Accounting programs

[Valente Sosa]

What other accounting programs can I use instead of QB online?

[Jim Kennedy]

I am a CPA and I am a real estate investor (with my wife) 

1. QB Pro also allows for P&L by class. 
2. QB online is slower than QB on your computer, and theres more keystrokes to get information, and the feess kinda add up after awhile. 
3. I have not worked with Xero, but have read more good than bad about it in the CPA community, 
4. Peachtree is not bad, but unlike QB, if you change your mind about how a check is posted, you have to post a journal entry to change in. 
5. In QB you can simply go right to the transaction adn re post. We can usually train a QB client and set up a chart of account in an hour or two, and they leave knowing how to book money out and money in. 
6. If you look at rental specific packages like REntManager, they soetimes include non tax things, like schedules of lease expiration dates, tenant contact info and so on. Usually the better this stuff is, the less robust it is on the accounting side. However, its a software-by-software thing. IT would be unfair for me to make a blanket statement.

The point here is that QB does the best job in my opinion. I use it for my CPA practice, tracking income from different sources to help me measure, budget and anticipate, and we use it for all of our residential and commercial investments (separate company from the CPA firm) QuickBooks does all the debits and credits without you even realizing you are doing debit and credit bookkeeping. However, for the technology challenged, we also developed an excel spreadsheet to summarize month by month property by property activity, which works for some investors, too.  

*******Now is the time of year to watch for deep discounts on QB as they try to blow out their 2016 inventory  in anticipation of the new 2017 version. 

Jim Kennedy, CPA