As a sole proprietor you manage your own time and you can work from home. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately there is one thing you still have to do no matter what: accounting. Or to be more precise creating and sending invoices, recording expenses, managing your clients, keeping track of the time you are working, and, of course, preparing reports for tax time. All these things are very tedious and take your precious time. And that is the reason why online accounting solutions were invented.
If you purchase such software, you can do all major features listed below. Create nice looking invoices, manage your clients, record expenses, track your time, see your constantly synced banking, share the auto-created reports with your accountant and integrate a wide variety of other software and services into your accounting software. And remember: no matter which solution you choose, accounting will never be a problem again.
A huge advantage of being a sole proprietor is that you don’t need a lot of different features to manage your business, just the most basic ones. However, those features must be in your online accounting solution regardless of the chosen software.
A decent dashboard should always be included in accounting software for very simple reasons. With this you can see the money you owe and you are owed, your banking, the reports your accountant needs, for instance profit and loss of the current fiscal month, and many more.
This is the most important feature your software has. Unless otherwise specified by the company, you can create multi-currency, recurring invoices to your customers either on your computer or on the go from your mobile device. Most accounting solutions even allow you to customize your invoices and if you subscribe to a pay-as-you-go service, your customers can instantly pay their invoices with credit/debit cards and even e-wallets like PayPal.
Depending on the number of clients you can add, most accounting solutions allow you to integrate your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook contacts to their own system.
Accounting software are capable of connecting to thousands of banks around the world. If you connect to your bank, all transactions will be displayed on your dashboard so you can easily track your incomes and expenses.
Not only you can capture receipts with your mobile device and digitize them for further processing, but you can also separate your personal and business expenses, so you can bill only those ones which incurred on behalf of your client.
As reports are automatically calculated from your incomes and expenses, which makes the work of your accountant easier. Furthermore, you can give limited access to him/her, therefore you can work simultaneously.
Most accounting solutions are capable of setting up multiple tax rates and generating 1040 Schedule C reports for sales tax.
If you subscribed to an accounting solution of a company that offers and supports an API, you can integrate with multiple third-party applications which could make your business run even smoother. Just give access to your accounting software to sync with the other application and you never have to use separate solutions again. There are many types of software that could be integrated into an online accounting solution: payment managing tools, expense reporting software, CRMs, invoicing and quoting solutions, project management tools, time tracking software and many more.
A solution you should integrate into your accounting software is PayPal: after syncing with this e-wallet you will be able to see all your transactions in your dashboard and, if you allowed your clients to use the fast payment option, you can receive your payments faster. There are other handy solutions as well: Receipt Bank with which you can capture and process receipts faster, Capsule CRM which manages the list of your clients, and ecommerce solutions such as Amazon Store and eBay.
Picking a cloud accounting solution is never easy: you either get software with unnecessary features, or cheap software which is good for nothing. If you are a sole proprietor, we suggest you to purchase a basic accounting solution with the most important features, but one that can grow with your business, such as FreshBooks and QuickBooks Online.
FreshBooks was founded in 2003 in Canada as an invoicing, billing and time tracking software, but over the past years it became a full-fledged online accounting solution ideal for sole proprietors and smaller businesses. With this neat cloud-based software, which underwent a thorough overhaul in 2016, you can easily and quickly create and customize invoices (whether using the desktop account or the Android/iPhone apps), record expenses, plan and realize projects, and track your time. You can integrate a decent amount of third party applications and services, and check reports FreshBooks automatically creates for you. You also have the option to enable fast online payments, set up recurring invoices, and even customize your account. Regardless of your chosen plan, almost all features remain available during and after the 30-day trial period. Furthermore, you also get unlimited customer support with your subscription, which can be as low as $15 per month. So if you need an accounting solution that includes all major functions and you work with a small number of clients and employees/contractors, then FreshBooks is your choice.
It is quite unbelievable that U.S.-based online accounting company Intuit Inc. has already been on the market since 1983. But the success of its main product, QuickBooks shows that they aren’t just simply lucky. The software exists as downloadable software for desktops, and a cloud-based accounting solution dubbed QuickBooks Online, which the company quite aggressively promotes. This latter version, of which we will be talking about, is ideal for everybody from simple sole-proprietors to bigger companies. Regardless of the chosen subscription, you can create invoices, expenses, and estimates with a few clicks, quickly manage sales receipts, create and print checks, payrolls, have multiple tax rates, real-time banking and reports. You can integrate the software with over 300 third-party solutions, and be entitled to full customer support. You also have the option to try out the software completely free of charge for 30 days. Skipping this trial period you get a discount from the monthly subscription fee for six months or a whole year. But if you don’t like the software, you still have a 60-day money back guarantee.
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