Domaining Small Business Saturday: Small Business Accounting

Welcome to another Small Business Saturday – if you haven’t seen this series before I’ll give you a quick summary. Every Saturday I provide a useful piece of information or tool for small business owners. Since many people that read my blog are just starting their business I hope this post can help make the hurdles of setting-up a business a bit easier!

This week I thought I would discuss a tool that I use in my own business that is making it much easier to keep my finances organized. Before I discuss the tool – I’ll tell you how I decided to start using it.

When I started my business back in 2007 I used a text document to keep track of my income and expenses. In 2008 and 2009 business was at a point where the old text file just wouldn’t cut it. So I switched to a custom excel spreadsheet I made – nothing too complex – just a monthly tabulation of my income and my expenses.

Well that was fine in 2008 and 2009 but by January of 2010 my business had finally grown to a point where I needed to take a step-up. I asked friends and family that currently owned or had owned a business and across the board I got the same recommendation – use Quickbooks!

Quickbooks is a piece of software made by Intuit – the same company that makes Quicken – an excellent piece of personal finance software. Now I’m not being paid to promote this and there’s no affiliate link in this post so if you decide to sign-up I don’t make a dime. This is a system that I started using this year and I can say that it has saved me a LOT of time and made my business accounting MUCH easier.

One of the features I really like about Quickbooks that will come in handy around tax-time next year is that you can assign your accountant a login so they can access the data directly. It’s a big step-up from Excel and since I’m using Quickbooks online I can easily access it from anywhere – this is much better than emailing a spreadsheet back and forth to myself!

Now Quickbooks will be overkill for some businesses. If you do less than ten transactions per month you can probably stick with Excel. If you are doing thirty or more transactions you really can’t live without it! So if you are watching your business grow and noticing that more and more of your time is spend keeping track of finances Quickbooks could be the solution you’ve been looking for.

Okay – it’s Saturday – stop thinking about your business, grab a beer, and relax.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton