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I need to move from accounting ledgers to accounting software. Should I buy Quicken
or Quickbooks?
Quicken is intended for personal use. Quicken lets you track your spending, pay your bills
online, download data from bank websites and plan for retirement.
Quickly do your personal accounting.
You still have to do the data entry, if you don’t set up automatic downloads from the
bank for recording spending. And it’s your responsibility to manage your spending.
Can I use Quickbooks for personal finance?
Quickbooks has most of the functions Quicken does. You can use it to pay your personal
bills and budget as well as generate business invoices and track your business sales tax.
Then buying Quickbooks lets me do my own accounting and that for my business.
Quickbooks can’t replace Quicken entirely. You can’t do retirement planning in Quickbooks.
And it won’t handle personal investments like 401ks and 529 plans.
I wish there was another option, other than paper or both software.
You could get Quicken for Home and Business. It does everything Quicken does while adding
many business features like tracking customer jobs, generating accounts payable and monitoring
unpaid customer invoices.
I heard you can create a business plan in Quickbooks, but not the other versions.
Shouldn’t you have had a business plan before you started the business?
Lots of IT companies and financial firms had complex business plans and beautiful websites
before collapsing into nothing. I never needed a government bailout.
And your accounting is just as archaic.
Can I use Quicken for Home and Business for both?
However, Quicken for Home and Business falls short for big businesses. You can’t track
inventory or sales orders or track someone’s labor to generate payroll.
That’s a lot of the paper I wanted to get rid of. My kids say I can’t call myself
an environmentalist, because we kill so many trees with recordkeeping and everyone’s
records.
Quickbooks is the only option if you want multiple users. You can even set up Quickbooks
to send a file to your accountant for reconciliation and billing, while you continue using most
of the Quickbooks modules.
I don’t have an accountant.
Get one, right after you get Quickbooks. And get Quicken for your personal finances.