There are many alternatives to Quickbooks available online. You can work around this by creating multiple categories for multiple currencies and then manually converting the totals at the end of your reporting period, but it is a hassle and it messes up your account reconciliation.
This is really inexcusable in today’s world – almost every creative professional I know works in at least 3 or 4 different currencies (USD, CAD, EUR and GBP are pretty common for me). The one issue I have with Quickbooks – and this is a major issue – is that it cannot currently handle multiple currencies.
There are many accounting software suites that can do this, but if you are used to manually entering transactions, this feature alone with change your life. Second, the ability to download transactions directly from your financial institutions is life saving. Or if your business grows to the point where you need to hire a professional bookkeeper, your books are already set up in a format that they can continue with. There are two reasons why I use Quickbooks.įirst, almost every professional in the accounting industry uses Quickbooks, so when you have to work with accounting industry professionals (such as your accountant) your files are compatible, the report formats are familiar and everyone know how things work. After that it is pretty easy to maintain on your own. The best way to get started with Quickbooks is to hire a professional bookkeeper to help get you setup and show you what to do. The big knock against Quickbooks is that it is overly complicated – which it is – so you should be prepared for a bit of a learning curve. The Quickbooks Simple Start plan is $15 per month and includes everything most freelance creative professionals need, including tracking sales tax which is not available with the base plan.
Quickbooks has been the accounting software industry standard for a long time – think Photoshop for accountants and bookkeepers. Many of the tools mentioned below do have support for payroll, but I am only going to concentrate on the core features that individual freelance professionals are most likely to use. Things get very complicated very fast once you’re into the realm of staff and payroll in which case you’re probably better off hiring a professional bookkeeper. For the purpose of this article, I will assume that most freelance creative professionals are sole proprietors or individual corporations.