Hello all,

I am new to this forum.  I file our own personal taxes every year using TurboTax, and I just hired my husband to work for my small proprietor business.  I haven't ever had to pay someone else or pay employer's quarterly taxes before.  I want to handle my own taxes for the business, but I guess I should invest in  Quick Books for Business owners, or something like that. Can you tell me what experience, good or bad, you have had with accounting software?

Thank you,

Julie

Julie Carmen, MLS

Hi Julie:

I think you mean to say sole proprietor business rather than small proprietor - right?

QuickBooks is okay. I prefer PeachTree because it has more features and I had some issues with QuickBooks. It's been years since I used QuickBooks - it's probably find to use at this point.

If you are paying people, I would recommend that you use accounting software. You have to keep track of Social Security tax etc. and the software will just make it that much easier for you.

Keep in mind that if you are using the software, you'll have to make sure that you get the yearly updates so that you can get the new rate tables.

Good luck!

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Quick Books, I reckon is as good as you are likely to get. The key thing as has been said before is to make sure that all necessary updates are downloaded and acted upon. The last thing you want to happen is to get your formats and reports structured correctly and then to find out you had compiled everything with last years tax rates on them :-(

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Intuit makes a great product for businesses - but they do have a couple of issues - 1) many of their packages have way to many features for most start-up or really small businesses and 2) they really try very hard to sell you additioanl services almost to the point that it makes you mad.

There are also some free shareware applications that can do what you need with little or no expense - but they don't offer any help desk type service either so you should know a little about accounting and report keeping if you choose this path.  When i first started, I used a free application from Microsoft (Microsoft Office Accounting) - very easy to use and very similar to Quickbooks.

The one thing I really like about intuit's products now is that a lot of them are online - thus they can be accessed from anywhere and are much cheaper in this medium.  Plus, no upgrades as they maintain and update for you (cloud computing for accounting if you will).

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