Quickbooks Pro 2011

A couple of weeks ago I suggested you look into Quicken 2011 for your personal finances. A loyal reader posted a comment wondering if Quickbooks was the better choice. So let me clarify a bit. If you are strictly managing your personal finances, Quicken is the program of choice. For a very small business, you might be able to get along with using Quicken Home and Business. For most businesses, you'll want to use Quickbooks Pro 2011.

I actually use both products. Quicken is used to manage my own finances and Quickbooks Pro is used to manage Unleashed Productions. While Quicken has a few features for businesses, it just doesn't have the depth of features offered in Quickbooks. When we first started the business, it took a while to get Quickbooks set up for our needs. Once everything was set up, it is quite easy to get financial data in the right place and manage everything.

All of the reports and graphs all really nice ways to track how everything is going. When it is tax time, I simply need to print a few reports for our accountant. We also take advantage of the payroll functions to really simplify things. When we need to bill vendors, it only takes an extra click to e-mail a PDF to the vendor. For the old school vendors, we can print it and mail it.

Like any software, there are things I'd love to see improved. Over the years, the upgrades have provided most of those changes. I just know that as a small business owner, it is a very important piece of software for running our business.