Coincidentally there’s lot of interest in this area here too.  Please share everything you know.

A survey of most users is they hate Intuit products - particularly this one, but don’t know where to turn.  Quickbooks has the current market-share.  Does it have the legs too?

That is a tough question. When you look at QB and Amazon ratings, they are low but at the same time most small business are using QB. Ms accounting package did not last long because QB still had a strong market share and there was no reason to switch.

There are only 2 packages that have some good functionality as far as online accounting goes - one QB and Xero. Xero is an up-an-coming product. Linking with Xero might be easier. Freshbooks at the present time does not want to be considered as an accounting package.

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/ (UK) looked good as well last time I checked but I think they were working on US version

If you ask me QB online and Xero have more legs than FreshBooks. Quickbooks Online UI that is another story.

QB Online is awful:
http://blog.quickbooksonline.com/2010/06/16/service-outage-notification/

Seriously, a dinosaur company that doesn’t understand the “Software as a Service” concept at all.

There is a serious amount of legacy thinking tied to QB not just in users but accountants as well.

The problem is that great products like Free Agent Central / Kashflow / Xero seem too young at this point and are still in development.

QB casts the widest net to be sure, but it is a sh#tty net at that.

Freshbook isn’t accounting, plain and simple.

Xero has big plans, I wouldn’t rule out Kashflow but I’m personally a big fan of the Free Agent team and at this stage in the game tend to pick people first (as long as the software is all a wash).

All good points. Interesting article Xero vs Kashflow. KashFlow has good functionality.
http://accmanpro.com/2010/06/08/kashflow-xero-zappos-zoho-nuances-and-ethics/

are we all reading AccManPro in here?

Dennis is fantastic.

back on topic - I have been scouring the web for a comprehensive accounting package. I must admit that at the moment I’m having a bit of deja vu:

This exact same thing posed a problem for me when looking for project management software (basecamp, activcollab, action, blah blah) until I found solve360.

So where is the Solve360 of accounting apps? Don’t know yet. No one is doing anything revolutionary at the moment though, with the exception of Mint which then got bought out by Intuit…

With that said, the aboved mentioned solutions are pretty solid and will get the job done for many SMBs… but none of them excite me about their growth and vision, with the exception of FreeAgent and they way they’ve geared their application to appeal to accountants.

After reviewing Kashflow, I must say that it is the most comprehensive package and comes close to QuickBooks in therms of functionality.

The way it handles projects, is just purely great! You can assign project per lines basis in A/P and A/R. When you receive bills, it is the same way. In FreeAgent, you can assign only one line per bill, so for example if you receive a bill from a printing shop for a $1000 that covers 2 printing jobs for a client A and B, you will have to create two bills in FreeAgent. In Kashflow, you just enter one bill with 2 lines and assign each line to a client/project. Bingo!

I must say that Kashflow has almost 95% of what I need, heck you can even print Dymo labels.. give me a check printing and I am set!

I am now evaluating kashflow and agree it covers about 90% of what i need. Going to spend a few days with it and report back.

Davieboy - if you use projects, make sure to activate them under settings

I spent a significant amount of time looking for an accounting program just a few months ago, and here were my conclusions:

Every online accounting software I used fell far short.  Nothing auto-imported my account statements.  There were no trust accounting features.  Very few used true double entry accounting.  I tried them all and gave 2 or 3 of them a serious try, spending a weekend setting them up and importing my data.  It was a nightmare.

So I bought Quickbooks 2010.  Yes, it is traditional desktop software.  But IT WORKS.  And very well.  It syncs with my bank accounts quickly.  It does online checks.  It does trust accounting and invoicing.  I can take checks by phone and scan checks to deposit them.  It lets me keep up with my accounting.  Honestly, I don’t know exactly why everyone hates Intuit.  I agree the lack of open API’s is frustrating, but the few times I’ve had problems their support staff have been extremely helpful.  The software runs perfectly for me.

That said, the only online contender I found was http://outright.com/.  When combined with Xpensify it let me import my expenses, though I still had to manually import my bank statements.  The big problem, however, was no double entry accounting.  For most serious businesses, that’s a must.

Having investigated kashflow it has slipped back to only providing 50% of my needs. They are half way there by allowing the creation of products under product types…but why no ability to link price lists to suppliers and no way to auto create a purchase order based on items placed in an invoice. They also allow you to enter the wholesale price of an item but don’t report it anywhere meaningful. I have searched high and low for a solution that will manage my 50+ products from my 4-6 suppliers. When I create an estimate for an opportunity I need to know what the PROFIT is otherwise I still have to go an make a separate excel sheet just to see how much profit is in a sale….There is 1 ERP product that has the facility but is not user friendly and their crm, interface and functionality is not a patch on s360. If anyone has any recommendations please let me know.

My suggestion to S360 would be to just stay away from accounting at this point.  There are way too many CRM/Project Management features to be implemented or integrated.  Accounting is the last great citadel between business and complete web 2.0 migration, and it’s not going to fall anytime soon.

I agree with the accounting comment but I still stand firm about a simple estimating, quote & purchase order with a simple price list tool. It is impossible to progress to a project from a lead without doing a quote of some sort followed by invoice. All the accounts softwares out there that I have seen are focused primarily on accounts with a light and often none existant approach to products and price lists. For my business it is an essential part of CRM and opportunities. Managing bank accounts etc. of course should be left to an alternate solution.

davieboy: i’m also looking for a complete solution that manages products from suppliers as well as internal inventory. So far it seems like only netsuite has a reasonably priced saas system for distribution businesses. Have you managed to find anything?

Zoho supports the product lists etc. But the interface and user experience is more hassle than it is worth in my opinion. The google integration is not up to much either. s360 beats it hands down with less functionality in the products area.

When I set out to start my business I looked at different accounting software. I looked at what was best for my business and had to go with the one with the largest market share. People may say they hate Intuit but that is what software they are buying. I have a bookkeeping business. I got certified as a QuickBooks Expert; or ProAdvisor as we are known. I now not only do bookkeeping for my clients, I also train them on how to do it themselves until they get too big to do it alone. That’s when they call me back for bookkeeping services. Intuit does make it sound a lot simpler than it really is and I have to admit it keeps me in business. The software is easy to use. It is just that if you don’t have a basic understanding of accounting you can mess things up for your accountant. I am not fond of QB Online but have started using it more lately. I have my desktop clients and my own file hosted so connecting to Solve probably isn’t an option. Actually, the financial side of things isn’t where I feel the connection to Solve is most important. Client contact is my greatest hurdle. I don’t even work much with projects because I try to cultivate long term clients. My greatest need is to have a seamless integration with my email client which is currently Google Apps. I need a place to track all contact with clients and potential clients and most of that happens via email.

I think the biggest reason for the Quickbooks hating is when people try to use it for customer management and invoicing/billing the customers. It definitely takes the long way around to do everything.

As far as syncing with Quickbooks online or Quickbooks Pro desktop version Service Sidekick has a good sync system with the desktop package. They don’t integrate with Google Apps, have a mobile app, or use live search filtering. If so I would be all over it.

Given that freshbooks doesn’t want to be an account program, I think Solve’360 could fill the hole in Quickbooks’ customer managment and maybe invoicing and online receiving.

It would be nice if someone could pull it off.

hansel - Aug 09, 2010 06:53am

davieboy: i’m also looking for a complete solution that manages products from suppliers as well as internal inventory. So far it seems like only netsuite has a reasonably priced saas system for distribution businesses. Have you managed to find anything?

I’m a little late to the game, but you might want to check out http://www.rocware.com.  It’s a SaaS platform ($50/month) that manages the items you buy from vendors, as well as the items you sell to your customers & is integrated with POs and Invoices.  When you input your items you are able to assign customized, private pricing - then share the product catalogs individually with customers.

Your customers can then create & send POs based directly on your product catalog.  This is nice because:
1. It’s easier for your customers to place order with you (vs PDF sales sheets & POs attached to emails)
2. it’s easier for you to receive orders because you know the POs will always come through with the correct product & pricing info.