If you ever had to go through the process of selecting the right accounting software, you can relate when I say, its a jungle out there. I tried them all and went through the gambit, and nothing out there save one solution was worth its salt. Your thinking I’m going to say quickbooks? The best app by far for accounting is lessaccounting.com by the boys over at lesseverything.com. I would be lying if I said it’s perfect- I had a few glitches in the process as well, but after successfully balancing two years of books in less then 8 hours, I really can’t complain. So let me summarize my experience app by app then conclude with the thesis, why lessaccounting kicks the tail out of everything else out there.
Quickbooks
I didn’t get as far as I should with this because there is simply no way of importing bank data with the online version, and the trial download does not do it either. Unless you want to sit and enter every single transaction manually (despite what sales mislead me to believe) you will have to buy the premium version for several hundred. That aside, the interface was better than most of the others, though on the whole pretty cluttered. The online version just lacks the power and the premium version is messy.
Peachtree
By far the worst interface. While I can tell it has a ton of features, the simple process of importing bank data failed. So what else is there to say? Bad interface, not functioning and extremely confusing. For some reason it breaks expense categories down as accounts, so a bank account and what you spent on gas are equivalent. Maybe you CPA’s out there get it but I don’t.
Quicken
I find it amusing that Intuit owns everything and none of it is great. Quicken is not much different then quickbooks, but marketed more towards the individual as opposed to company, though one of the apps has small business features. Very clunky interface and not useful for much beyond basic personal finance.
Freshbooks
Great interface, useful for invoicing, useless for accounting. Its just not robust enough. And I don’t know how else to say it, I don’t want to manually input every transaction.
Less Accounting
What sets it apart above all other things is the seamless bank integration. It literally updates itself with transactions every night. I even have my american express card on there. There is one caveat: Unless your bank exports data from far enough back, any old data that you cannot get downloaded in the form of a quickbooks/quicken file you will have to input manually. Fortunately for me all I had was about 3 months of data past the range of my bank export.
For premium users there is a reconciliation feature that lets you compare statement to entries- something I used a lot of. The invoicing is an excellent, seamless feature. You can import contacts from a variety of sources, including basecamp and gmail.
The other primary function is how they designed invoicing to work with payments. If your bank states a deposit you can select the corresponding invoice thus updating its status to paid. It also handles partial payments, by marking down the total but leaving the invoice open. Unbelievable!
The app isn’t perfect, there are bugs I ran accross and some of the time the site runs pretty slow and gets hangups and error redirects (probably due to server load they are still trying to adjust to). But I found the support to be extremely good. I mean if you have an issue, basically your emailing the founder. Can’t really complain about that.
