Hi everyone,

I am in the process of setting up an online business and am taking a lot of time and spending more money "upfront" to make sure I set everything up so that it will run and grow as smoothly as possible. I have to choose an accounting software. From what I can tell, Quickbooks is made for business, Quicken is made for home use, so I am leaning toward Quickbooks. What do you use and/or recommend? If you recommend Quickbooks over Quicken, which one of the Quickbooks to you recomend (basic, pro, etc)?

Will MosterBooks work with either?

Finally, the only specific question I have about either software is Quickbooks claims to handle credit cards and Quicken does not. What exact does it do with CC info? I of course plan to have a merchant account so it seems to me that once the merchant account does its thing, my "books" only see the CC payments as income. What am I missing here?

Right now, I am the only employee, but I want to make the transition to more employees, more distributors, customers, sales, etc easy when it comes time to do so, which is why I am taking the time now to figure out which software to buy and learn.


Thanks

Hi again,

I was just looking over the quickbooks features again and I have a couple more questions. It seems like there is quite an overlap of what QB and will do. For instance, QB can create invoices, reciepts, etc, but will do that too, correct? Keep records of orders is another feature that both seem to do.

Also, I may have answered my question about the CC processing. From what I have gathered, QB allows you to gather CC info and then charge them when you want, rather than automatically authorizing and charging at the time of order, is this correct? One advantage I see to this is I can wait to charge the card until the order is actually shipped.

So, I am basically still at the same question of what all of your opinions are, but I thought I would throw this info out there to give you a better idea of my current understanding of QB and /MonsterBooks

We use Quickbooks for accounting only. We do not use it for order management or inventory.

I don't really know enough about it to answer your questions, though. I don't do the accounting here.

MonsterBooks requires QuickBooks Pro or Enterprise and will not work with QuickBooks Basic or any version of Quicken. You can find more detailed information on the software system requirements here -
http://kb.monstercommerce.com/Software/Mon...onsterbooks.asp

As far as your other questions go, my understanding is that both MonsterBooks and the admin panel will allow you to do things like charge credit cards or print invoices or send alerts to your customers. Obviously you don't really need or want to use both. What the system gives you is options to use the features in MB to address these features or to use the admin panel. Depending on the customizations that you want, it could be done either way.

We use Quicken - we don't need to print invoices etc and if we do thats what Word is for.

We just set up all our categories in it and thats all we need. I prints of a nice summary that we can take to our CPA.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

smckenzie,
what information do you put into quicken, ie how much detail do you use? At this point, I do not need to print invoices either, which is one reason why I asked if I HAD to have quickbooks (i want to set it up right, but I dont want to spend $$ that I don't have to either). But, at the same time, I do not want to manually input my cost, customer cost, cc fees, taxes, etc for each order. It seems I would need all of that info to accuratly determine a profit. Do you do it on an order by order basis, or a "lump sum" type basis every day or week or something?

We just use Quicken to keep a track of what money is coming and going from our account. As every transaction is categorized down to a very detailed level it allows us to pull of a summary report for our CPA.

In addition we place every order in an Excel spreadsheet, we have a new one for each month. Only the basic details are placed in this sheet, ie customer name, order no, date, order amount, shipping, tax, actual cost of shipping. This allows us to have a quick glance at how each month is going.

We just work out profit etc by subtracting what we have spent on stock etc.

It may not be the most glamorous way of doing things but it works for us.

Hi,

I highly rerecommendo use Quickbooks and not Quicken as an accounting software.

Quicken is categorized as a personal finance software and it does not have all the categories that you or your accountant will need. (it goes beyond a simple income and expense categories)

Another problem that you will encounter; the invoice in the admin panell can't be fully modified example: You have to add an item to an order, it will add the item but not the cost base of the item.

Sooner than later the reports: Cost vs Sales are not going to be accurate.

Quickbooks also let you save invoices etc to PDF or e-mail directely directlykbooks.

My point is that you should be looking a year or two down the line and take the time now to learn a real accounting software.

By the way I do not think Quickbooks is the best (does not use sql server to store data) but for the money you can't complain.

Nuriel

We tried using Quickbooks and found it difficult to use with no tech support. You have to pay for tech support. Fortunately they had a 30 day money back guarentee. We had to buy Monsterbooks which we do not use now. I use Quicken and have been able to set upthe catagories to make my accountant happy. As for Invoices I download the order into Dataport, upload it into Access and have a Report that is just perfect for invoices. I also use Dataport for anything I need to look for in the orders. I use it with Access

Hello everyone,

THank you very much for the help. I broke down and bought QuickBooks Pro 2005 because I do want it as a business tool (not personal), I want the option of using MonsterBooks. I have been working through the tutorials and such and it seems powerful, but extremely complex. As I have been doing these tutorials, I have been trying to relate their examples to my ecommerce business. So, I have a few questions for you who are using QB.

1. How much detail do you go into with products (items), sales, customers, etc? Do you have every product you sell in QB as an item? Do you record each transaction and associate it with the customer? I see how this data would be interesting to look at, but not really helpful.

2. It seems QB is geared very much toward invoiceing and/or collecting cash in person at a brick and motor store. How do you deal with the instant and automated payment with no invoiceing or reciept (at least not a reciept created in QB). Also, How are you working your merchant account and associated fees with QB?

3. Can I import products from into QB via monsterbooks so that I do not have to re-enter everything?

Thanks

Every single variation of every product I sell is in QB. For example, I have created a group called 1234 which is actually the base item number. In that group, I have all variations of that item, such as 1234 SM BK (small black), 1234 MD BK, 1234 LG BK, 1234 XL BK. Doing it this way allows me to report on the individual item (how many 1234 SM BK's did I sell?) as well as the base item (how many 1234's did I sell without regard to size or color?).

Every customer has their own customer record, and every sales transaction is tied to that customer. I'm able to go to your customer record and see everything you've purchased across time. I often have repeat customers that speak to me offline and tell me "send six more." They like that flexibility, and I'm able to pull up the previous order(s) to see what it is they want.

I use sales receipts and do not use a payment gateway here. However, for the credit card fees, I record that at the end of each month as a fee paid back to my card processor. I also accept PayPal, and I treat that as another checking account. Money gets received into it, it has PayPal fees that I again record at the end of the month, and if I want to move money from the PayPal account to regular business checking, I just make an entry that moves the cash.

I'll let someone else answer this one. I don't use MB.

I can answer this one for you. You can import products from your store without having to reenter them. There are only a few minor issues with this, but overall you should be fine. For instance, if you have products with variants the cost value is not currently being pulled into MB correctly. The prices and part numbers are being imported just fine, and products without variants will not experience this problem.

Make sure everything has a unique part number if you are importing by part number. The actual problem we see more often is when someone is attempting to import in orders/products and they already have the products in QuickBooks and in their online store.

WHich version of quickbooks is recommended. Quickbooks Pro, or Premier. Also, do any of you use the "Retail" specific version? What are your thoughts

I don't have a recommendation (based on 0 experience) between the PRO or PREMIER versions of Quickbooks. Take a look at Intuit's site for a comparison chart of features and this should give you a good indication of the differences.

I do know that the Retail versions of Quickbooks are usually more 'watered down'/'stream-lined' and the current version of MonsterBooks does not work with them.

For more information -
http://kb.monstercommerce.com/Software/Mon...onsterbooks.asp

Thanks for your answers. Well if doesn't work with Retail version than I don't have to worry about it. I was just curious is any one who gets the Premier version, which is more analytical, actually finds the information usable and useful. Does play nice with the premier version? I don't want to make MORE work for myself if I have to hand enter everything!

We use QB Retail Premier and we are very happy with it. Monsterbooks does an adequate job importing orders with a few quirks like dropping the leading Zero's from Zip codes in the Northeast. You also need to kill the country code if you are using QB to ship packages with the FedEx integration. FedEx does not understand where to put the "US".

We use Authorize to process Credit cards on line as we have found customers like to get an acknowledgement immediately. QB is great for managing accounting functions since most accountants are familiar with it and have an accounting version of QB.

Depending on how complex your business is. Quickbooks tends to have more options, especially for warehouse stats. Quickens is good for quick bookkeeping and keeping customer invoices and tracking sales leads. I would recommend Quicken for your first accounting software in my opinion.