Is there any simple account software out there that you can just enter your daily or weekly or monthly sales, then be able to enter your expenses etc and then generate your 3 basic accounting statements?

If you find one let me know ;) All the software I looked at was ethier way to complicated and had lots of features I didn't need or would use or they were too basic.

So I spent a few hours writing my own in Access

ACCPACC's Simply Accounting is a good tool for reporting and year end statements. It's complicated if you don't know any basic accounting.

There are courses available on how to use Simply Accounting.

It does more then you are asking but you can use QuickBooks as simply as you are wanting.

Yes, Quickbooks is also a good cash management tool.

Except with quick books doesnt it want you to enter in clients and invoices for every customer to be able to get cash into the business? I really dont want to go through all that, i would rather just input total sales for the day.

You can fake that by just adding in one client if you wish called "WebClient" and attribute all sales to it. Also you can use the ledger view of an account (bank account, etc) and add in amounts. You will have to tell it where the money goes but just define "Sales" if you want as an income account and off you go.

A few simple setups and you are set.

Well, Quickbooks I believe is just like a check book, except it's electronic.

I will have to check it out

You can enter all the stuff in the "Check Book" style view if you want. I *think* you can even turn off having to save the customers you can use but I would do the following:

- Define the minimum number of services you wish to track. Maybe all your different plans. Or maybe just one huge service called "WebHosting"
- Define one client called "WebClient".

Add in amounts. Done.

Well, how about Excel? You can enter whatever you want and have it add up whatever you want.

That is what i have been using

Excel works great for simple needs, and Access if you need more complicated stuff. Excel can have templates that's set up to link information from various cells to other worksheets. So you can have your 3 basic statements.

A very simple, inexpensive accounting program that can handle recurring billing is FF Billing Manager Pro DELUXE (http://www.mrtec.com/ProductFeatures.htm) ($109).

It has a minimal learning curve, it can print or email invoives and statements, does aging, etc. We actually use the print function along with FinePrint pdfFactory (http://www.fineprint.com/) ($50) to print invoices in PDF format (~30KB each) which we then email.

We use Quickbooks and HSPhere as our control panel. We have a program we use that automatically downloads any new customers and invoices then merges them into Quickbooks all the background for us. It works great.

Jeremy

Quickbooks is very easy to use and inexpensive. It can also grow with your business. You can set it up to use all or only a few of its features. As you grow you can even upgrade to Professional which is a very robust program.

QB is much more than a checkbook, it has many great reporting tools. Just remember, once it is set up it is difficult (with any system) to make major changes to the set up.

You don't have to enter sales by the individual customer, as someone else mentioned, set up a Web Client customer and enter all sales through that customer.

I have used quite a few and QB is by far the most user friendly. You don't have to be an accountant to figure it out. You can even set up multiple users with different authorities, for example one person can enter invoices and sales but cannot get reports and info on the whole business.

Originally posted by hilda
A very simple, inexpensive accounting program that can handle recurring billing is FF Billing Manager Pro DELUXE (http://www.mrtec.com/ProductFeatures.htm) ($109).

It has a minimal learning curve, it can print or email invoives and statements, does aging, etc. We actually use the print function along with FinePrint pdfFactory (http://www.fineprint.com/) ($50) to print invoices in PDF format (~30KB each) which we then email.

I am using an old version of FF billing manager. It is very easy to use but it is only a sales and billing program. It will not help you with other accounting issues.

Anyway I like its output invoices. I just copy and paste them into emails.

But now I am going to purchase ModernBill so that customers can see their account history when they want.

Mac

With Quickbooks it has a built in feature to email invoices. If you have online billing setup you can then have them click a button on the invoice and pay it there. I am not using the online pay feature but I am going to look into it for fees, etc.

Full blown accounts software for free:-

http://www.clarisys.ca/

Or invoicing software with built in electronic emailing

http://www.account-n-see.com

Originally posted by Chae
Or invoicing software with built in electronic emailing

http://www.account-n-see.com

I completely looked at every part of this program. I have worked with many invoicing programs but I liked this very much.

It is designed to be very easy and logical. However it lacks some features. The most important is monthly billing.

Mac

Hi Yah Mac,

You must be missing something cause I've been using it for over a year and I have customers on Monthly, 3 monthly, 6 monthly and some even set-up for annual payments.

All the monthly accounts are set-up for the 20th of the month and on the 20th when I go to the software it automatically asks me to print them off 1 copy for the office - printer then another copy to the customer - email.

If you have a copy of the program there - go to the top menu...you need to have some customers already in the database or some test customers anyway...Programs > Add/Edit AutoBiller (Repeat Billing)

The next dialogue box even has the steps to setting up your autobilling numbers...it's real easy

Hope that helps you out...they not long revised the software and the latest version is 2.7.13

Regards from Auckland

Chae

Chae,

Oh, you are right! I don't know how I have skipped that menu item :)

Then it is one of the best invoice and billing programs available.

Currently I am using FF Billing Manager which is more expensive. I don't like its interface but as I had not been able to find a better program near to that I continued using it.

I may either use this one or move to ModernBill. My problem with MBill is that most of my customers are from local market and it is not easy to force them to visit my website and enter their order there each time.

Mac

Cool,

I found that my customers love the invoices, you can choose whether or not they have HTML or not and the invoices have actually been designed to be sent as HTML but if the customer can't read html then there's a little text header that says something like:- Contact whatever@domainname.com and ask for this invoice to be sent in ASCII format :cool:

This program does what I want and does more than a lot of the expensive ones, a lot of the full blown accounts software packages available won't even let you email invoices, some will allow email statements but not invoices.

I prefer to have a "local" package available on one of our machines, my wifes a chartered accountant so at the end of the month I print of a copy of the invoices paid and a copy of the debtors and she does her thing with the Real Accounting Software. It keeps my wife happy doing it this way, cause I can't mess around and fiddle with the accounting software :)