QuickBooks for personal finances?

You did not mention what you need to track for personal usage.

QB is designed for BUSINESS bookkeeping, it has no features for tracking investment activity. As Allan asked, what kind of "personal" finances? If you just want to record income and expenditures, QB will do just fine as there's no significant difference between "business" and "personal".

business are

Tod

QuickBooks does not have any features to account for 401K or stock options. The Loan Manager feature in QB Pro (and Premier) can be used for your home mortgage.

business are

QuickBooks is a poor choice for personal finances. Stick with Money or Quicken.

More specifically, Quicken for Home and Business. Besides the missing personal financal features, QuickBooks (any version) is overkill for any small business with personal activities mixed in. If there are employees involved, seperate the two aspects and upgrade to an appropriate version of QuickBooks.

I'd like to stick with Money or switch over to Quicken, but they both seem to have serious data corruption issues.

Tod

On what do you base that statement? A search of 2000 recent messages in news:alt.comp.software.financial.quicken turns up ZERO messages containing the words corrupt, corruption, damage, data integrity. I'm not a regular user of either Quicken or Money but I don't remember hearing about data corruption problems with either program, although I have heard about such problems with other programs (including some that I use less often than either of those). Gary (and others) have recommended that you stay with Money or switch to Quicken, and I doubt they would make that recommendation if aware of data integrity and corruption issues.

Money or

So you think this is the best app for someone who has both personal expenses and small business expenses?

I just searched in google groups for an admittedly unscientific test:

alt.comp.software.financial.quicken gave 692 hits for corruption.

alt.comp.software.financial.quickbooks gave 133 hits for corruption.

microsoft.public.money gave 855 hits for corruption.

I've personally had a few corruption issues with Microsoft Money 2004, and the answer from Microsoft Support is to reduce my file size to under 10Mb. I have good friends with Quicken who've also had corruption issues.

Tod

If your business is REALLY small, and you do not need an application for true double entry accounting, then yes, you could use Quicken Home and Business for tracking small business income and expenses - so long as you do not need to calculate payroll (you may set up payroll categories and print payroll checks, but you will need to manually compute witholdings and deductions).

Quicken really is designed as a financial tracking and management tool. I use Quicken for my personal finances. However, Quicken is not suited to my 'small' business.

Long and short of it-- for personal finances I recommend Quicken. I have been using it for many years, with no problems. I am currently using the

For business accounting, give the nod to your accountant. While it is important that you be comfortable with whatever software you use, it is equally necessary that your accountant be comfortable working with what data you provide.

I'm surprised at the assertion of data corruption issues - I've been using Quicken exclusively for my personal finances for over a decade - with many upgrades and zero data issues. I've been very happy with it and recommend it highly for personal finances.

If the two are mixed, yes. If the business grows and the application has been carefully used, the Quicken data can be transferred to most levels of QuickBooks. There might be a version of Money that will do as well, but I have zero experience with Money.

Micro$oft tried to buy Quicken a few years back, but the courts scared it off. Eventually MS will bring out something to compete with QuickBooks. If they compete with each other on features and price, Intuit will have to lower its prices or go the way of Peachtree Accounting, i.e., down hill.

Looks like Microsoft is just about to release their QuickBooks competitor:

Try searching the quicken newsgroup for the word corruption...

Question for the group tho....

I'm not a small business owner but have thought abt becoming one. Maybe a very small business.....cleaning or something

I would want to farm out all my accounting and tax record keeping to a real live accountant

So what benefit would it be to me to use QuikBooks or above program?

Wont I be duplicating records?

Please bear with any dumb questions.

The degree of organization you maintain for your books and records are directly proportional to the amount a real live accountant will charge you.

The dumb ones are the ones not asked.

Alan, your statement reminds me of a client of my step-father. She ran a bed 'n' breakfast/curio shop on one of Nashville's main streets about 50-60 years ago, long before PCs and she refused to keep a simplified book which are still available. She had, instead, a fairly decent cash register that would produce a summary at the end of each day on which she's make tiny little notes.

About 3 weeks before the tax deadline, she'd bring the 365-366 little rolls neatly bound in rubber bands. I called her the scroll lady. My step-father, after a friendly chat and see you in a week, would give the scrolls to my mother who would then use a B&P pad to categorize and summarize the scrolls.

Each year my step-father would increase his fee which she happily pay. He never charged her more than she could afford, but she could have saved a lot of money had she just bought one of those simplified notebooks and done the summary herself. That went on for at least 20 years until she died.

BTW, I found an answer to most of my questions about Excel importation at

Back to the subject at hand, even a Basic QuickBooks file will be welcomed by an accountant if the user is consistent even if wrong.

Thanks..... I didn't know this

Even tho I'm very computer literate.....I always assumed there was no benefit to me keeping my own small business records. That it best to "farm" that all out and well worth paying someone else to do.

Maybe I should get a point of sale system then if keeping records is so important?