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It’s no secret that entrepreneurs have the deck stacked against them.
According to the US Small Business Administration, close to 20% of all small businesses aren’t going to make it out of their first year. In five years, nearly 70% of all small businesses will have folded up shop permanently.
Amongst the most common reasons behind this sky-high rate of failure is a lack of money management, cash flow, and an understanding of a business’s finances. Thankfully though, with the help of top-tier accounting software specifically designed with small businesses in mind, you aren’t going to have to worry about a lack of data crippling your ability to make decisions as an entrepreneur.
On the flip side of things, however, finding the right accounting software for your small business is never simple or straightforward.
It’s not that there are so few top options out there to pick and choose from – but that there are so many!
Below we highlight the top five accounting software options for small business owners and entrepreneurs available on the market today. We have selected these options because of their user-friendliness, their depth of tools and analytics, and their rock-solid reputation for giving entrepreneurs (even without a financial or accounting background) accurate access to their financial data at any point in time. The main comparison is Quicken vs Quickbooks
Let’s dig right in!
QuickBooks
When you get right down to it, QuickBooks is almost universally praised as the gold standard of accounting software for small and midsized businesses – in the US and anywhere else, for that matter.
Featuring a full range of tools and technology specifically designed to help you make heads or tails of your business’s finances, there are a variety of different QuickBooks options available to take advantage of under this “umbrella brand name”.
Some are designed for self-employed entrepreneurs, others are designed for freelancers and independent contractors, and others still are designed for traditional small businesses with employees, payroll services, and overhead – not to mention taxes – that all need to be managed alongside key cash flow metrics.
Recently QuickBooks has launched a QuickBooks Online cloud-based solution that is really exciting, too.
This new cloud-based option as a totally revamped user interface, ties into a variety of different payment processors, bank accounts, merchant accounts, e-commerce platforms, and more, and even has an easy to navigate and feature-rich mobile application for both Android and iOS devices that users really like.
Suffice to say QuickBooks belongs on any list of the top five accounting options on the market right now.
Quicken
Quicken is another big name in the financial tracking software world, having its first edition released all the way back in 1983!
Probably most well-known as a personal finance accounting system more into with handling your personal financial needs, Quicken can be adapted into a pretty rock solid small business accounting platform as well.
In 2019 Quicken released its own cloud-based solution that makes it easy to access all of your data from any web browser without having to download dedicated mobile applications or traditional software directly to your computer.
This web version isn’t quite as feature-rich as the dedicated apps for Windows, OS X, and iOS/Android devices but it is still one of the best personal finance and business accounting forms money can buy.
NetSuite
NetSuite is one of the most feature-rich business management software solutions you’ll find anywhere, a top to bottom business management suite of software components that give you a lot more than detailed analytics regarding your business’s financial situation.
A little more complex to use than some of the other options we have highlighted on this list, the NetSuite package has been designed as a “horizontal deployment” that handles quite a bit of financial heavy lifting for you when it has been tied directly into your administrative backend or company workflow.
Flexible, feature-rich, and almost infinitely extendable there are a lot of third-party add-ons and API options you’ll be able to use with NetSuite to increase its functionality quite a bit.
Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct has been designed from the ground up to go toe to toe with QuickBooks specifically, providing entrepreneurs with easy to read reporting, datasets, and analytics regarding their core financials, key financial metrics, and a host of other critical pieces of information in a beautiful and easy to digest way.
Flexibility is the name of the game with this Sage software, too. You’ll be able to integrate this platform with cloud-based services such as Salesforce, ADP, and more and can even use the integrated API set up to create your own custom “hooks” that build out the features and capabilities of this Sage platform even more so.
Another cool benefit of using this software is that it has a variety of different deployments set up for different industries and types of businesses.
Whether you’re running an accounting firm, financial services organization, healthcare company, hospitality business, a nonprofit, professional services, a host real distribution organization or retail outlet – or pretty much anything else – Sage handles the heavy lifting for you by fine-tuning the settings of the platform for your specific industry so that you hit the ground running with this accounting platform.
Patriot Accounting
100% cloud-based, everything about Patriot Accounting has been carefully crafted around simplicity and minimalism without handcuffing or handicapping small business owners and entrepreneurs that need accurate and detailed information regarding their company’s finances.
Not only can you use Patriot Accounting to handle basic accounting details, but you’re also going to be able to use it to handle invoicing, bill pay solutions, paying out your vendors, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Patriot Accounting also tightly integrates with the rest of the Patriot business software solutions. This means you can dramatically extend the features of this software with other Patriot products, all effortlessly integrating with one another and building on the feature set that each individual component has to offer.
Best of all, as a cloud-based solution, any device with internet access and web browser capabilities immediately gives you all the accounting information you need about your business 24/7, 365 days a year.
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This content is brought to you by Shahbaz Ahmed.
Photo: Shutterstock