Accounting Questions

[tbarnard]

Hello All,

Have been in the carwash business a little over a year and a half and up until now i have been doing my books via an excel spreadsheet. I was curious what anyone else uses for doing the books. I have a single SS in a small town so there are no employees or anything crazy. Just quarters in and expenses out. Looking for a simple software where i can just enter my deposits and expenses that is laid out nice and breaks things into catagories like Insurance, Mortgage, Contract Labor, Repairs, Supplies, Taxes, and Utilities, so that I can just transfer the numbers to a Schedule C at the end of the year for tax time. A program like quickbooks just seems like way more than i need. Is there a better way than the spreadsheet? Thanks guys.

 

[washme1]

Quickbooks Simple Start.

 

[Earl Weiss]

You might be able to use Microsoft Money or Quicken. But if you can get quickbooks for a little more $, it will be worth it. You can run more than one business or business(es) and personal stuff with one QB program.

 

[mjwalsh]

You might be able to use Microsoft Money or Quicken. But if you can get quickbooks for a little more $, it will be worth it. You can run more than one business or business(es) and personal stuff with one QB program.

tBernard,

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2...-money-16-powerful-personal-finance-programs/

Something to consider before you get too dependent on whatever middleman software ... is to use whatever transaction & bill paying logging the bank's website has ... from experience ... it can help remove one more bad news "potential point of failure". It is one thing to have the ability to download data & quite another thing to be dependent on the download of the data into another software program.

mike

 

[Earl Weiss]

You lost me. (perhaps others as well)
I operate this way. All checks and electronic payments are entered into QB. Recurring transactions are entered automaticaly. Daily Sales reports and bank deposits are entered as well. At the end of the month QB is used to reconcile the Bank statements. How does your accounting software interact with the banks software?
Is it reconciling your credit card deposits and charges?

 

[Buzzie8]

Quickbooks is a CPA standard. I tried once, years ago, to do my business taxes. It was a nightmare. All CPA's these days except Quickbooks files and know how to file taxes from them. This is a no brainer.

 

[txheat]

Hello All,

Have been in the carwash business a little over a year and a half and up until now i have been doing my books via an excel spreadsheet. I was curious what anyone else uses for doing the books. I have a single SS in a small town so there are no employees or anything crazy. Just quarters in and expenses out. Looking for a simple software where i can just enter my deposits and expenses that is laid out nice and breaks things into catagories like Insurance, Mortgage, Contract Labor, Repairs, Supplies, Taxes, and Utilities, so that I can just transfer the numbers to a Schedule C at the end of the year for tax time. A program like quickbooks just seems like way more than i need. Is there a better way than the spreadsheet? Thanks guys.

I use excel. It cant get any more simpler then spreadsheet. You can customize your spreadsheet anyway you want. I have tabs from sales to income statements to charts/graphs. The numbers link together within worksheets.

 

[PaulLovesJamie]

I use excel. It cant get any more simpler then spreadsheet.

Thats true on the surface, but excel is a double edged sword, extremely sharp. We use it a lot. But for simple and highly standard things like small business accounting, IMO it is wiser to go with a standardized package.

Jamie is a CPA, she very strongly recommends Quicken for personal use and for simple small businesses - including car washes with very simple needs. Quickbooks is more robust but the vast majority of simple small businesses neither need nor use the extra features.
If you have payroll, go straight to Quickbooks.

fwiw, Jamie uses both Quicken and Quickbooks on our network. She uses Quicken for our self serve.

 

[mjwalsh]

Jamie is a CPA, she very strongly recommends Quicken for personal use and for simple small businesses - including car washes with very simple needs.

It seems like the different approaches have their strengths & weaknesses. For us ... MS Access plays a role. It is more structured to prevent entry errors than Excel. In our case we invested the time to interconnect our coin counter & Standard ChangeMakers ... so running databases with precise report capability has been worthwhile.

Paul,

It sounds like Jamie has to do some finishing in Excel which I usually wind up doing to bring all the data together for some final calculations.

Does Jamie ever have difficulty with some banks' one step process interaction with Quicken & QB? I had no trouble with the one stepper with the discontinued in 2009 MS Money Deluxe for over 5 years. The connection with the new Quicken was unreliable & would create duplicates for me. That was the point I wanted to make about using the Bank's own Bill Pay & possibly just using a process that requires a few more steps than with just the one step update process.

I agree that we want to eliminate as much manual entry as possible which is the main strength of Quicken & QuickBooks. We are smaller like TxHeat & tBarnard so that one step automation is not as necessary. From my experience this 15 months with an ATM ... it appears that specific handshaking automation of debit-credit cards is more mature & more solid than some of the fancy SS in bay credit card swipers. Maybe it is because we have just been lucky the last 15 months; but the ATM has been flawless & with standby flawless internal logging. We have access to more than one bank's log along with the QIF, QFX or CSV download capability. Those final spreadsheet calcs are just for tying in the more key source info since there is no one software that can do all of it automatically.

mike

 

[JMMUSTANG]

If you use an Apple I would be careful using Quickbooks.
It's was a nightmare for me.
Before I purchased Quickbooks I called Apple, my banks and brokerage, everyone at that time told me know problem with using an Apple and Quickbooks.
After I purchased it all I heard from Apple, banks and brokers etc. when trying to install it and make it compatibe was "we do not support third party software " or something like that.
I had several IT guys come in and try to get it to work without success and they advertised that they were Apple experts.
Even the Apple store told me that it's their number 1 problem software to install.
After 3 weeks of bs I finally found someone that got it to work.
The funny thing was he pressed the wrong button, and I mean one button, by accident and it started working.

 

[PaulLovesJamie]

sorry Mike, I didnt see this here are answers to your questions

For us ... MS Access plays a role.

Thats largely my point - Excel, Access, etc etc are development tools, you write and customize the vast majority of what you want/need.
Intuit products otoh are standardized packages for doing non-custom work,
... which is a direct segue to my next response:

Paul,
It sounds like Jamie has to do some finishing in Excel which I usually wind up doing to bring all the data together for some final calculations.

Nope, generally not. We let intuit do the standard accounting/bookkeeping/reporting/payroll/etc -- thats what a standardized package (like quicken) is for, so we roll with that. In the world of $$$ we generally only use excel for analysis - value regressions, trends, monte carlos, etc, most of which are not for the car wash.
Yes I realize now that my comment about using excel was ambiguous, sorry bout that.

Does Jamie ever have difficulty with some banks' one step process interaction with Quicken & QB?

Not really, no. When intuit standardized their back-end interfaces a few years ago there were some annoying glitches, but otherwise no - not enough that she's complained to me anyway.