QuickBooks Simple Start Edition

List Price: $99.99 Discount Price: $59.99

Features:

• Create estimates, invoices and sales receipts
• Write checks, pay bills, record expenses
• Track money in, money out
• Keep it simple and start working right away
• Work with familiar, everyday forms

Customer Reviews:

Very simple but very limited [Posted on 2005-03-23]
This is as advertised. Super simple to get started with accounting for a very basic business. It took about 5-10 minutes to load, walked me through half a dozen basic questions, and was ready to start taking bank account entries and categorize them. I was also able to set up a business credit card to track expenses there and enter things very easily.

The simplicity however comes with a real lack of flexibility for anything more involved. Within the first 30 mintues I was already noticing features missing that I would like, and found myself needing to upgrade to a more complete version of Quickbooks. For instance, expenses are only single level -- you can't have subcategories for expenses. Credit card entries can't have memo fields to remind you what the expense was (checks can however). Etc.

I imagine if you have a business with a very limited set of vendors and customers, and you have little need to categorize your expenses in too complicated a way, this program could be sufficient for your needs. It also is an easy first step into accounting software -- but I would probably start with the expectation that you'll have to upgrade.

Good for beginners, finicky interface [Posted on 2005-09-25]
I like QuickBooks basic because it does everything I need and is simple to use. It's help feature when deciding how to categorize expenses is good. Some things are a little difficult to get the hang of (such as how to enter invoices, etc.) but it does a lot and is worth the price if you need to organize your small business finances.

Helps the micro small business get out of the shoe box [Posted on 2005-10-07]
I am a CPA who has advised clients with small businesses to use this product to organize income and expenses. This is a very stripped down version of the Quickbooks line, but it is built to get those micro businesses out of the shoebox and rag-tag spreadsheets, and into a structured, logical format.

I would highly recommend Simple Start for the following:

--Small Schedule C, owner-operated businesses with no employees;
--Small services businesses, and;
--Those who may have an apartment building or two.

Michael J. Dunton
Aurora, IL

Doesn't support Quickbooks Transaction import! [Posted on 2006-09-26]
I got this because I use PayPal and Quicken doesn't support importing QIF files, and I thought it would be useful to get on Quickbooks anyway. PayPal does support the exporting of Quickbooks format (iif I think) - so I figure this would be perfect.

However, Overly Simple Start doesn't support this basic, simple task of importing data from anywhere, in any format. You are stuck typing in every transaction... And if you are getting a lot of payments on PayPal, this will cost you TONS and TONS of time.

I don't think that this goes for other versions of Quickbooks, and it did look like I might be able to "use" the software - if I didn't mind spending hours entering data.. And I don't know if I can later export that to the real version of Quickbooks when I need to...

I paid $99 for this, and the only good thing I can say about the purcahse is that it can be written off as a business expense... :-(

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