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My girlfriend runs a small but successful catering company. She only has 1 full time employee, and a few contract employees who get hired out for random events. She manages food purchasing, equipment rentals and insurance and up until now, has pretty much just been keeping stuff in spreadsheets, or on paper for her accountant. Her business is steadily growing, and we want to manage everything (budgets, expenses, salaries, paperwork (w4's and w2's). Looking for suggestions on software to do this. We use a Macbook/iPhone for most stuff, but anything cloud based, or OS agnostic would be great. Is Quicken/Quickbooks the default answer for this?
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May 4, 2014 04:08
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 23:23 |
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Bumping this because I would like to know the answer as well. In Australia we have something called MYOB which I think is the go to software for small businesses. Supposedly it makes filing your taxes a lot easier. Would be awesome if we had a small business megathread.
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Jun 18, 2014 11:17
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I don't know what the rates are, but this name has been popping up a lot as a good quickbooks alternative: http://www.xero.com/us/accounting-software/
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Jun 18, 2014 13:13
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How does your girlfriend manage payroll? My friend is paying a bank for payroll services and I'm not sure if they're missing something.
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Jun 18, 2014 19:25
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My Dad runs a small business (~12 employees) and my sister and I just helped him switch from doing his payroll manually, to using an automated online system. It's made the whole process a lot easier. I would recommend doing that and using something akin to Quicken for storing all the transactions and other data.
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Jun 19, 2014 13:55
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Here's a free alternative https://www.waveapps.com/accounting/
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Jun 19, 2014 14:29
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We switched to Xero from QuickBooks near the beginning of this year. I used to spend two days doing my month-end accounting. Now I spend about fifteen minutes. That sounds like a sales pitch, but it's the truth. I've got complaints about Xero, but none that come close to making me want to go back to QuickBooks.
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Jun 20, 2014 07:17
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I've spent time with a few different accounting systems and Quickbooks basically wins the "drastically reduce the amount of work Award." There is a cloud version and Mac specific version, though I've not tried either. There is some really cool stuff she can do. Let's take the purchasing cycle for a sec. Does she have a business debit/credit card she uses for all her purchases? If it's with a major bank she can import all the transactions directly from the bank, tell Quickbooks to put catering supplies bought from vendor X into account Y automatically going forward and overtime minimize bookkeeping. And since it pulls this directly from the bank it minimize month end reconciliations as well. There are downsides, but for a small business its almost always a significant step up in efficiency and reliability, allowing her more time to analyze the numbers or manage her business and de-stressing a lot of bookkeeping and accounting.
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Jun 30, 2014 19:39
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I just incorporated an LLC and set up a wave account to simplify accounting. I barely remember accounting 101 from undergrad, so I need help setting up the foundation. Is there a guide for someone like me who works as a photographer, as far as taxation and invoicing and such? For example, I might invoice $1k on a job, but a chunk of that is going to be for assistants, rentals, expenses like that. Do I report whatever the profit is as income, or do I tally up all the revenue minus all the expenses at the end of the year? Or if I license a photograph for advertising or commercial use, do I charge sales tax? What if I assist another photographer for a day rate, does that count for sales tax?
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Jul 19, 2014 23:59
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You don't net it. You record the revenue, you record the expenses. Sales tax is more state/local specific, but usually the government entities websites are pretty clear on that.
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Jul 20, 2014 18:02
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 23:23 |
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When I was helping my dad run his small business we used quickbooks and it worked well. It had the backend account tools I liked because debits and credits were all I knew when I got out of college, and once you set up invoices and all the different types of charges it made life really easy. This was about 5 years ago too so I have to assume it's better now. Hah payroll, I have no idea how small businesses run payroll. I recommend not hiring anyone and just hiring them as contractors because gently caress payroll (i work in payroll for a fortune 500). For one employee though it can't be too bad as long as you're not taking out pre/post tax deductions that aren't tax related.
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Jul 21, 2014 03:16
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