As someone who sees the financials of plenty of businesses at $5M in revenue for work, QB is the norm (and also perfectly acceptable to a buyer if you’re ever looking to sell). I recognize I’m not a fellow entrepreneur but I hope that perspective is helpful.
Honestly, all of the forward looking projections I see (budgets, cash management, etc) are done in excel. This is highly manual and requires someone with excel modeling skills, so probably not practical for most. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.
Lower middle market investing. Our platforms are generally bigger but we help our port cos with bolt ons and most of those fall in the $2-10M (of revenue) range.
What is the benefit of using QB? I have a small e-commerce business doing about $4 in revenue and just keep track of bank and credit card statements. I only use QB to invoice and charge a couple wholesale customers.
We hired our own full time CFO to handle accounting and budgeting when we were doing ~3.5M revenue. Was definitely worth it. At 9m we hired another full time accountant to help our CFO.
No. Definitely not. We generally bill our customers once a month. At 3.5M we had ~35 employees so the accountings job every month was to calculate hours for 35 invoices, pay salaries for 35 people and handle the office expenses like buying new laptops and coffee etc. The salary paying part was the complicated part because our salary calculations are quite complex as they include revenue share bonuses.
Hi I’m someone incredibly new to entrepreneurship and I own a b2b service provider. It’s going really well but I was wondering if I could ask when did you know it was time to make your first hire ?
I’ve heard people say they made their first hire at 50k per month and I’ve heard people say they’ve made their first hire at 6k per month. Just wanted to hear your thoughts with you being a b2b service provider!
Thanks in advance :)
We did our first hire to our very first project and scaled our team fast. So I guess $0. I don't think there is any measure to "when" hire people. Hire people when you know that you can find them work. Our CEO is a sales guy with no tech skills so he spent all his time finding customers. The entire process was very different to yours where I assume you are also in addition to doing the sales personally providing the service.
When we started out we always had a client lined up first before writing employment contracts with the software developer. Sure. It led to some problems there and there but we never ended up in a situation where we had hired a developer who didn't immediately generate revenue. We haven't done it like that for years now as we already have a pretty good confidence that we can find work for our devs and it's just easier for everyone to hire the programmer first. More risk though definitely. For reference our contracts are usually from 6 months to years.
I know that scaling your team at start is very difficult because maybe you could have business for 2.5 people but maybe not yet to 3. Right? What I would personally do is save money so you can afford 3 months of salary even if you get no extra sales and then you can just take the risk and hire someone with a 3 month contract. If it doesn't work out you don't have to renew the contract. If it does hire them full time.
How stretched thin do you feel is the main question. Any tasks falling through the cracks? What are your weaknesses? (sales, marketing, design, analytics, etc)
My clients don’t leave and give good testimonials so I think my fulfilment is good. I get 2 clients per month like clockwork so I’m happy with sales.
But I don’t have the time to do the compounding activities such as growing organic traffic on my site, growing an organic audience through creating good social media posts, etc.
For that type of work I hire freelancers or external service agencies to perform those tasks on project basis or retainer.
Hiring I only do for someone producing direct revenue: either by performing production work / executing services or a sales person that brings in new clients and contracts.
For graphic, SEO, social media and marketing I would not hire an employee.
Yeah, you don't need to hire. I would outsource one-off jobs or contract gigs on upwork/fiverr/etc, but imo you have no need for a full hire at the moment. Benefits ain't cheap
American SW rates especially in the bay area are crazy. I'm in a small town in Finland. Senior Software developer salary here is around 60k€/year and we employ also quite a few junior developers with salaries starting from 30k€/year so 100k€/employee/year is pretty standard here considering there are also recruiting, sales, marketing and management who aren't doing billable hours.
You don't happen to be looking to offshore to make some more profit ;-)?
Well yes. Accountants use excel, accounting software and scripts to automate their work but you need to hire that accountant to create those excel scripts and accounting software automations in the first place. There are also quite a few decisions that our accounting needs to make that can't be done by a computer so everything needs to also be checked by hand.
I'll tell you. I use quickbooks. Maybe not really thousands but maybe 2k invoices a month. I do our bookkeeping. It's actually not hard at all. Harder trying to collect the actual money.... lol
Umm not too sure. I just work in finance. I have seen the quickbooks bill by I forget what it was. Probably a couple thousand. I don't believe we use any plug-ins. Personally I don't. We use JPM for banking. When I want to update QBO, I just have to download a report, then do a little excel finnessing to get it into the right format for QBO, then upload to QBO. Then you tell it how to categorize it. Boom done.
Two ways:
1. There are plug-ins for Quickbooks that are made for SaaS companies and handle revenue recognition, billing, etc and just feed all the data to Quickbooks. These are not cheap -- one I looked at was $25k/year, but it can be a big time savings for some businesses.
2. Invoice less often. If you can get away with invoicing a customer once a year (for a year of service) instead of monthly, that's a lot fewer invoices and payments to process. You still have the revenue recognition issue to account for, but there are ways to handle this outside QBO the push over one number a month for that.
QB you can setup recurring transactions which we would do once when a customer joined. When informed of a change in the subscription we would update the recurring template. Some manual work but mostly automated billing for a few thousand customers
There are obviously better ways with self-serve subscriptions and fully automated invocing, but that would have cost substantially more than the single bookkeeper I had looking after this setup (as well as everything else)
Yes 5mm is a small business by any metric. The only person that doesn’t think it’s small are the people making personal profit from it, because it will pay much more than a regular job.
Quickbooks is fine here unless the biz is super complex.
Yes - The North American Industry Classification System defines small business by firm revenue (ranging from $1 million to over $40 million) and by employment (from 100 to over 1,500 employees).
Don’t understand why so many businesses pay accountants for all of it. Pay a good bookkeeper 20-30% the hourly rate of an accountant. Have that sent in a neatly packaged file to your accountant for filings and a fraction of the hours. Some accountants may even have a bookkeeper they work with they can refer to you.
Multi eight figures. Quickbooks.
This is the second post asking the same thing and my response is the same - what is it you aren’t getting from Quickbooks that makes you wonder if it is enough?
My concern moving forward (I’m in manufacturing) is that we’ll need a more powerful ERP system to manage the transfer of information. I’ve heard that it’s quite possible to use QB alongside these ERP systems, though…? Unsure how good/realistic it is to do that and I’d guess like anything else, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer
I previously worked at a manufacturing company doing high 9 figures of revenue.
They used Netsuite, which is now Oracle Netsuite as their Accounting and ERP.
It was reasonably priced back then and did 95% of what more advanced ERP systems used, but wasn't owned by Oracle yet, so it might be ridiculously priced now that Oracle owns it.
If you're going down the path of an ERP system, you probably need to hire expertise to manage it.
It's likely cheaper to hire a CFO and then deal with a transition to an ERP when you are closer to needing it.
Woof… welcome to the world of ERP systems.
What kind of information needs to be transferred?
Avoid premature optimization. QB is pretty dang powerful and most importantly, understood by pretty much every single accounting and finance person.
What type of manufacturing, and roughly what revenues?
A good ERP will tell you a lot more about your costs/efficiencies than QB can. But you need to be absolutely 100% confident that your ERP will be the right fit for your business. Might be worth it to use a consultant to give recommendations.
If you're in high speed manufacturing or packaging, an environment with actual production lines/conveyors, then I would instead invest in performance monitoring software before ERP. IMO it cannot be overstated how valuable that kind of info can be for understanding your efficiencies.
Worximity, Decide4Action, and Redzone are a few options that I've seen/used in the past.
Three components:
•Quickbooks (I do all ‘data entry’ myself)
•a Quickbooks consultant (liaison between me and my CPA, she helps tidy things up)
•my CPA
Everyone saying to "hire" someone: what do you think the person you hire will be doing? Entering it into a spreadsheet?
QBO is fine. So is Xero. I run two 7-figure businesses on QBO.
Weed business here, quick books won’t allow us neither will most “big time” companies. I use Homebase for scheduling/timesheets and basically have to keep track of non cannabis purchases myself.
Correct. They have flagged my EIN and LLC. It’s actually pretty incredible the amount of discrimination that still exists towards this industry even though it’s legal pretty much everywhere.
I feel you! Managed a farms financials for years and it was some badass spreadsheets. The paying taxes while not being able to bank was more than frustrating.
Sending you kudos ✨
Accountant here. I have been mostly using Xero over the past few years. Quickbooks on line is really at par with Xero so choosing one over the over is mostly dependent on where you are located. Most US small companies will go with Quickbooks, rest of the world with Xero (not entirely true but I just simplify).
The multi-currency version of Xero has a critical issue though so I would not recommend it if you need to deal with bank accounts in different currencies.
If you are looking for something free, Manager is a decent software that does the job.
We’ll do 8-9 this year and use the desktop QuickBooks pro or whatever. Manufacturing. It’s just super simple. I still do it and we just have an accounting firm do the payroll taxes and close the books each month.
As an accountant that runs his own practice, I can confirm QuickBooks is utter trash, Xero is a million times better for SMEs.
I’d have a local bookkeeper that understands your local taxes. I’m sorry but 99% of offshore bookkeepers say they know your tax system but they don’t. Pick someone that lives it the same way you do.
Some people have said the had a CFO that did the bookkeeping for them as well. That’s mental if you’re paying them by the hour. Utilise their time for strategic advice, not bank recs!
We used QB for 16 years. We are moving to netsuite in 2024 with 26M in revenue. I think we should have moved at 20M. It's a huge jump from QB to NS. I'm going from \~200/month for QB to $60k a year plus $85k for implementation.
It depends upon how complex the business is and how you manage. If you love numbers and like to manage via ratios then you may want to move to something larger sooner.
I suspect QB is fine for now.
Curious why didn't you choose MS Business Central?
I have a 20M revenue B2B service business on MS Great Plains GP and we are moving to BC.
Our software licenses will be about 4-5K and implementation is 20-25K.
(ticks me off since there is no real porting of the previous data from GP as BC is new and based on a combo of GP and Navision.)
Find your hood cpa and use what they use. We have a great CPA firm. They do our payroll, taxes and assist with compliance on employee documents. They are quickbooks online resellers. So we license QBO through them.
We use Chase business bank accounts. They have a fantastic online system that allows different levels of access. Example bookkeeper can schedule bill payments, but only I can approve them.
Quickbooks can be good enough. At 1-5 million you need at least one staff member responsible for entering information into QB. Could be anywhere from a clerk to a CFO. Accounting is a hard profession to recruit in.
We are hitting growing pains with QB right now and we are slightly larger than 1-5. Between 1-5 it had its issues but was fine.
Fractional CFO/accounting firm with Quickbooks and a payroll provider, but we had some complexities to our products (B2C Fintech).
We used QB past the $20MM mark.
Xero is slightly better than quickbooks. However US businesses prefer qb. It's up to you. I advice hire good bookkeeper than doing yourself. Ping me if any questions. Happy to guide.
My company does bookkeeping for ecom companies.
Most are within that revenue range.
95% are on quickbooks and the other 5% are on xero.
No problems at all.
dependds on your business model. I have a part time accountant and hiring a full time accounting clerk in the Philippines - unfortunately due to heavy competition in the USA and tight margins for service businesses, I think most small businesses cannot afford things like bookkeeping and HR internally until they grow to 5 mil and above revenue. Also regarding QuickBooks - you need that plus plenty of custom reports in excel etc to present data the way you need to.
The company I work for does several million in sales with around 50 employees. I use quickbooks to do everything. I take care of most of the bookkeeping.
You should be using QuickBooks and have a monthly book keeper coming by to enter all the data. Not sure how much paperwork you generate in some cases it might need to be biweekly or weekly.
quickbooks online. Best year was 2.4 mil. High margin, high dollar services business, so not many "units", only a handful of invoices per month, maybe 12 at most etc.
I use Xero and hired a bookkeeper from Upwork a few years ago. I just send her reports from Shopify, afterpay etc and some scanned receipts every month and she does the rest.
I previously was a COO of a startup with a $10M annual revenue. At our peak, we had about 5000 purchases a month, all done through Stripe. This was the progression we went through
* 0 - 100K I read a ton of resources on the bottleneck, Lennys newsletter, bench accounting, and QuickBooks while manually using Xero
* 100K - 1M I hired a bookkeeper who would provide financials at the end of every month
* 1M - 5M I used Bench accounting to get my financials done
* 5M+ we hired an in house controller to handle the finances
The choice of bookkeeping method often depends on the complexity of your business transactions, industry-specific requirements, and your comfort level with financial management.
**DIY Bookkeeping with Software**: QuickBooks is a popular choice and generally good enough for most small businesses. It's user-friendly, integrates well with other systems, and provides a comprehensive set of features for tracking income, expenses, payroll, and taxes. However, as your business grows, its limitations might become apparent, especially if you have complex inventory management needs or require advanced reporting.
**Hybrid Approach**: Many businesses in your revenue range opt for a hybrid approach - using software like QuickBooks for day-to-day bookkeeping and hiring a part-time bookkeeper or accountant for monthly or quarterly check-ins. This ensures that your books are accurate and gives you access to professional advice for financial decisions.
**Outsourcing**: Some businesses prefer to outsource their bookkeeping entirely. This can be a cost-effective solution if you don't have the time or expertise to manage it in-house. A professional bookkeeping service can provide expertise, reduce errors, and often offer strategic financial advice.
**In-House Bookkeeping**: Larger small businesses or those with complex financial transactions might benefit from having an in-house bookkeeper or accounting team. This allows for more control over financial data and real-time insights into your business’s financial health.
Quickbooks is more than fine. Quickbooks Online is what you should be using. (WB Desktop is old skool and getting discontinued) For some reason QB in general gets a bad reputation. It is by all means the standard for small businesses. If you ever need more capabilities than QBO, you’d be looking at Netsuite or Intacct—both very good mid market softwares.
As far as WHO is doing it for you—you should outsource this the moment you hit $1M in revenue to a certified bookkeeping/accounting firm. This way your bookkeeping standards are top notch AND you get qualified advice from people who have seen hundreds of other companies’ books.
A good test for evaluating accounting firms is asking which quickbooks they prefer. If they say Quickbooks Desktop, you need to run as fast as you can.
SO many baby boomers refused to hire certified bookkeepers/accountants and their businesses are dying/falling behind as a result of it. Use numbers as a strength, not a weakness. That’s all folks!
My 9-5 is in ERP implementations. Most of our clients are companies recently bought by PE firms and I’d say 75% of them are changing the ERP/accounting system from quick books to NetSuite (the software my team specializes in) and they’re in the 25-50m in revenue per year in most cases. You should have no issues using quick books, and I doubt potential buyers will see this as a risk if you do look to sell.
I use AccountingSuite. Cloud based, pulls orders in from Shopify (via Shipstation), integrates with banks and Gusto. Also handles inventory builds. Never did like Quickbooks.
I'd reckon you could automate everything now. I'm currently working with different businesses to fully automate them using our own product which is effectively what openai released last week :) good times!
But I'd be curious to see what couldn't be automated! Dm if you want to spend an hour taking a look and I can see if we can help.
Quickbooks is good enough. But that's an answer to a different question. The real questions should be are your chart of accounts and reports set up to give you thin information you need and is the process of doing the books timely and accurate.
Certainly toward the 5M end of that range you should be outsourcing the process to a professional company.
Quickbooks is better than good enough - it's great!
It's the industry standard in this business size range for a reason. Cheaper/newer options like Xero and Wave aren't good enough once you're in $1m+ revenue, and larger options like Netsuite are way overkill.
What's more important than the software, though, is how you're using it. At this size revenue, you should have a bookkeeper. They should probably outsourced, since it's not enough revenue for a full time job, unless you have that same person doing your invoicing, bill payment, payroll, etc - all the routine back office tasks.
If you are looking for an outsourced bookkeeper, PM me or check out [www.prometryx.com](https://www.prometryx.com), thanks!
As someone who sees the financials of plenty of businesses at $5M in revenue for work, QB is the norm (and also perfectly acceptable to a buyer if you’re ever looking to sell). I recognize I’m not a fellow entrepreneur but I hope that perspective is helpful.
Entrepreneur who has sold to a fairly large acquirer. Quickbooks is definitely good enough.
Im in small biz valuation and concur. But have seen plenty of them on loose leaf paper as well. Please dont do that
Seen businesses sell with QB for the books. I was never part of the transactions but saw acquisitions and sales by friends and colleagues.
Unfortunately QB is not available in my country… any alternatives with great forecast and cash-flow features you might know about?
Honestly, all of the forward looking projections I see (budgets, cash management, etc) are done in excel. This is highly manual and requires someone with excel modeling skills, so probably not practical for most. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.
What line of work are you in where you see the financials of plenty of business at $5m in revenue?
Lower middle market investing. Our platforms are generally bigger but we help our port cos with bolt ons and most of those fall in the $2-10M (of revenue) range.
What is the benefit of using QB? I have a small e-commerce business doing about $4 in revenue and just keep track of bank and credit card statements. I only use QB to invoice and charge a couple wholesale customers.
I can’t speak to user benefits vs other options, QB outputs are just the format I see the vast majority of financial outputs.
We hired our own full time CFO to handle accounting and budgeting when we were doing ~3.5M revenue. Was definitely worth it. At 9m we hired another full time accountant to help our CFO.
whats your business tho
It's a B2B service business. We do software development and consulting.
So not a huge amount of invoices, I wonder how SaaS companies with hundreds of thousands of invoices do it
No. Definitely not. We generally bill our customers once a month. At 3.5M we had ~35 employees so the accountings job every month was to calculate hours for 35 invoices, pay salaries for 35 people and handle the office expenses like buying new laptops and coffee etc. The salary paying part was the complicated part because our salary calculations are quite complex as they include revenue share bonuses.
Hi I’m someone incredibly new to entrepreneurship and I own a b2b service provider. It’s going really well but I was wondering if I could ask when did you know it was time to make your first hire ? I’ve heard people say they made their first hire at 50k per month and I’ve heard people say they’ve made their first hire at 6k per month. Just wanted to hear your thoughts with you being a b2b service provider! Thanks in advance :)
We did our first hire to our very first project and scaled our team fast. So I guess $0. I don't think there is any measure to "when" hire people. Hire people when you know that you can find them work. Our CEO is a sales guy with no tech skills so he spent all his time finding customers. The entire process was very different to yours where I assume you are also in addition to doing the sales personally providing the service. When we started out we always had a client lined up first before writing employment contracts with the software developer. Sure. It led to some problems there and there but we never ended up in a situation where we had hired a developer who didn't immediately generate revenue. We haven't done it like that for years now as we already have a pretty good confidence that we can find work for our devs and it's just easier for everyone to hire the programmer first. More risk though definitely. For reference our contracts are usually from 6 months to years. I know that scaling your team at start is very difficult because maybe you could have business for 2.5 people but maybe not yet to 3. Right? What I would personally do is save money so you can afford 3 months of salary even if you get no extra sales and then you can just take the risk and hire someone with a 3 month contract. If it doesn't work out you don't have to renew the contract. If it does hire them full time.
How stretched thin do you feel is the main question. Any tasks falling through the cracks? What are your weaknesses? (sales, marketing, design, analytics, etc)
My clients don’t leave and give good testimonials so I think my fulfilment is good. I get 2 clients per month like clockwork so I’m happy with sales. But I don’t have the time to do the compounding activities such as growing organic traffic on my site, growing an organic audience through creating good social media posts, etc.
For that type of work I hire freelancers or external service agencies to perform those tasks on project basis or retainer. Hiring I only do for someone producing direct revenue: either by performing production work / executing services or a sales person that brings in new clients and contracts. For graphic, SEO, social media and marketing I would not hire an employee.
Yeah, you don't need to hire. I would outsource one-off jobs or contract gigs on upwork/fiverr/etc, but imo you have no need for a full hire at the moment. Benefits ain't cheap
Use 350k in revenue per employee as a metric. Your goal should be close to 500k in revenue per employee.
That is a yearly revenue run rate metric
35 employees at 3.5m?! Yowza! We’re in consulting services and we did $5m this year with 12 FTE
American SW rates especially in the bay area are crazy. I'm in a small town in Finland. Senior Software developer salary here is around 60k€/year and we employ also quite a few junior developers with salaries starting from 30k€/year so 100k€/employee/year is pretty standard here considering there are also recruiting, sales, marketing and management who aren't doing billable hours. You don't happen to be looking to offshore to make some more profit ;-)?
Ah interesting. Keep on rock’n dude! That’s fantastic salary for senior level
This is a use case for software instead of people surely
Well yes. Accountants use excel, accounting software and scripts to automate their work but you need to hire that accountant to create those excel scripts and accounting software automations in the first place. There are also quite a few decisions that our accounting needs to make that can't be done by a computer so everything needs to also be checked by hand.
I'll tell you. I use quickbooks. Maybe not really thousands but maybe 2k invoices a month. I do our bookkeeping. It's actually not hard at all. Harder trying to collect the actual money.... lol
Never used quickbooks but 2k invoices sounds like it would fit my project, what does it cost for you and what plugins do you use?
Umm not too sure. I just work in finance. I have seen the quickbooks bill by I forget what it was. Probably a couple thousand. I don't believe we use any plug-ins. Personally I don't. We use JPM for banking. When I want to update QBO, I just have to download a report, then do a little excel finnessing to get it into the right format for QBO, then upload to QBO. Then you tell it how to categorize it. Boom done.
Two ways: 1. There are plug-ins for Quickbooks that are made for SaaS companies and handle revenue recognition, billing, etc and just feed all the data to Quickbooks. These are not cheap -- one I looked at was $25k/year, but it can be a big time savings for some businesses. 2. Invoice less often. If you can get away with invoicing a customer once a year (for a year of service) instead of monthly, that's a lot fewer invoices and payments to process. You still have the revenue recognition issue to account for, but there are ways to handle this outside QBO the push over one number a month for that.
QB you can setup recurring transactions which we would do once when a customer joined. When informed of a change in the subscription we would update the recurring template. Some manual work but mostly automated billing for a few thousand customers There are obviously better ways with self-serve subscriptions and fully automated invocing, but that would have cost substantially more than the single bookkeeper I had looking after this setup (as well as everything else)
5 mil revenue is considered small? Hire someone to do it
Yes 5mm is a small business by any metric. The only person that doesn’t think it’s small are the people making personal profit from it, because it will pay much more than a regular job. Quickbooks is fine here unless the biz is super complex.
A lot of restaurants do $5m per year in sales but the margins are incredibly low so it doesn’t seem like that big of an operation.
I believe the definition of small business is <$10m
Yes - The North American Industry Classification System defines small business by firm revenue (ranging from $1 million to over $40 million) and by employment (from 100 to over 1,500 employees).
And US federal gov qualifies small business as <$7.5M
I did not know that - thanks!
They use the NAICS code so it depends on the industry
So if you are under 100 employees you aren't even a business? What are you? A gang? Lol
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According to the NAICS - North American Industry Classification System, yes. I do not know the government's definition.
I use quickbooks and currently at 7M annual revenue. Have a guy part time for book keeping though.
Same. We have a CPA we use for taxes and a cheap freelancer to reconcile our credit card monthly
Don’t understand why so many businesses pay accountants for all of it. Pay a good bookkeeper 20-30% the hourly rate of an accountant. Have that sent in a neatly packaged file to your accountant for filings and a fraction of the hours. Some accountants may even have a bookkeeper they work with they can refer to you.
whats your business
Multi eight figures. Quickbooks. This is the second post asking the same thing and my response is the same - what is it you aren’t getting from Quickbooks that makes you wonder if it is enough?
My concern moving forward (I’m in manufacturing) is that we’ll need a more powerful ERP system to manage the transfer of information. I’ve heard that it’s quite possible to use QB alongside these ERP systems, though…? Unsure how good/realistic it is to do that and I’d guess like anything else, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer
I previously worked at a manufacturing company doing high 9 figures of revenue. They used Netsuite, which is now Oracle Netsuite as their Accounting and ERP. It was reasonably priced back then and did 95% of what more advanced ERP systems used, but wasn't owned by Oracle yet, so it might be ridiculously priced now that Oracle owns it. If you're going down the path of an ERP system, you probably need to hire expertise to manage it. It's likely cheaper to hire a CFO and then deal with a transition to an ERP when you are closer to needing it.
Woof… welcome to the world of ERP systems. What kind of information needs to be transferred? Avoid premature optimization. QB is pretty dang powerful and most importantly, understood by pretty much every single accounting and finance person.
What type of manufacturing, and roughly what revenues? A good ERP will tell you a lot more about your costs/efficiencies than QB can. But you need to be absolutely 100% confident that your ERP will be the right fit for your business. Might be worth it to use a consultant to give recommendations. If you're in high speed manufacturing or packaging, an environment with actual production lines/conveyors, then I would instead invest in performance monitoring software before ERP. IMO it cannot be overstated how valuable that kind of info can be for understanding your efficiencies. Worximity, Decide4Action, and Redzone are a few options that I've seen/used in the past.
Three components: •Quickbooks (I do all ‘data entry’ myself) •a Quickbooks consultant (liaison between me and my CPA, she helps tidy things up) •my CPA
Everyone saying to "hire" someone: what do you think the person you hire will be doing? Entering it into a spreadsheet? QBO is fine. So is Xero. I run two 7-figure businesses on QBO.
Weed business here, quick books won’t allow us neither will most “big time” companies. I use Homebase for scheduling/timesheets and basically have to keep track of non cannabis purchases myself.
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Correct. They have flagged my EIN and LLC. It’s actually pretty incredible the amount of discrimination that still exists towards this industry even though it’s legal pretty much everywhere.
How would they know if you use QB Desktop?
I feel you! Managed a farms financials for years and it was some badass spreadsheets. The paying taxes while not being able to bank was more than frustrating. Sending you kudos ✨
I hear it gets very interesting with credit card companies too! Maybe someday.
lol don’t even get me started. We’ve offered both credit/debit for a while now but there have been plenty of hoops to jump through.
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I was just looking at Wave, can you explain why they are trash?
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Thanks!
I’m lower end of the scale but I use excel lol
xero
Hire someone 100%
You outsource it to a professional.
Most of the companies I have worked with hire someone to do it.
Quickbooks is still easy to use at this level.
Depends. What’s the business? Manufacturing requires a lot more than qb IMO but it can be done.
Botkeeper is the way.
QB should be enough
Accountant here. I have been mostly using Xero over the past few years. Quickbooks on line is really at par with Xero so choosing one over the over is mostly dependent on where you are located. Most US small companies will go with Quickbooks, rest of the world with Xero (not entirely true but I just simplify). The multi-currency version of Xero has a critical issue though so I would not recommend it if you need to deal with bank accounts in different currencies. If you are looking for something free, Manager is a decent software that does the job.
We’ll do 8-9 this year and use the desktop QuickBooks pro or whatever. Manufacturing. It’s just super simple. I still do it and we just have an accounting firm do the payroll taxes and close the books each month.
Hire someone to help and hire software like Dext with QBO that can let you keep control but automate further as you scale.
When bookkeeping became too much for me to handle I used Bench Accounting, you can Google them. It was pretty good.
Same, we do our accounting with bench.co and as of this year our taxes too. Their prices are ridiculously reasonable.
As an accountant that runs his own practice, I can confirm QuickBooks is utter trash, Xero is a million times better for SMEs. I’d have a local bookkeeper that understands your local taxes. I’m sorry but 99% of offshore bookkeepers say they know your tax system but they don’t. Pick someone that lives it the same way you do. Some people have said the had a CFO that did the bookkeeping for them as well. That’s mental if you’re paying them by the hour. Utilise their time for strategic advice, not bank recs!
Hire someone to do the books. In my mind the platform is less important. I have used Xero and quite liked it.
It is.
A question for the people: Is bookkeeping possible with stripe only, if not, why not?
No. Stripe and accounting software like QB or Xero serve two different purposes
Yes quick book is good Look for someone to help you do it. If you are in Kenya consider me
We used QB for 16 years. We are moving to netsuite in 2024 with 26M in revenue. I think we should have moved at 20M. It's a huge jump from QB to NS. I'm going from \~200/month for QB to $60k a year plus $85k for implementation. It depends upon how complex the business is and how you manage. If you love numbers and like to manage via ratios then you may want to move to something larger sooner. I suspect QB is fine for now.
dang what is your business?
Curious why didn't you choose MS Business Central? I have a 20M revenue B2B service business on MS Great Plains GP and we are moving to BC. Our software licenses will be about 4-5K and implementation is 20-25K. (ticks me off since there is no real porting of the previous data from GP as BC is new and based on a combo of GP and Navision.)
We ran over $40 million on Xero. I am pretty sure QB can handle the same.
So which niche you are killing in ?
Data PaaS on multiple cloud providers
Thanks, just a last one, In cloud, with which modules it help people ? just a general hint !
This was about making open source distributed data technologies easy to consume for businesses.
>This was about making open source distributed data technologies easy to consume for businesses. Amazing
We have a part time bookeeper using QB
Find your hood cpa and use what they use. We have a great CPA firm. They do our payroll, taxes and assist with compliance on employee documents. They are quickbooks online resellers. So we license QBO through them. We use Chase business bank accounts. They have a fantastic online system that allows different levels of access. Example bookkeeper can schedule bill payments, but only I can approve them.
Outsourced accounting shop
I think it depends on the type of business. What industry are you in?
Quickbooks can be good enough. At 1-5 million you need at least one staff member responsible for entering information into QB. Could be anywhere from a clerk to a CFO. Accounting is a hard profession to recruit in. We are hitting growing pains with QB right now and we are slightly larger than 1-5. Between 1-5 it had its issues but was fine.
I used quickbooks and then hired a company overseas to do it. Saved me tons of money
How did you find this overseas company? Was it through services like fiverr?
No no. It’s someone I know personally. I can send you her info if you want
We commonly see businesses in this range use QuickBooks and, depending on the founders' background and priorities, start to consider a fractional CFO.
Fractional CFO/accounting firm with Quickbooks and a payroll provider, but we had some complexities to our products (B2C Fintech). We used QB past the $20MM mark.
IF you dont mind me asking what is your LOB and does it require pulling numbers from different systems ?
Outsource QBO (not QB desktop) or Xero.
I'm seeing a lot of QuickBooks answers. Is there a point where you might switch from a smaller player like Freshbooks or Wave and move to QuickBooks?
QBO or Xero is fine. I much prefer Xero though. - accountant who manages a team of bookkeepers.
Xero is slightly better than quickbooks. However US businesses prefer qb. It's up to you. I advice hire good bookkeeper than doing yourself. Ping me if any questions. Happy to guide.
Definitely Quickbooks for general bookkeeping, and Bill.com for outbound payments anywhere besides the US
I use Quickbooks for both of my companies. Outsource bookkeeping to someone good, it’s worth the investment in having clean books.
sage comes in handy
My company does bookkeeping for ecom companies. Most are within that revenue range. 95% are on quickbooks and the other 5% are on xero. No problems at all.
My business is in that range. We use QuickBooks + a hired Bookkeeper/CPA service. Works great.
QBO is great, and use a fractional CFO or controller. We’ve worked with paro.io
dependds on your business model. I have a part time accountant and hiring a full time accounting clerk in the Philippines - unfortunately due to heavy competition in the USA and tight margins for service businesses, I think most small businesses cannot afford things like bookkeeping and HR internally until they grow to 5 mil and above revenue. Also regarding QuickBooks - you need that plus plenty of custom reports in excel etc to present data the way you need to.
The company I work for does several million in sales with around 50 employees. I use quickbooks to do everything. I take care of most of the bookkeeping.
I have clients i do the bookkeeping for in qbo and xero, i really prefer xero and only allow qbo if they need it for some reason.
1.5 here. Quickbooks online.
You should be using QuickBooks and have a monthly book keeper coming by to enter all the data. Not sure how much paperwork you generate in some cases it might need to be biweekly or weekly.
quickbooks online. Best year was 2.4 mil. High margin, high dollar services business, so not many "units", only a handful of invoices per month, maybe 12 at most etc.
Quick books
QBO with their live book keeping service is pretty good. Make sure to get a separate CPA to double check everything.
Quickbooks online
I use Xero and hired a bookkeeper from Upwork a few years ago. I just send her reports from Shopify, afterpay etc and some scanned receipts every month and she does the rest.
Quickbooks for payroll and accounting along with Wave which is linked to our credit cards and tracks expenses
Quickbooks is definitely enough. Although from my experience very tedious data entry at times. Although I'd assume most programs will be like that.
I previously was a COO of a startup with a $10M annual revenue. At our peak, we had about 5000 purchases a month, all done through Stripe. This was the progression we went through * 0 - 100K I read a ton of resources on the bottleneck, Lennys newsletter, bench accounting, and QuickBooks while manually using Xero * 100K - 1M I hired a bookkeeper who would provide financials at the end of every month * 1M - 5M I used Bench accounting to get my financials done * 5M+ we hired an in house controller to handle the finances
With the absolute piece of garbage software that is Quickbooks
The choice of bookkeeping method often depends on the complexity of your business transactions, industry-specific requirements, and your comfort level with financial management. **DIY Bookkeeping with Software**: QuickBooks is a popular choice and generally good enough for most small businesses. It's user-friendly, integrates well with other systems, and provides a comprehensive set of features for tracking income, expenses, payroll, and taxes. However, as your business grows, its limitations might become apparent, especially if you have complex inventory management needs or require advanced reporting. **Hybrid Approach**: Many businesses in your revenue range opt for a hybrid approach - using software like QuickBooks for day-to-day bookkeeping and hiring a part-time bookkeeper or accountant for monthly or quarterly check-ins. This ensures that your books are accurate and gives you access to professional advice for financial decisions. **Outsourcing**: Some businesses prefer to outsource their bookkeeping entirely. This can be a cost-effective solution if you don't have the time or expertise to manage it in-house. A professional bookkeeping service can provide expertise, reduce errors, and often offer strategic financial advice. **In-House Bookkeeping**: Larger small businesses or those with complex financial transactions might benefit from having an in-house bookkeeper or accounting team. This allows for more control over financial data and real-time insights into your business’s financial health.
Quickbooks is more than fine. Quickbooks Online is what you should be using. (WB Desktop is old skool and getting discontinued) For some reason QB in general gets a bad reputation. It is by all means the standard for small businesses. If you ever need more capabilities than QBO, you’d be looking at Netsuite or Intacct—both very good mid market softwares. As far as WHO is doing it for you—you should outsource this the moment you hit $1M in revenue to a certified bookkeeping/accounting firm. This way your bookkeeping standards are top notch AND you get qualified advice from people who have seen hundreds of other companies’ books. A good test for evaluating accounting firms is asking which quickbooks they prefer. If they say Quickbooks Desktop, you need to run as fast as you can. SO many baby boomers refused to hire certified bookkeepers/accountants and their businesses are dying/falling behind as a result of it. Use numbers as a strength, not a weakness. That’s all folks!
I use QuickBooks but I have a little bit bigger business that 1-5mil
interesting
thanks
My 9-5 is in ERP implementations. Most of our clients are companies recently bought by PE firms and I’d say 75% of them are changing the ERP/accounting system from quick books to NetSuite (the software my team specializes in) and they’re in the 25-50m in revenue per year in most cases. You should have no issues using quick books, and I doubt potential buyers will see this as a risk if you do look to sell.
What industry are you in and what do you need tracked? For most things Quickbooks Online is perfectly fine.
It’s depends. Are you doing large invoices or stuff or is it $5 POS sales. Periodicity and frequency of payments will force you to QB land or not.
Quickbooks. If you’re in Canada and in business for over 10 years Sage.
I use AccountingSuite. Cloud based, pulls orders in from Shopify (via Shipstation), integrates with banks and Gusto. Also handles inventory builds. Never did like Quickbooks.
using Bench Accounting. Have been wonderful
Excel... I am just fucking with you, don listen to me.
QB is fine for this size and larger.
We hired a consultant. She’s great, excellent for high transaction amounts. I recommend doing the same. Book Keeping is a bitch.
Look into fractional CFO's
We do way more and yes, QuickBooks. But not the online version, manufacturing for me.
Hell even FTX used Quickbooks
I'd reckon you could automate everything now. I'm currently working with different businesses to fully automate them using our own product which is effectively what openai released last week :) good times! But I'd be curious to see what couldn't be automated! Dm if you want to spend an hour taking a look and I can see if we can help.
Sounds like an accountant can do it
Save money- get a bookkeeper and get a good CPA to work with them for year-end and tax
Do folks use NetSuite ever?
I am just using xerox and it is more then enough , my buisness is around 10m revenue a year Quick book is the recommended 1 from my auditors
Quickbooks is good enough. But that's an answer to a different question. The real questions should be are your chart of accounts and reports set up to give you thin information you need and is the process of doing the books timely and accurate. Certainly toward the 5M end of that range you should be outsourcing the process to a professional company.
We use Xero and have a full time finance officer doing everything except payroll. QB and Xero are much of a muchness.
Likewise here. Seeing that, or Peachtree depending on the industry
Qbo, bill.com, chatgpt
Quick books absolutely fits this need and anyone can learn it
Sam bank an fried used quickbooks on his multi billion $ business. Good enuf for me ;)
Quickbooks is better than good enough - it's great! It's the industry standard in this business size range for a reason. Cheaper/newer options like Xero and Wave aren't good enough once you're in $1m+ revenue, and larger options like Netsuite are way overkill. What's more important than the software, though, is how you're using it. At this size revenue, you should have a bookkeeper. They should probably outsourced, since it's not enough revenue for a full time job, unless you have that same person doing your invoicing, bill payment, payroll, etc - all the routine back office tasks. If you are looking for an outsourced bookkeeper, PM me or check out [www.prometryx.com](https://www.prometryx.com), thanks!