I have been a user and supporter of Quickbooks for years. I used Quickbooks professionally as an office manager and have also used it for years in managing my own personal and business money. I know Quickbooks inside and out, with the help of not only lots of experience, but also LOTS of one on one training through Conscious Bookkeeping and Serenity Bookkeeping.
“We download and categorize your balances and transactions automatically every day— making it effortless to see graphs of your spending, income, balances, and net worth…” – Mint.com
I recommend it over Quickbooks, even for small businesses
This past year my CPA turned me on to Mint.com, which is easier to use than Quickbooks (see this “Quicken/Quickbooks vs. Mint” article on TypeADemographic.com )
No more tediously entering individual transactions! After entering my account info for my various bank accounts, credit card companies, etc, Mint automatically downloads all of my transactions and categorizes them (which makes calculating deductions at tax time a breeze!) Of course I do need to sweep through to enter category info for checks or transactions which were placed in with “uncategorized” or “other.”
Financial tips galore! Mint also has unending financial tips. They automatically begin a budget for you which you can easily customize (no more spreadsheets!) A visually beautiful site, you can even see attractive pie charts for your own spending, income trends and more.
The only negatives I have found so far:
1. As far as I can tell you cannot print out a Profit and Loss Report, which for me, is the whole point of using Quickbooks to keep track of my business money (well almost the whole point) – To be able to print out a nice neat report for my CPA at the end of the year so he can easily enter those numbers into my tax return.
So…I will have to take about 20 minutes to type out into a doc or simple spreadsheet the end of the year totals (from the pretty Mint pie charts) into a list of income and expense totals. HOWEVER, this 20 minutes is far less than the hours and hours of entering transactions that I used to do in Quickbooks!
2. As of right now Mint.com is only for personal money management. If you have a business banking account, Mint.com will not be able to download your transactions. You can only link your account to personal banking accounts.
All in all…
Time saved! So I used to spend 15min-1hour every week inputting my transactions into Quickbooks. This year I spent ZERO hours every week on data/transactions entry and in a few short hours of category cleanup, in one day I am tax-info ready for my CPA. Woohoo!
Its free! Enjoy!
Lots of usefull information and inspiration, both of which we all need, thank you for good work
Usefull post , THX !
Thx for this great information that you are shareing with us
Heya¡my very first comment on your site. ,I have been reading your blog for a while and thought I would completely pop in and drop a friendly note. . It is great stuff indeed. I also wanted to ask..is there a way to subscribe to your site via email?
Great article-would like to publish in my free newsletter for seniors but was wondering if the information applies to Washington residents as well?
Theodore – Yes please feel free to publish this. Yes the information is relevant for washington residents. Thank you!
Searching for this for some time now – i guess luck is more advanced than search engines :)
Hi, thanks so much for these tips! My blogs usually do bring readers and responses. One thing I do is engage with the readers. Answer questions in responses and make clarifications where needed. I think they appreciate that I take the time to talk to them.
Thank you for your share. I am glad you like the tips…I appreciate you for commenting