Putting Your Books in the Cloud: Your Options

Keeping your books may not be the funnest part of running your own business, but it is one of the most important. If you don’t have a good grasp on your money, you can wind up without a business very quickly. But bookkeeping is getting easier. There are now many web-based tools that make the process easier to manage: not only can many tools available import information quickly but they take care of details like backing up your files and even emailing out notifications about late payments. Here are just a few of the options that are now available online.

• Freshbooks: More than a million users rely on Freshbooks to keep their books. The web-based application handles everything from time tracking to invoicing, providing easy-to-use tools for creating estimates and managing contractors.It automates many steps of the bookkeeping process. Freshbooks’ plans range in price from $19 to $149 per month.
• Outright: Not only can you handle all your bookkeeping tasks in Outright, you can have the application generate your tax forms based on your books and create reports for your CPA or tax preparer. Even better, Outright is entirely free to use. The site even offers forums where you can ask questions about taxes and other financial issues.
• Blinksale: Focused first and foremost on invoices, Blinksale makes tracking payments easy. If you’re already using tools such as Basecamp, you can automatically import client data. You can even automatically create follow up emails for such tasks as reminding clients of invoices or thanking them for their payments. Blinksale’s monthly plans start at $6 and reach up to $24.
• Harvest: One of the key features of Harvest is its ability to track time. Even if you aren’t at your computer, you can use Harvest’s smartphone apps to keep track of the time that you’re spending on specific projects. The web application can translate that information into invoices, budgets and the rest of your books. It can even export all that data into Quickbooks if your tax preparer is one of those folks who requests everything in a Quickbooks file.Harvests’ plans range from $12 to $90 per month.

There are some drawbacks to keeping your books in the cloud. Before you choose any of these options, it’s important to make sure that the security measures meet your requirements. Depending on the type of business you run, you may want to take additional steps to ensure that your customers’ data is protected. It’s also important to make sure that the system you choose meshes well with the type of business you run. Some tools work perfectly for the way a consultant bills but may not be up to handling products. The opposite can be just as true, so take advantage of free trials to actually get in to a bookkeeping tool and see how it will work with your business.

Image by Flickr user edinburghcityofprint

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Accounting and Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.