any other program that wants me to pay constantly just to keep doing what I’ve been doing.
Please tell me more about this, since I’ve only just begun investigating it, and haven’t made the transition yet.
You can see that the closing process is fairly involved, whereas QuickBooks makes in an automatic behinds-the-scenes kind of thing. (Which most accountants hate about QB, but the users prefer it).
You don’t automatically lose/condense data from prior years if you select the right options, but only certain reports show multiple years of data. QuickBooks can show multiple years on just about every report.
Just looking at the OP, what you want, you can’t do (from what I can tell) with Quicken. You really do need to step it up to QuickBooks. It does all that stuff, not only that, it’s designed to do all that. To do all that in Quicken, you’d be shoehorning it in, I’m sure you can find a way, but it’s not going to be any kind of standard way.
On top of that, if you don’t have an accountant, some day you probably will have one (or at least need one for something). Most accountants will prefer you to be using something like Quickbooks or Peachtree or something else meant for a business. Partially because they already have all those programs, but also because they’re more or less standardized in how they’re set up and they’re familiar with them. So, you have a problem or a question or you need them to do some year end cleaning up, whatever it is, you send them a copy of your data file, they can open it up on their computer and know what they’re looking at. Sure, they might have some questions, but they’re not going to need you to walk them through it.
Also, unless you have a really good reason, I would strongly suggest you don’t mix your personal money in with your business money. If you’re only doing it because you like Quicken, all you need to do is set up a second data file for you personal finances and switch between them as necessary to do personal or business stuff. Moving money between them is as simple as writing a check from one account (against the Owners Drawing Account on your business file) and making a deposit on the other. I’d suggest having two separate bank accounts as well, but I suppose it could be done with one. In small/sole prop business, the owner takes money via the Drawing Account and it ends up on the Balance sheet that way.
In fact, that’s another reason to use quickbooks. You can create a Balance Sheet and a Profit & Loss statement in a matter of seconds. With Quicken you’d have to create a more customized report to do that and if you create it wrong, people might not be happy with you and you’d have no one to blame but yourself. I don’t know how long you’ve had a business or what your banking needs are, but I use those two items (BS and P&L) on regular basis. I need them for my bank, I need them when I’m asking people for money, plus I look at the P&L a few times a month just to see how we’re doing compared to last year.
(On preview I see I already have a Wall of Words started, I can keep fanwanking Quickbooks if you’d like, but I’ll start with this). For the record, I do use Quicken at home as well.
The personal finances are completely segregated from business finances, except for those rare occasions when I make a business purchase on a personal credit card for reward points, or in instances such as my cell phone bill (used for both personal and business, so I allocate a percentage use for each), or when traveling for business and I take my girlfriend along, so I have to claim only my expenses as business related. Basically those instances which are part business/part personal.
Quickbooks does not seem intuitive for personal finances. Further (and this is one of the things that I need and should have mentioned), my income is sporadic. I might rake in big fees one month and have next to nothing the following. It is difficult to use forecasting tools under that model. Previously when I worked for others, you just put in your standard paycheck every two weeks and voila. That doesn’t work now, and I want a program that would set up an alert if a particular account was projected to be low, so I could transfer some money.
I am currently using WAVE for accounting purposes and it has served me well. I just hate having to enter it once in Quicken and redo it in Wave.
Do any of these programs have a tool for estimating quarterly taxes? IOW, I would like a calculator that tells me based upon your gross receipts and business expenses, you need to set aside X% of each fee earned for quarterly taxes. Paying those (and all taxes) from within the app would be great as well.
Bottom line, I am searching for an all in one solution that does not seem to exist.
I’m not aware of any forecasting tools that are useful when income is sporadic. You have to make some kind of prediction, whether that’s by assuming one big paycheck every couple of months or by averaging that paycheck out on a monthly/weekly basis.
QuickBooks isn’t intuitive for personal finance, but it’s mostly a terminology issue. If you see “sales receipt” and think “paycheck” that kind of thing will get you there. It does have the forecasting tools you’re looking for, but it will still depend on you telling it what you expect income to look like. Any forecasting tool is going to rely on your brain for the heavy lifting in determining how to project income like that.
Wave is a nice program, especially if you want to track business and personal. I forget their terminology, but you can manage the two separately, but under one login, and it’s easy to tell the program that business expenses are personal or vice versa.
My main hesitation with Wave is theoretical: you have no guarantee they stay free or that they stay in business. My advice to people who use it is to keep detailed backups of the transactions by running a few reports and saving them as Excel files.
Wave also has serious limitations for some businesses. For example, the way it handles sales tax (by creating a separate account for each tax rate) is very cumbersome for businesses that have lots of rates (which is common here in Washington state at least).
Quarterly taxes are hard, especially for a sole proprietor that may have to account for personal income other than business income. Basically, you want to use your accounting system to get a profit & loss, do a quick estimate of non-cash expenses (use of home, mileage, depreciation), multiply that out for an annual figure, estimate the taxes on an annual basis (lots of calculators exist on the web for federal taxes, but states are harder), then take your final tax about and divide by 4. For most people, the better solution is to figure out a percentage that works for you. Many sole proprietors in the US pay somewhere between 25% to 40% on their net profit (combining income tax and self-employment tax).
And, yes, getting an accountant’s input is probably a good idea.
I understand that…and you understand that, however, the tax man might not. It can’t hurt and can only help to keep them in different data files.
QB is waaay over board for personal finances. If you use QB for business, you’d still use quicken for personal (I might have been confusing in my last post). However, if you use Quicken for both, I’d keep two separate files. As for having a single expense that use use for both personal and business things, that’s easy enough. QB (and quicken for that matter), let you split an expense into multiple accounts. For example, you can say
Verizon $125
–Telephone…$100
–Draw…$25
You can do that with anything and split it into as many or as few accounts as you want, ‘Draw’ will always be money that counts as your personal income. Anything else is a business expense.
There’s lots more (and if it makes a difference, my knowledge is limited to desktop versions of these products), but I have to run.
Let’s say I pay $2,000 for a business item on a personal credit card. Next month when the bill comes, I pay $2,000 out of the business checking account to the card.
In my personal financial file, I write this as a loan to the business. I create an account in the personal file as an asset.
I create a debt in the business file. When money is paid, my personal asset goes to $0 and the business debt goes to $0. But I keep this “account” always open for payments back and forth.
Would that work? So long as I am clear that everything that goes into this “account” is a legitimate business expense/capital expenditure?
I’m working on the assumption that you’re keeping your personal finances out of the company file…
Yes. You’d pay yourself $2000 (in exchange for $2000 worth of receipts…everything always needs to balance). In quickbooks you could handle this in a few ways. Three of which would be to write a check to yourself, write a check to the credit card company or repay yourself in cash (if you handle cash). However you do it, though, none of this will go towards your ‘drawing account’, just break it out into whatever you spend the money on.
To make this a little easier, pretend like one of your employees came to you and said “Here’s the receipt for the new paper shredder I got from Office Max, you owe me $150”. You’d then write him a check for $150 and in Quickbooks put it towards Office Supplies (or whatever). Same thing. In a case like this, don’t think of yourself as an owner. You have to mentally remove yourself to wrap your head around some of this bookwork.
Honestly, it probably doesn’t really matter. But I might stay away from the word “loan”. If someone looked at your personal financial data, they might ask why your loaning your own company money, and if you are, are you really a good candidate for them to give a loan to. If I bought stuff for work, I’d just put it in Quicken as what it was, and when it was paid back, I’d deposit the money into my checking account. Come to think of it, it might be easier for you to just make the payment directly from the business to the credit card. The book work for the business side of things remains (more or less) the same and there’s no book work on the personal side. Your personal finances won’t even know anything is happening.
However, if you want to do that, yes, that’s what you would do. In quickbooks you’d set up a short term “Note payable” and just use that to owe money to yourself and in Quicken you’d set up a “Note receivable” (or whatever the equivalent is for that in Quicken, some type of asset).
However, banks look at Notes Payable and they’ll ask questions. This is an accountant question, I’m not sure that a loan/Note situation is really how you’re supposed to be shuffling money back and forth. It’ll work, but it’s probably not the proper way.
I’d sooner do it the way I first mentioned in the first part of this post. Either pay yourself back with a check each time you buy something or pay the credit card company directly. Either one of those should be fine. The nice thing about writing yourself a check is if the business can’t afford to cash the check, you can sit on it, but at least it keeps the books clean (that is, you don’t owe anyone (being you) money).
I think so, as long as we’re understanding each other.
Have you considered getting a credit card for the business? Seems like that would alleviate a lot of this? Even if you have multiple credit cards of your own and just get one totally paid off and from this point on use if only for business, then all of this would be moot. Unless this is more of a general thing that you plan to apply to other accounting aspects.
I should also mention that I’m pretty much self taught from doing 90% of the books at a small business (10-20 employees) for a long time, but even at our place we still touch base with our accountants a few times a year and I email them whenever I have a question.
It might not hurt for you to get an idea for what you want to do (like your doing here) and set up a meeting with a local CPA to go over some of this stuff. The main reason we have a CPA (besides all the little questions we have during the year) is that they do all the end of the year stuff. Preparing our end of the year taxes, cleaning up all the loose ends in our books, finding (sometimes huge) tax savings/deductions, making sure we’re not doing something wrong that’s going to get us fined (do you know what day your 941 payment is due? Will you know if the law changes regarding the ability to mail vs e-file w-2/w-3). Even if you don’t need anyone on a regular basis, it still might not hurt to have someone to meet with once a year and, more importantly, to have an established person to talk to before you have a question instead of scrambling afterwards.
One other thought as I’m re-reading my post. This is, of course, a personal choice, but it’s something the owner at my store does and always has done.
Uses his personal credit cards for both personal and work expenditures. So, for example his bill for last month might say
Marcus cinema…$50
Grocery Store…$75
Office Max…$150
Gas…$400
Haircut…$30
TOTAL…$705
And then it Quickbooks it would say
PAY TO THE ORDER OF Visa…$705
Drawing Account…$355
Office Supplies…$150
Gas…$200
Now, what this does means is that nothing at all is entered in his personal finances (if he actually did that, which he doesn’t). In this case, he used that one card for, basically, whatever and sorted it out at the end of the month. Business expenses were broken out into their proper categories and the rest (drawing account) is part of his personal income. That’s perfectly acceptable as well. If you write checks to yourself to take money out of the business, they’ll be written off that same account as well. You’ll even note, I split his gas, half business, half personal.
Now, if you want to account for that $355 in quicken, I’d have to give that some thought. It’s a little tougher since you never actually see the money. You might have to create some kind of dummy account. I’m not sure, off the top of my head.
