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What alternatives to Quickbooks are there for the small business?
I am just curious, in a company with under 20 employees, does anyone use anything but Quickbooks?
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14 Answers
In talking with small businesses all day, I find that a lot of the leading ERP and CRM vendors are starting to jump into the small business accounting world. Whether it is Salesforce with some of their Appexchange partners in the accounting realm or Sage with their line of MAS products (Mas 90 is more in the Quickbooks realm), of even Microsoft with Great Plains, a lot of companies are starting to jump on the small biz bandwagon.
Even major companies such as SAP are starting to make small business applications, afterall, there are only 500 enterprise level companies in the Fortune 500...I think.
With talking to all of these small businesses, one theme has come up consistently. The companies aren't growing at astronomical rates but growing nonetheless and more functionality is needed. Usually a next level from Quickbooks is in the budget or plan. Solutions from Sage, Microsoft, Netsuite, SAP, etc, offer great small business tools, but with vast array of options for scalability and added functionality.
There are cloud based options such as Wave Accounting, Newsuite and Xero. Sage Peachtree is probably the next most popular small business accounting if you want a local installation. Microsoft is actually not Great Plains anymore it is called Dynamics. Dynamics is a pretty good leap from QB but it is a very powerful program that can grow and handle very large organizations.
The best answer really depends on what type of business you operate and what you want from your software.
Quikbooks for small businesses in general seems to be very user friendly and can produce the basic financial statements you would need. The shortfall is that it may not track certain operational data or financial data specific to an industry. My suggestion would be to look at specific industry software and understand what benchmarks in the industry you need to look at, and what other information you desire before choosing a software package.
Quick answer: For construction and contract-base work, I like Deltek or Foundation. I also like the online solutions (The clouds) for their easy access.
For the typical small business client (who would rather cut off their own arm than spend money), I like Peachtree. If a company is willing to spend $1,000 or so, the world opens up! Operational efficiencies can be measured in ways that owners may never have imagined.
However: The more sophisticated solutions require a time commitment to learn the system in order to use it properly. IE: If you're not going to use it, don't buy it.
This is a complex question, actually. It deserves more time than I spent drafting As Mr. Rives said "The best answer really depends on what type of business you operate and what you want from your software."
Thanks,
Tony
Anthony C. Gruber
President, Visor Business Tools
ProjectedFinancialStatements.com
FinancialFirmTemplates.com
401ktest.com
SmallCompanyTools.com
There are lots of alternatives, and the best fit is generally dictated by your requirements. For example, size, industry, processes etc. There are many traditional and proprietary systems available, and also free and open source alternatives. I personally favour the open source approach for various reasons:
You can freely download, evaluate and test them for as long as you like
They tend to follow generally accepted global standards
They are platform independent (run on Mac, Linux Windows, mobile phones etc.)
You have full control to modify, run in the cloud or whatever
They are considerably less expensive, and total cost of ownership is lower
They offer commercial grade support and services
Some good ones to consider would be xtuple Postbooks, Openerp, and Openbravo
You don't hear about them as much because they don't have huge marketing budgets. They have large and active collaborative communities which contribute to the projects.
Fred Blauer CA, CA.IT, CISA
http://openacct.ca
To answer your question - the only other software I've seen is Peachtree.
Peachtree has several different products with the top of the line Peachtree Quantum which can support between 5 and 40 users and has additional features and capabilities. They have industry specific editions for accounting, construction, manufacturing, distribution and non-profit.
Intuit does have QuickBooks Enterprise Edition which is a mid-market solution not an enterprise level solution. It can support up to 30 users and if you have outgrown QuickBooks should be in the conversation as there is little to no learning curve in moving from QuickBooks to QuickBooks Enterprise. Like Peachtree they have industry specific editions: construction, distribution & wholesale, manufacturing, non-profit, professional services, retail and accounting.
To mention MAS 90, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite and SAP for a company under 20 employees is ridiculous on many levels including initial cost, implementation costs, training costs and continuing support costs. It's like trying to kill an ant with a two ton truck - complete overkill.
QuickBooks is the way to go for most small businesses.
First, the cost is much lower than most competing solutions.
Even more importantly, there are more than 50,000 QuickBooks ProAdvisors available to help when you run into trouble and the competition helps keeps support prices down.
Not only that, but it's easier to find inexpensive, qualified in-house staff trained in QuickBooks. You'll pay much more for someone experienced in other accounting systems simply because there are less of them out there.
Always keep in mind the laws of supply and demand. You'll almost always pay more if you require something that's in low supply.
From a banker's point of view, QuickBooks has come a very long way toward becoming the standard for small business bookkeeping programs. Using a ProAdvisor (as Ruth suggests) greatly improves the quality of your financial statements. Needless to say no accounting program is going to give you usable financial statements unless your chart of accounts are set up correctly, accounts are reconciled every month, and you are careful about classifying your expenses. Having a CPA that is QuickBooks friendly is also a plus.
I just found this site after I googled almost this exact question. I have been in the small construction business for around 5 years, and couldn't be more frustrated with many aspects of quickbooks. The main issue I have is my book keeper, and accountant probably wouldn't be efficient if I decided to use different software. I am doing research about it though, so when the next 2 year interval is up, I might have the option to switch to something that is a better fit for me. By the way, having to buy new software every two years is the straw that broke the camels back for me when it comes to frustrations with quickbooks.
With the growth of software as a service and cloud computing you should be able to find a suitable alternative without the associate implementation and maintenance costs. Anyway choice of accounting an financial software has become more complex and also whether to go with an on premise system, hosted or cloud. This resource should help http://bit.ly/wGhcnu with making an informed decision.
QuickBooks has become a standard but more and more features are becoming add-ons at additional expense. There has almost been some real scandal that the updates actually will disable some features to cause you to purchase them or to buy a new version. Unless you really know how to set up books, deal with inventory and/or job costing you will get back accurate reports but can't give you the information you may need in a format that is usable.
There is no perfect solution and beware of really cheap accounting programs. My suggestion is to talk to your CPA or get one and see what they recommend and is compatible with what they use. It will be less expensive in the long run and give you far better results.
QuickBooks has a very poor data architecture, as the product has grown they just don't seem to have made the effort to structure new data elements within the overall data architecture. Their use of a database in recent years is an example - its just a technical box into which they've thrown the kludgy inconsistent structures of old. A couple of releases ago they added a Manufacturer's Part Number field - you can't show it in any useful place except a purchase order, and it seems to be unavailable (still) to the APIs and products using them.
A few releases ago I could update the tax tables in the product, but I never bothered as the tax table updates were available for a couple of releases back. Now that function is gone and they don't supply tax table updates for prior releases.
I've had enough of the new releases with no useful content and the frustrations of the data structure, so I'm looking for a way out of QBooks too.
Hi, Craig.
At GetApp you can also have an idea of which applications are being used by small business. Some of the most popular accounting apps (http://www.getapp.com/accounting-software) in our database are:
- Zoho Books (http://www.getapp.com/zoho-books-application)
- Xero (http://www.getapp.com/xero-application)
- NetSuite Financials (http://www.getapp.com/netsuite-financials-software-application)
Best regards,
Diego Dacal.
This a free and open source alternative:
http://www.xtuple.com/the-quickbooks-alternative
We have several clients up and running on xtuple, and it works well. Most people still don't seem to be aware that there are good alternatives to the traditional, proprietary legacy systems.
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