Online Accounting Software - What Do You Use?
Right now, we use Quickbooks Online for the US business and a shrink wrapped copy of Quickbooks (the UK edition) for the UK business. What we'd really like to find is an online package that we can use for all of our companies (US, UK and soon Ireland) to keep track of all of the accounts. Ideally a nice API we could use to generate invoices would be nice, although that isn't essential.
Anyone have any recommendations of affordable small business online accounting packages that might be able to handle the multi-country, multi-currency, multi-company requirements without being priced for an IBM or a General Motors?
Any input appreciated . . .
www.mint.com
It is not for sale though.
Our current solution-- which is not ideal-- is to run our MYOB desktop accounting software on a firewalled machine in the same colo as our web servers, and access it via remote desktop. This gives us high-bandwidth access to the accounting system from everywhere, and makes backups a bit easier also. But I'd much rather be using a hosted web application, if I could find one which meets my needs.
And for that reason I will only ever use a desktop application where I'm in 100% total control of the security of my financial data and network. If I needed to access my data from another location (why?) I'd take my laptop and heavily encrypt the file or entire hard drive. Just my 2 cents.
Also, in the worst case, there really isn't anythig that sensitive in my accounts. I don't plan on publishing them on my blog, but I wouldn't forsee any huge calamities were some of the information to be available publicly - there isn't any part of my business model that depends on people not knowing what I spend or make, and as for my team, I keep them up to date with the financial status of the business.
Oh well . . .
Some friends of mine have a web-based product called LessAccounting (http://lessaccounting.com) which is another really nice application as well. A little more in-depth as far as the things that it tracks such as expenses and re-imbursables.
Currently we have direct support for Swiss VAT and Canadian GST, but if you point us at a place describing the sales tax rules in your area we can make those available as well.
Our application allows you to access multiple businesses using a single login, and we also support multiple currencies in a single business as well as allowing each business to have a different primary currency.
Please check us out and let us know what you think. If you don't think we meet your needs, I do have a giant list of other online accounting applications, one of them might do the job.
Also, someone earlier complained about the lack of inventory control in online accounting applications - I have run into one application that seemed promising in this regard - based on their demo, NetBooks seems to have a very CoGS and Inventory module in their application.
Have a look at <A HREF="http://www.e-conomic.co.uk">our web site </A> and you can take a free trial of of the package without obligation. We have the following trial versions:
- a basic one with historic data
- one including the Stock Management module
- one including the Project Accounting module
- one including the Subscription module
- a blank one that you can use to start setting up your own accounts as a free trial, which can later be converted to a subscription.
Even in the basic one, you have multi-currency, online invoicing, the ability to tailor the invoice format as much as you like, the ability to send invoices out by e-mail to your customers. You can have whatever base currency you want for each company and we have a free API module which you can use to build integrations.
The cost of the basic version is £13.50/mth for small companies, £27.00/mth for all others. Full pricing details are on our web site.
Regards
Mark Davies
e-conomic
Like e-conomic and clarityaccounting, ClearBooks is web based and so has the advantages of flexible access, cross platform, muti-user and free updates and upgrades.