It seems it's become a yearly tradition that I come here to ask about what everyone uses for tracking business expenses. I've been a Quicken Home & Business user for many years. Mostly because it lets me track mileage and run schedule C tax reports.

My new invoicing system lets me track income and mileage so that's redundant. It also has Quickbooks online integration but I've not tried it.

So, what are you using for business finance/expenses/tax reports? Quicken gets quirky and the online account integration is just about the flakiest thing I've ever used (basically it's useless and takes hours to debug the downloads) so if something is better I'm all ears.

I've been using Quickbooks for 20 years to run my business and happy with it.

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Originally posted by jimmy123x:
I've been using Quickbooks for 20 years to run my business and happy with it.

I tried it 12 years ago and it was way too complex for me. Quicken basically runs like a checkbook and is easier I use. Is Quickbooks all online now?

After struggling with the old DOS Peachtree Accounting, I switched to QuickBooks and never looked back. Taught my wife and now she uses an old copy to keep our family books.

Excel, I got tired of Peachtree, Quick books and the others charging me every year so I stopped using them. Mileage is tracked via the Driversnote app and I give everything to my CPA in Excel.

Still using Quicken Home & Business as it has the reporting and bulk editing I require for tax purposes. Also, all of my stuff is in one place.

I wish I could find an online, cloud equivalent.

For mileage, it's pretty easy for me to track on a notebook in the car.

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Originally posted by mrvmax:
Excel, I got tired of Peachtree, Quick books and the others charging me every year so I stopped using them. Mileage is tracked via the Driversnote app and I give everything to my CPA in Excel.

Do you make a spreadsheet for each account with columns for date, transaction type, payee, category and amount? How do you handle reconciling at the end of the month?

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Originally posted by steve495:
Still using Quicken Home & Business as it has the reporting and bulk editing I require for tax purposes. Also, all of my stuff is in one place.

I wish I could find an online, cloud equivalent.

For mileage, it's pretty easy for me to track on a notebook in the car.

It seems to be the easiest for me to use. Especially since we also use it to track our personal accounts, too. It's just really, really, really bad at downloading from credit cards and my bank and getting things into the correct categories with human readable payee names. It's much easier to enter everything manually.

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Originally posted by mark123:

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Originally posted by steve495:
Still using Quicken Home & Business as it has the reporting and bulk editing I require for tax purposes. Also, all of my stuff is in one place.

I wish I could find an online, cloud equivalent.

For mileage, it's pretty easy for me to track on a notebook in the car.

It seems to be the easiest for me to use. Especially since we also use it to track our personal accounts, too. It's just really, really, really bad at downloading from credit cards and my bank and getting things into the correct categories with human readable payee names. It's much easier to enter everything manually.

My bank and credit card connections are generally pretty good, but nowhere near perfect. I absolutely do go on there on a very regular basis (every couple of weeks) to "clean up" entries. Then at the end of the year I have to go in and bulk edit a lot of stuff. As an example, I need to ensure my payments to Amazon AWS are all named the same and in the right category. Not perfect, but generally works well.

I believe I've recommended MoneyDance before. It too, uses a checkbook-like entry and category/account management metaphor. Double-entry bookeeping behind it all. To address the download concerns, it is supposed to be "Quicken-compatible" using the same download protocol. I only know that it downloads transactions from my banks, credit cards, and brokerage accounts transparently. My experience is that the only hitches I have had have been on the vendor's end, e.g. downloading a specific transaction again, or with a mis-identified payee (one of my banks does this consistently). It allows auto-merging of manually-entered transactions that also come in on a download. Expense categorization is also automatic, usually it matches what was done for the last transaction in that account for the same payee. It is easy to recategorize, either individual transactions, or in a batch. Transactions can be marked as cleared and reconciling, these tags are used in the reconciling panel.

Free to try out (with the number of expense categories limited until you buy a license). Download from www.moneydance.com, runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, limited versions for iOS and Android. I do not have experience with the mobile versions so I don't know the extent of the limitations, but I think it is mostly omitting the extensive reports and graphs in the desktop version. One license ($50) allows running on all platforms.

I use it for my personal finance, including my small business consultancy. I suppose it could serve for business-only transactions, never really tried it. It is easy to create reports for specific periods that omit non-business-related data, e.g. for Schedule C entries, so I've never felt the need of it.

I use QuickBooks to tracks my son's business sales and expenses. I found it easy to use. There are reports available that I run and enter into Excel. Using Excel tools (pivot tables, formulas, etc), I can glean a lot of information from QB. QB also has a customer & vendor area where you could extract info from these databases. I like it!

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Originally posted by mark123:

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Originally posted by mrvmax:
Excel, I got tired of Peachtree, Quick books and the others charging me every year so I stopped using them. Mileage is tracked via the Driversnote app and I give everything to my CPA in Excel.

Do you make a spreadsheet for each account with columns for date, transaction type, payee, category and amount? How do you handle reconciling at the end of the month?

I have receipts on one tab (actually multiple tabs) and a main ledger on another. The ledger tab has several columns, total, cost, tax etc. I only have 20-30 customers a month so I have not really spent time adding formulas to the cells and getting fancy.

I just have a big Excel spreadsheet

Any chance you cats using excel can show me how you've got it set up? Like maybe a screenshot?

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Originally posted by mrvmax:

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Originally posted by mark123:

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Originally posted by mrvmax:
Excel, I got tired of Peachtree, Quick books and the others charging me every year so I stopped using them. Mileage is tracked via the Driversnote app and I give everything to my CPA in Excel.

Do you make a spreadsheet for each account with columns for date, transaction type, payee, category and amount? How do you handle reconciling at the end of the month?

I have receipts on one tab (actually multiple tabs) and a main ledger on another. The ledger tab has several columns, total, cost, tax etc. I only have 20-30 customers a month so I have not really spent time adding formulas to the cells and getting fancy.

I got the file you sent me and replied but I'm not sure the reply went through as I received a DKIM failure message. My DKIM file is set correctly but for some reason one of the relays rejected it.

Thanks so much. I'll dig into it and see if it's what I need. I have the rest of this month to decide.

I'm an Excel wizard in both formulas and VBA programming.

But I use Quicken Home and Business. I connect it to my banks. It downloads the transactions for me. It reminds me of bills and payments to pay. I don't use the business part much as I just use it as a placeholder for other accounts I have.

It's the same reason why other people pay you to do what you do for them - it's more efficient than if they were to do it themselves instead of hiring you.

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Originally posted by Rey HRH:
I'm an Excel wizard in both formulas and VBA programming.

But I use Quicken Home and Business. I connect it to my banks. It downloads the transactions for me. It reminds me of bills and payments to pay. I don't use the business part much as I just use it as a placeholder for other accounts I have.

It's the same reason why other people pay you to do what you do for them - it's more efficient than if they were to do it themselves instead of hiring you.

This is my point for asking. I don't want to spend an extra minute, let alone hours, at the end of a long day figuring how to use a program and trying to figure why my accounts are screwed up.

I think I'm just going to go with the new version of Quicken Home and Business again.

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Originally posted by mark123:
This is my point for asking. I don't want to spend an extra minute, let alone hours, at the end of a long day figuring how to use a program and trying to figure why my accounts are screwed up.

I think I'm just going to go with the new version of Quicken Home and Business again.

I'm glad my guidance help. During Thanksgiving weekend, Quicken business was $64 instead of $103. Maybe they'll have a sale for Christmas.