Intuit Tools Clean Up Small-Business Books
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (
) -- Here's a smart way to end summer 2009: Get organized for 2010.
Believe it or not, my fellow
, there are fewer than 20 weeks left on the calendar. Your quarterly estimated tax payments for 2009 are due on Sept. 15. If you sought an extension for your company's 2008 annual returns, those forms are due Oct. 15.
It's the perfect time to organize those miserable excuses for accounting ledgers you have. The good news for
small businesses
is that America's Fortune 500 elite are lining up to give us makeovers.
Microsoft
(MSFT) - Get Report
has its jazzy
Small Business Center
.
(GOOG) - Get Report
has an enormous banner on its
page announcing that more than 1 million businesses use its free tools. And
Intuit
(INTU) - Get Report
, not to be left behind, has its
site.
I have been poking around Intuit's Small Business United site, and was particularly impressed by the online riffs of QuickBooks and Quicken, the company's small-business and personal accounting tools. With a little tinkering, these packages are the simplest and cheapest way to streamline invoicing, track expenses and get ready for tax season. And best of all, they don't cost a dime. Here's how to put them to use.
Track what you're owed:
QuickBooks Online Simple Start
is a stripped-down version of QuickBooks Simple Start, with limited reporting features, single-user access (meaning your accountant can't log on) and a limit of 20 customers. It works as well as the original, if you don't ask it to do too much.
Intuit makes it easy to find the parts of the software you need, which makes it useful for a small-business makeover. Get started by cruising to the site and filling out the forms describing your firm -- it took me 10 minutes. Then click on the client or customer tab, depending on your type of business, and create a new client and then a new invoice. Tell the software to e-mail your client. And that's it.
Simple Start will track your receivables, warn you when they're overdue and keep your clients organized. It is a beautiful thing.
Simple Start offers other fancy features to help manage your expenses, vendors, employees and even your banking. While they work well, they take gobs of time to install and update. In fact, keeping QuickBooks up to date is its biggest drawback.
Track what you spend:
Now you'll use Intuit's other online freebie,
, to manage your spending.
Intuit has been facing stiff competition from a new generation of online finance tools. Services like
and
use the Web to automate the process of tracking accounts. Intuit has fought back by beefing up its online packages. Earlier this year, it released its free Quicken Online.
Like its competitors, Quicken takes all your bank and credit card information and compiles it into a single ledger that reconciles your spending, tracks your expenses and helps you stay on budget. You just create an account on the Web site, tell it which financial institutions and accounts you have, and then set it free to grab your data and organize it for you. I uploaded a single business account, and in a little less than 10 minutes my incoming checks and outgoing expenses appeared. Toss in my business credit card, and there was a complete report of my business spending, expected cash flow and even a rough estimate of future revenue.
Words to the wise:
There are major limitations to Intuit's free online tools. For one, you need to do plenty of tinkering to get meaningful data. In my test, many checks had to be hand-categorized because my bank didn't supply the needed information.
This model also assumes you have separate business accounts and credit cards. If you don't, you have to flag your business spending and personal spending, which takes some thought. And you'll probably face some confusion on how your credit card company labels expenses. In other words, don't load your accounts and take the results as gospel. Be sure they make sense.
But none of this is more complex than entering QuickBooks data directly or doing your ledgers the old fashioned way. And I must say I was impressed by how quickly I had a robust model for my receivables, spending and cash flow. It was the fiscal trick of the summer.
-- Reported by Jonathan Blum in New York
.
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Jonathan Blum is an independent technology writer and analyst living in Westchester, N.Y. He has written for The Associated Press and Popular Science and appeared on FoxNews and The WB.
