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To use Quicken for creating invoices for your small business, you first need to describe your business to Quicken. You can then create invoices associated with.
Small business owners frequently ask us, “Can I use Quicken or do I have to use QuickBooks for my business?” Since Steve, the firm’s founding CPA, is the author of both Quicken for Dummies and Quickbooks for Dummies, we can probably provide some useful information on the Quicken vs. QuickBooks question. So let us try to do that here. What your bookkeeping system needs to do To start, note the three basic tasks that a small business accounting system does (or is supposed to do):. Your small business accounting system—whatever it is—should let you and other people (e.g.
The bank, your partners or investors, the Internal Revenue Service) accurately measure your financial condition. Your small business accounting system should produce the business forms—checks, invoices, customer statements, and so on—that you need again and again in your business.
Your small business accounting system should allow you to keep appropriately detailed records of the assets and liabilities of the business. In other words, your accounting system should be able to tell you with a mouse click how much money you have in the bank, which customers owe you money, and what inventory you’ve got stocked on the store, warehouse, or shop floor. No kidding, that’s really it. Stated most simply, your accounting system should perform (and perform well) three easy-to-understand tasks. If you think about these tasks and then the requirements of your business, it’s pretty easy to choose the winner in a Quicken vs. QuickBooks competition. When you need to use QuickBooks instead of Quicken For all practical purposes, Quicken produces only two business forms: checks and invoices.
This means that it doesn’t work for businesses that own inventory. But Quicken works really well for service businesses—especially small service businesses. If you need more forms—customer receipts, purchase orders, customer statements that show finance charges, and so on—you need QuickBooks. Also, if you need to use accrual basis accounting to accurately measure your business profits, or you need to keep detailed records of what the business owns and what it owes, you need QuickBooks. Finally, if you need to keep detailed records of anything besides cash, you need QuickBooks. QuickBooks, for example, includes an inventory feature and a fixed asset tracking system. Additional Benefits of Using QuickBooks We should also mention that includes better features for automating common bookkeeping tasks like payroll, customer statements, and finance charge calculations.
What’s more, QuickBooks includes security features that make it possible to have other people (like a bookkeeper) do some of your accounting without having them see every bit of your business’s finances. Hopefully, that information will let you get started in your decision. However, let us emphasize something that’s really important and related to task 1: It is essential that your accounting system let you accurately measure your profits or losses. If you don’t know whether you made or lost money last month or last quarter, you’re almost certainly in big trouble. Sorry, but you can’t successfully manage a business unless you know when and how you’re making money—and when and how you’re not. If you need help getting started with either Quicken or QuickBooks, you can try using the program right out of the box. If that doesn’t work and you enjoy reading, you can try one of Steve’s books, Quicken for Dummies or QuickBooks for Dummies.
If you want more help than that, you can and arrange to schedule an hour or two of personalized training that will teach you how to use Quicken or QuickBooks in your specific situation. Note: People refer to Intuit’s accounting system as both QuickBooks and Quick Books. The correct name, however, is actually not Quick Books (two words), but QuickBooks (one word). Nelson is the author of more than two dozen best-selling books, including Quicken for Dummies and QuickBooks for Dummies.
Nelson is a certified public accountant and a member of both the Washington Society of CPAs and the American Institute of CPAs. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Accounting, Magna Cum Laude, from Central Washington University and a Masters in Business Administration in Finance from the University of Washington (where, curiously, he was the youngest ever person to graduate from the program). Reader Interactions. I have been using Quicken to track my rental expenses for my 13 properties, 26 apartments and 100 tenants for years.
It is definitely sufficient in its design to do that – you use tags for each property you want to track seperately. Where Quicken fails dramatically is in its unstable database design and bugs – and having so many payees, different tags, and tracking so many things seems to bring Quicken to its knees.
I am looking to change to Quickbooks just to have a stable accounting software program that doesn’t crash almost daily. Hope that helps. I have successfully used Quicken for over 20 years for bookkeeping for rental property (Sch E), for writing invoices for my service business (Sch C), and for stock market investment performance metrics and bookkeeping.
Needless to say I have tracked banking transactions, and matched my totals to bank and credit card statements for decades. I have routinely upgraded, every three years, and most lately use Quicken 2014 Home and Business. In 2015 something went haywire sending my Windows XP computer into lock up when stock prices were downloaded or when I attempted to calculate investment income that included non-realized gains. Migration to a new Dell Windows 10 computer remedied nothing.
I would like to cut my database down to 2015 only so I might hand-fix every single transaction if necessary, to restore functionality. But I have 15,000 transactions that defy my attempts to mass-mark them as “reconciled.” The big “R” is needed so that a Year End Copy might leave said transactions behind into the history books, so to speak. But Quicken will not allow mass-handling of investment account transactions. I’ve had it with Quicken, and I wonder if Quick Books is a viable replacement software? Will it import my database?
I have no payroll needs, etc. Will Quick Books provide reports, for investments? Internal rate of return? Will it provide income and expense information for use in a 1040 Sch C? Nice article!
I’m coming at it from the opposite side: I wonder how well QuickBooks would work for managing personal finances. I already own QuickBooks for my business.
We have been using Quicken for home finances. My spouse is familiar with Quicken, but I find it a bit limiting, and am more used to how QuickBooks works. Given that Intuit is selling off the Quicken business, and that I would prefer to simplify by using a single product (if possible), what would we be giving up by using QuickBooks for both household and business finances? Hi Tonya,Well, you can transfer evhentriyg over, but it’s highly questionable if QB Pro 2003 will work under Windows 8. There’s a good chance it won’t; Intuit says that no version of QuickBooks prior to 2013 is supported under Windows 8. I guess you could install Windows XP over Windows 8 on your new computer, and then bring your QuickBooks Pro 2003 programs and files onto your new computer, but that’s a huge hassle might be best to just bit the bullet and get yourself a copy of QB 2013.Thanks for the question.