The Digital Tool Factory Blog

I haven’t been blogging any more about my Less Accounting experience, largely because I haven’t made much progress in actually using it. Much as recessions will reveal what auditors cannot, changing accounting systems reveals Quickbooks flaws that will not come up in any other way. Everything has been on hold while everything gets properly imported into the new system.

I recently signed up with Less Accounting and I will be publishing a Less Accounting review  and experiences with the setup process here (read the introduction).

1. Introduction
2. My accounting background (This post)
3. The Signup
4. Import Quickbooks File
5. Wire Account
6. Set Recurring
7. Hook up Bank Account
8. Hook Up American Express Account
9. Less Accounting – One Week Later
10. Less Accounting – One Month Later

In the beginning, by which I mean my awesome web company’s beginning in 2002, there was Microsoft Money.  That was my first accounting software and it served me adequately for about five years.  It was nothing special, but it did the job with a moderate amount of hassle, but after a while it began to show it’s age.   Somewhere along the way I started using BlinkSale, which was one of my better decisions.

Along about this time I first heard about Microsoft Office Accounting.  It was a relatively easy migration over from Microsoft Money and I was able to do my minimal accounting and bookkeeping tasks in significantly less time.  Plus, it worked like every other Microsoft product, and if you know Microsoft products well (which I do) then using it was a breeze.  Then Microsoft decided to discontinue the program and for reasons I don’t recall I thought that was a big deal and did not want to get stuck using obsolete software.

So I got a copy of QuickBooks, and away I went.  Specifically I went through a painful migration software.  I also came to the realization that there were many parts of QuickBooks that were not compatible with 64 bit software at that time.  I debated using Quickbooks Online, but that did not seem like a good option.

The good part of using QuickBooks for my Accounting Software

My accountant knew and liked the system, and we could do the entire thing remotely.

Beyond that, there were no good parts.  After a while, and inspired by Peter Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive, I began looking for options.  That led me to Less Accounting for my financial management and financial analysis..

For some reason the blog posts about QuickBooks Pro 2010 are the most popular ones on the entire blog.  As I’m doing accounting this morning, here are what I would change.

1. Remove the advertisements written directly into the program.  Click on “Learn about Payroll options” to see what I mean
2. Allow better sorting of invoices and estimates, currently the program throws everything at you at once.
3. Fix the printing problems – there is really no reason why creating a pdf is so error prone.
4. Allow easier access to templates – they should copy the sadly defunct Microsoft Office Accounting in their use of templates
5. Split off recurring invoicing and functions, avoid this whole “Memorized” metaphor, it’s simply not accurate. Continue reading →