goWholesale

I am an accountant (actually an enrolled agent with a masters in accounting) and I can tell you that Quickbooks is the software that most small businesses use (Peachtree is also widely used but I have no personal experience with it). It is very versatile as it can do invoices, inventory, general ledger entries, payroll, and credit card transactions through one of their 2 credit card merchants. That said, I am no big fan of it, it is just an OK software in my opinion.

Now mind you, I come from an accountant mindset, so the problems I have with it may not be applicable with you.

The last version I used for a small tax practice I had (before leaving California) was QuickBooks Basic 2002. These problems may or may not have been addressed.

First, I don't like the input descriptions. When entering in transactions outside of the general ledger, Quickbooks uses terms such as decrease/increase, Charge/Payment, ect. which I find very confusing. I would prefer the software to do away with all that and simply use two words "debit" and "credit". Why?

Well for one thing, think about this. I created an other asset account called prepaid expenses. Decreases is in what is normally a debit column and Increases is in what is normally a credit column. This is counter-intuitive as I want increases to be in the debit column. I kept screwing up my entries because of this. It got so bad that for the first month I completely ignored Quickbooks separate entry forms and just used the plain old general ledger.

Second, Quickbooks does not handle depreciation of fixed assets. I created an accumulated depreciation account for each type of asset group and had to manually calculate the tax depreciation and enter it into the system. This is a serious drawback to a software that I think should have it. I think they left it out because there can be up to 6 sets of depreciation (Fed regular, AMT, & ACE, State regular, AMT, & ACE) plus a 7th internal. I suspect Intuit felt that a dedicated software should do this.

On the positive side, you can put in future transactions and run reports without them. Where this comes in handy is in situations where you want to be sure you expense out all the prepaids over time. I will book future expenses in prepaids until the account is zero so I know I did it right. When I run the reports for a specific period of time, it ignores those future transactions which is pretty nice.

Currently, I am dabbling in eBay and I find Quickbooks way to cumbersome. So now I do my entire business on spreadsheets. Its quick, easy, totally accurate, and I can sort it any way I want. In my opinion, if you have accounting knowledge, spreadsheets is the way to go for an eBay business.

yhost,
Quickbooks makes a great software for nearly any business. It's quite easy to learn and then a breeze from there. Initial cost may be a bit steep, but it depends on exactly what you're looking for.

What are your personal opinoins about Peachtree for the ones who have used it....

Hi there,

Seems nice conversation is going on here. I am not an accountant but I am willing to be. I am in college now studying 3 years program.
Well, we also learn Computerized Accounting and manual system. It makes you understand how diffucult was accounting before Computerized system.

We use Simply Accounting Program which is very user friendly and easy to use. Our teachers and most accountant that I spoke said, Quickbooks is very popular as it is advertised a lot. I gave a shot to Quickbooks but it seems confusing and not as easy as Simply.

I dont know if Simply is comptetitble for U.S. but I live in Canada and it really is a nice program.

Regards..

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Free Wholesalers & Dropshippers Database.

http://www.ezgoo.com

I am developing an ebay seller product which is a plugin fo rexcel

I would love to get some input from users that sell on ebay