Our company moved from Peachtree to Quick Books a few years back... a year ago, we moved to Quick Books Online (QBO). We like it a lot. We do not love it unconditionally.

We’ve worked hard to fully embrace electronic integration... pulling all our bank accounts and our Corp Amex into QBO. We strive for, literally, zero retained paper. We scan (if necessary) and store everything electronically directly in QBO. It’s great.

Our accountants can login to our QBO account and check on or help us with stuff.

The web interface is easy to use, as is their iOS app.

Having said all that... there’s some stuff that’s just plain annoying. There’s no simple way to export/backup your data. It makes me nuts.

The iOS app is fun, but only provides a small subset of functionaly of the web interface... and it has bugs.

Their reports are ... fine... as long as you want exactly what they give you. Some of their choices are not my favorites. For example, it’ll tell me, supposedly on a cash basis, what my net profit is year to date. Great... but, it counts as having been received all the invoices that I have outstanding. So, if I have $300K of invoices due in the next 60 days, the YTD profit counts those invoices as being received. This is not helpful, and makes me... in a word... nuts.

That’s one concrete example. I often find the meaning behind the pretty graphs inscrutable. Now... I’m a software engineer, not an accountant, so maybe I’m just too stupid to appreciate what QBO is telllkng me sometimes.

Apart from all that, I’d signup for it again. We went for having a full time admin plus a full time finance manager to having a 20 hour a week bookeeping clerk. QBO is only responsible for part of that savings, of,course, but it definitely plays a part.

Thank you, Peter. I am probably going to try several of these options before settling on something so all of this info is awesome.

I forgot to answer the transactions question earlier so maybe this will help too....
The operations account has 2-3 credits and 20 debits monthly.
Personal checking, 5-7 credits and 20 debits.
Credit card for personal use is a rewards card so gets 50+.
Debt accounts are being paid down so 1 a month (and sadly there are 11 accounts including l.o.c.s car loans and mortgages.

Not sure of that helps anyone.....

My accountant needs a few receipts and state!ants, my income docs and a report from whatever I choose tracking business expenses. I guess its possible that some system could centralize all this and make his job easier and cheaper for me too.

quote:

Originally posted by PeterGV:
Their reports are ... fine... as long as you want exactly what they give you. Some of their choices are not my favorites. For example, it’ll tell me, supposedly on a cash basis, what my net profit is year to date. Great... but, it counts as having been received all the invoices that I have outstanding. So, if I have $300K of invoices due in the next 60 days, the YTD profit counts those invoices as being received. This is not helpful, and makes me... in a word... nuts.

I am not an accountant, I did not sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I did "ace" the intro level accounting course that I took in grad school at University of Chicago (I started down the road to an MBA, but changed direction and stayed technical).

There are two methods of reporting, they are both valid as long as you understand what they are telling you.

What you are describing is accrual reports. These tell you what you have on the books, both actual income that you have received, and expected income based on invoices that you have given to clients that have not been paid yet. Similarly, expenses that you have paid, as well as bills that you have received and have not yet paid.

The other method of reporting is cash reports. This type of report reflects income that you have already received and does not report expected income from invoices that you have sent to customers, but have not yet received payment. Similarly, expenses that you have paid are shown in these reports, but not bills that you owe and have not yet paid.

You can think of it as cash reports showing exactly what you have right now; accrual shows your expected position in the near future.

The QuickBooks programs that you install on your computer let you go into Preferences and designate which type of reports you want: accrual or cash. I am not familiar with QuickBooks Online, so I don't know whether that has a preference selection for reports, but since both the accrual and cash reporting method are accepted practice (you need to pick one and stay with it for IRS purposes), I would really be surprised if there is no way to select which type you want.

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OK, QuickBooks online does offer both types of reports. Here is how to switch from one type to the other.

quote:

What you are describing is accrual reports

Thank you, VTail.

I’m familiar with cash and accrual basis accrual principals... and in fact in my post I wrote “For example, it’ll tell me, supposedly on a cash basis, what my net profit is year to date”... And at the time, switching from cash to accrual showed a difference in the report (reflecting cash received at the beginning of the year).

And, know what? This morning I tried it... and QBO no longer has this problem. Seriously. It did. For weeks. For everyone in my company.

This just highlights one of the primary charchteristics of QBO: It’s constantly changing, what it does and how it,does it is often a mystery, and your ability to customize what it does is often limited.

Having said that... I’d still do the move from QB on sight to QBO again.

And, again, thanks VTail for your try at helping.