Business Matters - Outright Bookkeeping software

Last week I spoke about NeatReceipts - a scanner and software program that enables you to scan in your receipts and then creates a database of all the information.  At the same time as starting to use NeatReceipts, I also found Outright - which is free online bookkeeping software.

Here are some key features of Outright:

• it's great for small business
• it tracks income and expenses
• the software is free
• there is nothing to download  - this is cloud technology - but safe and protected
• it imports income and expenses from Paypal
• it's simple to use
• it's really simple to use!

It shows simple profit and loss graphs providing quick visual checks on how each month is going.

The company is quite young so they are still developing the software and improvements are being made all the time.  The main reasons I chose it was a) because it's soooooooo simple to use, and b) because it can import all my paypal data automatically and I use paypal for the majority of my income and large percentage of my expenses.

The only downside re. their Paypal system is that currently, they can only import in US dollars.  As I have two currency accounts on paypal - US dollars and Euros - it won't convert the euros.....but this is one of the things they are currently working on.  I can instead convert all my payments in paypal to dollars which gets around it.

There are only four tabs: Income, expenses, taxes and reports.  In the reports section you can search by date,  income by category (which you can set yourself), income by customer, expenses by vendor, expenses by category etc etc.

If you want a complicated system, with lots of bells and whistles this is not for you.  If you currently don't have a computerized system, this is free to try and easy to set up so worth a go!  For me, the fact that it imports Paypal data means its a great instant check on transactions and a back up for my pen and paper records.

Business Matters - NeatReceipts

I've just started a couple of new ways to keep track and monitor my business accounts.  I like them both a lot, so thought I'd share them with you here.

First up is NeatReceipts. Basically it's a small mobile scanner and software that reads what is scanned.  So all you do is put your receipt in the scanner, press the button, brrrrrrrrrrrr it goes through and the key information is extracted and automatically entered into an easy-to-use database.

I feed in my post office receipts to keep track of shipping charges, and all other receipts that I don't pay for on Paypal (I use a different system for Paypal which I'll tell you about another day!).

With NeatReceipts you can:

• manipulate the database and sort in a variety of ways to produce reports and searchable pdf documents.
• use it on both windows and mac
• export data to Excel or Quicken
• assign tax categories to receipts and keep digital copies for tax records(accepted by the IRS)
• create expense reports
• use it for either business or household expenses
• use just the scanning software and data filing system if you currently own a compatible scanner

The scanner is small and "neat" so you can take it with you on business trips if you do that sort of thing.  It is powered by a USB connection so can just go into your laptop and before you are home, you can have a report of your expenses.

I like it.  Before I just kept everything in a drawer and year end had to go through it all. Now, it's much more manageable.  The system is quick, and also kind of fun - which encourages me to do it! 

Occasionally when the receipt is difficult to read, you have to enter some of the data manually into the database. 

Anyhow, a few people recommended it from the Etsy Metal Clay team and I'm happy I gave it a go. Maybe it'll work for you?  Or do you use something else that you like?  Let us know ...