I'm curious as to what you guys use in running your business. Right now I just use Word for invoicing and keep books by hand.I have an Accountant to the hard stuff. I thought it was time to get into the real world and get everything on computer. I'm just a me, myself and I operation so I don't need to do too much but would like to do recievables, payables, Invoices, estimates. I was at Sams club the other day and looked at "Quicken for Contractors". What else is out there and how hard is it to use??
Thanks
Jon

Regardless of choosing the right software for your needs, if you are moving from paper ledgers to a computer system, it is *vital* for you to plan how to do your system's backups. I can't over-emphasise it too much, because I have seen the stress and chaos at first hand of having to re-enter four years worth of paper, after I was called to look at a nearby neighbour's PC which had experienced a crash which turned out to be irrecoverable. His poor wife was given the job and has hardly forgiven him even now.

One of the lessons from that episode is that I would generally not recommend the use of a "general" PC that you use for surfing, mail etc as a bookkeeping system at all: it is safer to avoid all unnecessary chances of a virus or worm getting in there. A second PC for purely invoicing and running the books could be a very moderately-specified machine, and cost very little, and then it can be kept well away from public networks. The risks these days are a lot higher than they were even three years ago.

Paper books are extremely resilient and have excellent archival properties; electronic data does not. Over a seven-year period (or however long the auditing record requirement is for your tax authority) you could very feasibly change PCs, or at least change to a new hard disk drive. Historically it has often proved to be that over this time frame the backup system you had in the outset will no longer be working or supported at the end. It is always easier to cope with this if you plan it ahead.

Bear in mind also that copying stuff to CD-R is *no longer* a viable backup strategy. These things (both the disk AND the blank disks) are now so cheap that there is really no profit to be made on them, and therefore no longer any incentive for the manufacturers to produce ones that work dependably. There are so many counterfeit blank disks on the market and they *often* just lose data completely after only a couple of years. My opinion is that this is also the reason that my very very old 12X QUE!Fire external drive still seems to read just about anything I put in it, while the far newer drive in my laptop experiences read errors on anything that is not a perfect copy. Even though it probably a sign of my impending old-fartdom, I would still keep some sort of external tape backup unit going, if you are going to be putting business-critical data like your books on there, and from time to time make a c:\trial directory and try doing a small restore test, just to keep an eye on the safety of the data.

As for software I personally like GnuCash which is free and which runs on Linux or Unix, but it sounds to me as though you'd prefer a Windows package.

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!



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

Regarding the archival issues Jooles was talking about: Make sure to print out a permanent copy of the ledgers and journals every month, and the invoices as you issue them. That way, you have an archival paper copy that's equivalent to a manual bookkeeping system.

(Incidentally, that was how we recovered from our Solomon crash.)

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

I have been using MS Money Business. It is cheap enough for a one man operation without any bells and whistles. I would recommend Quicken Business because you can update to QuickBooks in the future if you need too. I tried a software package called "Bookkeeping" which I bought from Staples, it is only for someone who doesn't use any credit cards, so I would say don't bother with it. I returned mine to the mfg and got a refund.

Jeff

Here is a tip on backing up stuff. I have a dvd/cdrom burner in my pc. The drive comes with software called "incd" which runs in memory and you can put a blank dvd or cdrom in the drive, I copy all my data files and important files to this drive so if I ever did crash the harddrive I would have a copy burned on dvd. Here is some other good tips. I partition my harddrive and name one partion "Storage" I put nothing on this but data files, pics, .doc files, etc... just use it as a storage drive for backing up important stuff i dont want to loose. Sometimes windows needs to be re-installed due to corrupted files,etc... any experienced computer user knows what I am talking about. So because of having this partition called "Storage" and all my important files on it, I can reformat the C drive and reinstall Windows on it. Then I re-install all my programs on the D drive. Keep Windows on C drive and all programs on D drive. Storage is usually E or F drive, depends on size of your harddrive and how many partitions you make.

Here is a tip worth its weight in gold. If you loose a harddrive and it has important files on it, download a program called "GetDataBack" This happened to me and I had to reformat the whole drive just to reload Windows to boot the computer back up. GetDataBack recovered 75% of my files. I was amazed and very happy. I believe I spent $39.00 for it. Do a web search on Google to find out more.

I hope I have helped someone out there?
Jeff

Do not use DVDs or CDs as your backups. The writable versions have an organic compound that breaks down in sunlight and overtime. Funny thing also, is that people in South America have a fungus that eats the center of the disks. Writable CDs and DVDs are meant to be temporary storage. Spend the money a proper backup system. Preferably something with an offsite solution.

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

Indeed: maybe I was not clear enough about this.

Here is chapter and verse.
http://www.macintouch.com/cdrfailure.html

This article relates to Mac but it also applies to PCs and ALL types of writeable CD. You see by the date it has been a problem now since a long time ago.

A useful alternative to CDR I found is to use a couple of external hard disks (USB-2/FireWire connected). These are for nightly backups. They are not too expensive any more -- EUR 150 for 240GB!

But I still keep a tape drive going to make tapes of critical *archive* stuff to keep in a tupperware box in the wine cellar.

I'm glad I thought I was giving valuable advice. Now I just learned my dvd-cd rom backup is a potential disaster waiting to happen. How come my music cds don't deteriate then?

I assume you are refering to music CDs that you bought? They are made differently than writable CDs. Writable CDs have a layer of an organic compound that is burned by the laser. This layer is what deteriorates over time and in sunlight.

Mitsui Gold CD-Rs are said to be the best for long-term storage. They actually are manufactured with the intent of being stable, rather than to sell for $0 after rebate. (Yes, I've actually seen the $0 deal at Fry's on occasion.) They are more expensive--around $1.00-$1.50 each, depending on quantity.

You can find info about them by Googling "Mitsui Gold".

You mentioned "Fry's". One of their stores is in Phoenix. I used to travel there alot working on machinery and visited Fry's every chance I got. Wish they were here in Pittsburgh, a GREAT store, everything electronic under the sun, computers and more, makes my mouth water.

Jeff

I use Quickbooks. If you buy the newest package it will have moe than you really need. I would (and have in the past) buy a little older version off Ebay. I picked up 2003 for $70 last year. New? over $200 I'm sure.

I use an old version of Peachtree Accounting that I have been using since the Windows 3.1 days. Not only was it a PITA to figure out and set up but I can put the whole thing on a 3.5" floppy and stick it into another computor and run it from the .exe if that ever becomes necessary. Needless to say I'm very reluctant to change but unfortunately I think it's the end of the road for it because it doesn't like XP and the Win98 box it's on isn't long for this world.

-Hal

I've had success with old apps that are unsupported in XP by running them in W98 inside a virtual machine booted on Win2003 Server or WinXP. For an old Win 3.X package you should not notice any difference in performance.

That could work indefinitely, but if you decided after all to switch to a native XP package in the future then virtual machines also simplify this by letting you very easily create and manage test installations to use while you are doing things like configuring your reports, importing data, and so on.

I find VMWare the best, but there is also Virtual PC, which is cheaper and should be sufficient for this task.

I use Quick Books. I just upgraded to QB 2005 for Contractors. I've been using QB for 3 or 4 years and still don't really know how to use it to its fullest extent. The only drawback I've found is that they stop supporting it after 3 years and force you to upgrade if you use it for payroll.