Poll the Audience: Accounting and Freelance

Posted by kev Tue, 23 May 2006 15:06:00 GMT

Since I’ve started doing freelance Rails consulting as my day job, I’ve found the need to track my income and expenses.

I’ve looked at a few accounting packages, Quickbooks, Quicken, and iRatchet namely, but I’m still sitting on the fence.

For you freelancers out there, do you feel you need an accounting package, and if so, which one? My goal here has always been to help educate people about their choices with Rails or web development in general. What choices are out there that I’m not considering and how do you feel about them?

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Comments

  1. Avatar Zdenek Bohdanecky said about 1 hour later:

    Look at iBiz+iBank or LiquidLedger. I bought them a while ago, but still don’t have a time to start up. :)

  2. Avatar Bernie said about 1 hour later:

    Accounting is one of those things where a few dollars spent on software can quickly be recouped at tax time. Plus there are other non-tax time savers in invoicing, payments, etc—especially important as you get into contract or full-time employees.

    I’ve gone with Quickbooks in the past and was very happy with the decision. More than a few clients or more than one employee (you), I’d head in that direction.

  3. Avatar BrokeOne said about 13 hours later:

    I use MYOB first edge its very simple to use. http://www.myob.com/us/products/2006_firstedge/

  4. Avatar Craig said about 21 hours later:

    I have been using quickbooks for a while now and it serves its purpose. My accountant uses it and it makes it easy if I have problems. He knows how it works and makes for easy answers to my accounting questions. I have never used some of the other web based products but i’m thinking, if you are forseeing the need for help from an accountant than you may want to look at a tool they are familiar with. My two cents…

    Cheers

    Craig

  5. Avatar Todd Huss said about 24 hours later:

    Most accountants I’ve worked with prefer receiving Quickbooks files. It makes doing taxes really easy when you just send your accountant the file and they do everything off of it.

    Word of advice though, spend the money to sit down with your accountant to organize and setup your Quickbooks for your business. It will make the hand-off the first year go much more smoothly!

  6. Avatar Adam said about 24 hours later:

    Hey, As BrokeOne said, MYOB is fantastic. I highly recommend it.

  7. Avatar Kian said 2 days later:

    I just use Quicken (not even QuickBooks). It’s still pretty easy to set up accounts and categories to track income and expenses from the consulting gig.

    Just try to set up your expense categories to be similar to the ones in Section II of the Schedule C (if you’re a sole proprietor). Then you can run reports at tax-time and just plop the numbers right in.

    I used to use an accountant, but now how found that TurboTax Premier does a fine job for a one-man shop.

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