Quickbooks vs. Quicken
10/08/09 | Kentucky Business Network
One of the most important tools for a business is a clear and organized tool to track finances. If you can’t track your finances, then you won’t be in business very long. There isn’t just one method or tool that suits all businesses however. Some businesses prefer to use spreadsheets over off the shelf accounting software. This can work for for some businesses, but for others a more robust tool may be needed to track expenses, draft reports, create profit and loss statements, track employee expenses over time, consider time and materials and a host of other features to help empower a business owner with valuable tools for sharpening their business blade.
Two extremely popular software tools are Intuit’s Quickbooks and Quicken. Many business owners are directed early on to adopt a practice of running their finances through one other these two great tools. “But which one is best for me” is a very common question. We hope to provide a very short outline comparing the two products.
What will I need for my business?
- Your accounting tool will need to accurately measure your profits and your financial condition and share this information with a third party, whether it is the IRS, your bank, your accountant, or a business partner.
- Allow you to product checks, invoices and customer statements and records for the daily activities of your business
- Allow you to see clearly detailed records of the assets and liabilities of the business
Business Forms
Quicken produces only two business forms: checks and invoices. This means that it will work fairly well for small, service businesses.
Quickbooks is better for businesses that require other forms such as: customer receipts, purchase orders, customer statements that show finance charges, or detailed records of what the business owns and what it owes.
Downloading Transactions
Both Quicken and Quickbooks can download transactions for bank, credit card and investment accounts.
Comparison for Business
Quicken
1. Easier to learn program
2. Standard reports with sort and filter
3. Great for tracking checkbooks–totally by category and produce simple reports for income and expense. It is more difficult if you have multiple checkbooks.
4. Terrific personal financial tracking software- Track stocks and other investments, track household inventory , emergency tracker for describing locations of important documents, important phone numbers in case of serious accident or death, financial planning tools to help save for retirement and children college funds.
5. Add on payroll system ( extra expense )
6. Cannot track inventory
7. Home and Business addition tracks vehicle mileage
8. Limited invoicing, receivable and payable capabilities
9. Only one user on the software at a time
10. No add-on software available
Quickbooks
1. More complicated (due to the business customization and sophisticated business features)
2. Balance sheet, journal entries, behind the scenes double entry accounting features.
3. Improved data collection. Customized transaction fields plus customize customers and vendors, can collect data by location, department, job, repairs on equipment, referral sources, employees, salesman
4. Standard reports include full range of financial reports, sales and expense reports, inventory and sales detail reports, time tracking and employee reports, job reports, departmental reports and much more. All can be modified and filtered and memorized for easy access in the future.
5. No personal financial tracking features
6. Inventory tracking is a feature, but has limited functionality.
7. Integrated Payroll feature is excellent for the small business. Can have unlimited state withholding but each employee is limited to withholding for just one state. Prints 941, 940 W-2’s (additional cost)
8. QuickBooks Pro and Premier have a mileage tracker.
9. Full features for receivables and payables, invoicing and purchase orders. Includes: professional invoices, statements purchase orders
10. Multi-user – can have up to 5 simultaneous users. Enterprise solutions can have up to 10
11. Over 300 add-on software developers to date that integrate to QuickBooks. This combination gives the same power of similar systems selling for over $20,000.
Pay To Employees
Do you hire employees? QuickBooks comes with a complete payroll system, and can print the required quarterly reports.
Quickbooks Pro? Oh, now I’m confused
QuickBooks Pro adds the capabilities for:
(1) estimating, such as estimating construction costs to make a bid on a construction project
(2) time tracking, for businesses that bill on the basis of time, such as a CPA
(3) advanced job costing to compare estimated costs to actual costs of a project
(4) exporting data (reports) to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for further analysis
(5) and some more stuff
