Ask HN: Best Intro to Accounting/QuickBooks?
I'm bad and should feel bad and only do my corporate books once a year right before taxes. Each year I've completely forgotten everything about QuickBooks specifically and accounting in general, and have to rediscover everything.
Is there a quick, written overview somewhere of creating/classifying accounts, processing transactions from banks feeds, etc? Ideally it would also cover common things like what taxes we've paid (state, local, federal) I need to pull out and track separately from payroll and the like.
We only have about 100 entries a year right now, and mostly with the same few vendors. It feels silly to pay someone else to do this, though I'm willing to hear that I'm insane to be doing it myself.
16 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] thread2. Failing that, make your chart of accounts in Quickbooks be exactly equal to the tax return you are filing. If there is a line item on your tax return for "Rabbits" then make a "Rabbits" account in Quickbooks.
3. Only make accounts to match the expenses you have. Don't try to guess the future and pre-populate the chart of accounts.
4. Be willing to have 5% - 10% of your expenses fall into "Misc." It isn't worth being anal-retentive.
5. All of this advice is based on the assumption that you are tracking expenses for the purpose of preparing a tax return, not gratifying your inner MBA with all sorts of management-related financial reports.
This seems obvious in retrospect but is actually super helpful. Since I'm trying to do the minimal work required to do taxes, it makes sense I should work backward from there.
2016 was all pre-revenue, and hopefully in 2017 it'll be worth taking option (1) :)
Seriously, you don't need to be really good with this tax return. Say you wildly miscategorize expenses. The net profit is the same, so the tax is unchanged.
And an auditor can swiftly go through 100 transactions to put them in the "right" buckets.
Greetings from TUS.
The simplicity means that I'm more inclined to stay on top of it rather than leaving it all to tax time.
Right now professional bookkeeping (even part time), would exceed the cost of offering our entire service, and likely be our largest expense except salaries.
Book keeping takes no time at all.
I also like the strategy of classify your own transactions, but pay your accountant to reconcile your accounts quarterly, and to do your corporate taxes. This lets you stay close to the money and keep your books up-to-date on a weekly basis, which helps you forecast and manage cash flow. At the same time, it ensures your books are correct, and that your year-end tax filing are simple and quick.
– http://plaintextaccounting.org – http://hledger.org/
If so, did they say they could satisfy those requirements, and then later fail to do so? If so, did they give any reason why they misled you?
They did not maliciously mislead us, but failed on their promise because apparently the ‘automagical’ part does not seem to work out so well. Yet, that, imho, is more the fault of the implementation and of its users (the accountants), than it is because such things are too hard to accomplish with the state of current software development (and ‘AI’).
For one, I found it beyond comprehension that any such software would blindly rasterize well-structured PDFs, as does the software used by our accountant, to then OCR the resulting low-res jpg, while wastefully of resources throwing away most of the relevant information, with obviously bad ‘detection’ results. Worse, duplicate uploads would differ, resulting in double bookings requiring the accountant’s assistant using the software to manually fix those errors produced by the software. In the end we end up with a much more expensive accounting bill than we would have had when we sticked to a paper-based flow.
But is doable, and I truly hope some startup grabs the opportunity to implement it well.
They're provide a tech + manual bookkeeping service, where you have an actual accountant to talk to, aided by technology.
I use them for my LLC, and it's been pretty paperless so far. They can link directly to all my accounts (Chase, US Bank, Citi) for ongoing accounting work. For historical or one-off statements, I upload a pdf statement with highlighted items and notes (fairly simple to do in Mac Preview).
Any questions they or I have is communicated through their dashboard, including assumptions they're making and categorizing outstanding charges.