Accounting/Timekeeping Software

I use quick books. I don't have any accounting background except for one required college course many moons ago, but I have been able to pick it up pretty easily. And it ties right in with turbo tax when tax time rolls around.

J_S, how does it handle invoicing with multiple 'methods'?

For instance, we have a job X with 3 phases:

A lump sum phase,
A unit price phase (ie, linear foot for wetlands),
& an hourly phase for out of scope work

We may bill some of each phase every month ... does Quickbooks have that flexibility?

Does Quickbooks handle your time sheets?

We have used Medlin (Medlin.com)accounting software for the past 23 years, although it doesn't support timesheets, the AP, AR, GL and Payroll are excellent. And it is VERY affordable! You can try it by downloading it from their site.
Try it you might like it, it's very easy to use.

Hope this helps, and have a great week.

The way I would handle this in QB would be to create three invoices (one for each of the billing basis types mentioned) and then prepare a summary invoice in Excel that adds them all together. There may be a more sophisticated way to do this in QB but I have not discovered it.

You can set up "services" in Quick books to handle just about any type of invoicing that you need.

It handles timesheets, and pulls in those when associated with a job number.

I am a solo firm, and it works for me, although I know that I am barley scratching the surface when it comes to what it can do.

Yea, what he said!

I really only use it to track income and expenses to make things easier at tax time. I don't use it for invoicing but I think others here have indiacted that it will do what you want it to.

I gave peachtree a try and took it back to the store. Very cumbersome and hard to figure out how to use. At least for me.

Thanks all ... sounds like we'll probably end up using Quickbooks with the work-arounds you mentioned.

In our 'googling' we did stumble across 'Tabs-Plus', which bills itself as time and billing software for land surveyors?? We're gonna give the demo a run through; I'll report back if it's worth it ...

Seth -

> I gave peachtree a try and took it back to the store. Very cumbersome and hard to figure out how to use. At least for me.

I haven't seen a recent version of Peachtree, so I don't know how different it is from my ancient (circa 2001) version 8. I've been using Peachtree since 1993 and find it pretty easy to use, but it's the only accounting software with which I'm familiar.

If I were starting out today I'd probably go with QB Pro, simply because it has the most momentum behind it. I'd grumble about having to buy an annual tax update, but I think that's the case with all of them now. (I can update the tax tables in my version of Peachtree in about 15 minutes, and it doesn't cost me a nickel to do so.)

Take a look at BillQuick. We used Deltek?Wind2 previously but switched to BQ when we started a new company in 2006. Not as detailed in reporting and but less expensive. It is not integrated with our accounting package (Peachtree) but it is a feature. We kust chose not to use it.

> We're in the process of weaning ourselves off of a larger A/E firm's support systems (IT, Acct., etc.) and are looking for some accounting and timekeeping alternatives. We've been using Deltek Vision (very robust, read: expensive). ... Any ideas? What are you guys using?

We moved from Wind2 to FMS, and recently from FMS to Vision.

We thought long and hard about staying with the vendor (even though they force expensive upgrades on their users) versus using other open-source accounting/timekeeping software versus developing our own.

The last option is not so far-fetched because we already have our own in-house surveyor's record-keeping program, iPJC, and it would "merely" be a matter of expanding its capabilities to include accounting/timekeeping.

We chose not to this time (it would be a major effort), but next time that we're expected to do an expensive "upgrade", who knows what we'll do?

FYI: iPJC is a free web-based tool that tracks drawings, projects, and clients. Try it out -- it's for land surveyors.

Our time and attendance system is totally optimized for multiple sites, multiple time zones and multiple languages. There are many features that allow you to configure the application to fit your solution needs

web time clock

> I'd grumble about having to buy an annual tax update, but I think that's the case with all of them now.

I stand corrected. I recently installed Peachtree 2010 on a new machine, and found that I can still maintain my own tax tables. It took me all of 1/2 an hour to create the tables I need, and I expect annual updates to take half that time.