Walrus, it was funny for me reading your post, as I've arrived at the same place you are at the moment, but through a different route...

Over the years I've spent thousands of dollars on accounting package--BPI, Peachtree, Solomon, and QuickBooks. Most of them have been worse than miserable. And the more I paid for them, the more miserable they were.

(A quick contractor story here: The owner of my office building gave the contractor building next door permission to tap into the house panel of our building for construction power. But, as Murphy would have it, the guy went to MY panel instead of the house panel. He killed the power to our panel while my office manager was doing the books on Solomon Accounting. Even with backups, the resulting database crash was completely unrecoverable. I believe that was the point when we switched to QuickBooks. I find that completely beyond belief--Solomon was a package costing thousands of dollars, and they didn't even have the basics right, like always having the disk in a consistent and recoverable state. Arggggh!@#!!!)

QuickBooks was by far the best package for my purposes, which was keeping books for a small company. If was also the least expensive by a large margin. And very easy to use.

If I really needed something now, I'd get QuickBooks. However, I went to work for a while for someone else, and when I went out on my own, I hadn't bothered to get the QuickBooks update from DOS to Windows. So I've been invoicing on Word, and just list everything out at the end of the year on a yellow pad and add it up manually. It works just fine for what I'm doing. It also has the advantage that I can email invoices to the client as "doc" files, which gets me paid faster! [Linked Image]



[This message has been edited by SolarPowered (edited 05-21-2005).]