Need help with accounting/bookkeeping/personal finance

[P3HSB]

How do you guys keep track of your money for business? If you can share your method for accounting/bookkeeping/personal finance that would be helpful.

Is there any software you are using that you can recommend?

Excel templates??

What do the pros use?

Here is what I am currently using. I built it myself. Embarrassing, but you got to start somewhere right?

The excel sheet I've made is messy & inefficient and I feel like it is hindering me from taking it to the next level.

Any insight would be helpful, thanks!

 

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[Trivium iz rC]

I use Xero for my accounting software across all my businesses. Really easy to use but there plenty of accounting software out there. Take there free trails & see which one you like best.

Other accounting software

Quickbooks
Freshbooks
Godaddybookkeeping (Formerly Outright.com)

 

[Damage Inc.]

I'm hardly a pro but I use excel too. I just designed a template that works for me and has what I need. As I grow I change/add to it. Excel is pretty powerful, I'm sure I'll outgrow it at some point but for a start up / one man show I think it does the trick just fine.

 

[theag]

For my day-to-day business controlling I use a google spreadsheet with http://supermetrics.com/product/supermetrics-for-googledocs/

It grabs data from FB ads, Adwords and my magento MySQL database (where I added a seperate column for product, fulfilment, shipping, etc costs that are associated which each single order) automatically, which is pretty cool.

I have my monthly fixed costs set up in a sheet.

All in all, it shows me very accurate real-time profit/loss for daily, month-to-date, last month, and year-to-date.

Also have some sheets to easily see CPA across all currently active campaigns and calculate stuff like average profit per order etc from the data I import. So I can make decisions on optimizing my campaigns right from that spreadsheet.

Can recommend that method . Takes some coding skills to set it up as detailed as I did though.

For everything else that lies in the past I use my accountant and request reports from him if I need them.


For personal finances I just have a simple excel spreadsheet with income/expense, current account/creditcard balances etc..

 

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[Andy Black]

+1 on supermetrics for gathering Google Analytics data.

For my business accounts I also use spreadsheets, but that's a backup. I now have my accounts in sageone and get my accountant to do the book-keeping. I tried to do the book-keeping for years, then realised I hated it and should just outsource it. Sooo much happier.

For the record, I do a LOT of stuff in Excel. It's an awesome tool and it can probably scale with you until you decide to outsource your book-keeping completely.

I'll dig out and drop some of the personal finance ones I created into here.

EDIT: Just to show you how powerful Excel is... when I was in a team of 35 AdWords specialists buying 1m clicks a day for €120k+ a day, we just used Excel to report on the campaigns and produce daily/weekly/monthly ROI reports, for the team as a whole, and smaller sub-teams, AND we used Excel to create and amend AdWords campaigns.

 

[llinda]

I use wave waveapps.com. It's free and makes my bookkeeping and invoicing so efficient. It's perfect for my freelancing on a small scale. At work we use quick books - easy to get a hang of, integrates easily with e-commerce but can be slow if there's a large volume of data.

 

[Ninjakid]

A cute girl handles it all for me. I bring her statements, and she does all filings and stuff. Then it's one less thing I need to think about.

 

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[wbrett1027]

What categories do you make on your spread sheets? Perhaps the price and date, date shipped, tracking number? Address? Quianty?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[theag]

What categories do you make on your spread sheets? Perhaps the price and date, date shipped, tracking number? Address? Quianty?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

In my spreadsheets I have the high level stuff like revenue, costs, profit, margin, etc. Those things you mention are inside my shopping cart software and are handled completely automatic.

 

[MrChill]

After searching the forum, I came across this thread which hasn't been bumped in a while. I'd appreciate your updates if you're still using the same software or have moved on to something new.

I'm in the pre-launch stage of my business right now, but I really want to nail the accounting side of the business out of the gate, that way I don't get hung up on fighting software or doing tons of manual data entry or corrections.

Here's how I envision my business structure working, and if I'm missing anything, please correct me:

Online Business:

Accounting/Banking/Merchant Lifecycle Needs:

1. List product and/or service on your own website and/or on some 3rd-party platform.
2. Make a sale.
3. Automate entry of sales into accounting software, perhaps linked with whatever merchant processing software you're using.
4. Have that accounting software sync and reconcile with your business bank account.

It seems that the more vendors or moving parts you add to a system, especially if you're not a coder or an accountant (which I am neither), you're asking for trouble. Keeping proper books is super important to me, because I want to focus on growing the top line of my business, not spending too much time fussing with data entry.

I did find a channel on YouTube that deals with a lot of cloud accounting solutions, which may be of interest to everyone here: Catching Clouds Academy

I'm looking for an accounting solution and an accountant that actually understands technology. I called around in my local area to try and find an accountant that understood the challenges of online businesses. Most of them were older and really didn't grasp all of what I was trying to do. I'm sure they are good accountants in their own right, but most of them were very much of the brick-and-mortar type business mindset.

Questions:

1. Given my business process explained above, what accounting software would you advise?
2. Are there any particular national or regional banks in the United States that you recommend that work well with 3rd-party software integration? I currently have a Chase business bank account, but am open to switching if there's another bank that really "gets" online business owners challenges and needs better.
3. What has been your experience on Xero, FreshBooks, Quickbooks, Wave, etc.? Updated reviews would be great. I'm not an Excel wizard, and know enough to get around for basic functions, but would prefer something that is more out-of-the-box.
4. What are some pitfalls that a new online business owner should avoid as it relates to a business banking account, merchant accounts, accounting software and CRM's?

In summary, how did you decide to build the "stack" of banks/accounting software/merchant services/CRM/other software and why? What did you end up going with? Are you happy with it? Why or why not?

Thank you for your input!

 

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