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.