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I've been using Intuit Quickbooks Self-Employed for my contracting work and it really fucking sucks. Paid invoices can't be added as transactions. Tax payment
by CoolGuySteve 5y ago
I've been using Intuit Quickbooks Self-Employed for my contracting work and it really fucking sucks.
Paid invoices can't be added as transactions. Tax payments aren't correctly imported into TurboTax. The time tracker can't generate invoices.
There are so many sharp edges that can make their way into my Schedule C that I'm worried about being audited. This software clearly doesn't come from the "Have you even fucking tried using it?" school of software design.
And now on top of all that I have to worry about them selling my data to a credit agency that's a boil on the face of the economy.
Is there a better accounting/tax package out there? The only thing Quickbooks Self-Employed does well is scan receipts.
- toddmatthews 5y agojust curious, why do you even need to scan receipts? Cant you just use a credit card and import transactions from the card provider?
- fennecfoxen 5y agoThe point of receipts is if the IRS ever audits you.
- toddmatthews 5y agois the credit card trail not good enough?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoFor amounts over $75, it is not. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-03-106.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-03-106.pdf
- toddmatthews 5y agothat's strictly for reimbursing an employee for an expense.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoGood catch. I’ve been audited before, so I err on the side of caution and keep as much documentation as reasonably possible to substantiate business expense claims. Electronic storage is cheap, and audits are unpleasant. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/what-kind-of-records-should-i-keep https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
- toddmatthews 5y agogot it, makes sense, thanks
- toomuchtodo 5y agoThanks again for pointing out my mistake.
- kingnothing 5y agoI don't think so. You could go buy $1000 worth of gift cards to give to your family on a business credit card versus legitimate business expenses. The receipt shows what you bought, a credit card statement only shows the amount.
- toddmatthews 5y agothanks
- namibj 5y agoNo, the CC company actually has line-item information for almost all purchases (fall-back transaction processing and really old terminals are likely excluded). Theoretically you can get your hands on that information.
- jacobr1 5y agoExpensify has a really good scanner and sync-to-CC data system. I have only ever used it as an employee, but my understanding is that it has good backends synchronization with a variety of accounting packages.
- dheera 5y agoI found Abacus much easier to use. Expensify was extremely convoluted, you had to create reports and then submit them, instead of just submitting expenses with a couple clicks.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoMy understanding from a brief stint in an adjacent industry is that Xero is pretty good and popular for accounting, but I cannot vouch for it as an end-to-end solution for self-employment needs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI use Xero for my business accounting. Works well. My accountant had never used it before, but had no problem grokking it. Intuit has my email address from an abortive attempt to use Quickbooks, about a decade ago. It sucked so hard, I ran screaming. Every now and then, I get an email from them, suggesting that I “reactivate” My account. The unsub link is worthless. I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub. The reset password function doesn’t work (non-existent account). I am doomed to get these emails for eternity, but they aren’t frequent enough to be much more than an annoyance. But Equifax has a crappy record on data integrity. I expect an avalanche of penis pill spam, soon.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago> I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub I would consider this a CAN-SPAM violation. You can have your representative and AG apply some pressure.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoYeah…they aren’t interested in addressing this. Not sure why. So far, it has only been a slight annoyance.
- cure 5y ago> The unsub link is worthless. I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub. Ah, hey, that's the same level of incompetence as British Airways. I'm in the same boat there, but that's why /dev/null exists, of course :)
- thinkingkong 5y agoBench works super well for your use case, provided youre Ok with cash basis bookkeeping.
- krisroadruck 5y agoI'll add another nod for Bench. Been using them for 6 months now and they are friggin great.
- kayhi 5y agoIs it just like a Dropbox to upload receipts and someone reviews it? Do they tell you what's missing?
- dheera 5y agoI just use spreadsheets, if you design them well they work, and they're relatively portable between the few major spreadsheet products out there. LibreOffice if you're worried about corporate eyes on your data.
- MattBearman 5y agoIf you're based in the UK I'd definitely recommend FreeAgent - https://www.freeagent.com https://www.freeagent.com Disclaimer: I used to work for them as a software engineer, but having used Xero when I was self-employed I can definitely say FreeAgent is better.
- mtm 5y agohttps://plaintextaccounting.org https://plaintextaccounting.org Not sure about receipt scanning though.
- dawnerd 5y agoSelf employed wastes so much of my time. I had to completely redo everything this last tax year. Switched to godaddy’s bookkeeping which still sucks but not many options out there.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoI personally use GNUCash for my budget stuff but I know they've got a lot of business oriented tools and reports. Might be worth looking into.
- hallway_monitor 5y agoI've been using it for several years. I run all my freelance stuff through a specific checking account so I can just import all transactions and I have my p&L for the year, broken out by category etc etc.
- curun1r 5y agoI remember seeing the Self Employed launch from inside the company. It was somewhat of a skunkworks project from 3 engineers and they got a lot of internal PR for creatively targeting the gig worker market. I guess the plan was to eventually branch out to other self employed people, but the initial motivation was Uber drivers and such rather than small business owners, because that would cannibalize the QuickBooks Online market. It doesn't sound like much has changed in the 5 years since I left. It sounds like you fall a bit in between their product offerings, but I wouldn't count on them handling all your needs because they'd rather people like you just moved to their full QBO product. I also remember attending a session that Intuit offered on the competitor landscape and being quite surprised that Wave wasn't covered. Intuit just doesn't take them seriously, but their products, to me, seem better than just about every competitor covered in the session, including Xero. They've got a self-employed offering [0] that might be worth experimenting with since you can start for free and only pay when you need the premium features. [0] https://www.waveapps.com/accounting/self-employed https://www.waveapps.com/accounting/self-employed
- CoolGuySteve 5y agoFunnily enough, Wave discontinued their receipt scanning feature this month.
- nafizh 5y agoMost probably, they outsource most of the software engineering to consultancy agencies known for H1B abuse.
- pkoullick92 5y agoKeeper Tax is very user friendly, but designed for a simpler use-case. It only does expense tracking very well, but it doesn't have income tracking, or invoicing.