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Less Accounting Review – a 10 part series – The Signup

'Accounting Sense != Common Sense' photo (c) 2007, Paul Downey - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/I recently signed up with Less Accounting and I will be publishing a Less Accounting review  and experiences with the setup process here (read the introduction).

  1. Introduction
  2. My accounting background
  3. The Signup (This post)
  4. Import Quickbooks File
  5. Wire Account
  6. Set Recurring
  7. Hook up Bank Account
  8. Hook Up American Express Account
  9. Less Accounting – One Week Later
  10. Less Accounting – One Month Later

There really isn’t much to the signup process (which is a good thing).

I’m tempted to leave it at that for this part of the review, but one thing that does bear mention is the overall look and feel of their website, and the role it plays in your decision making.  The site isn’t flashy, or terribly notable graphically, however, it is very, very well written, and designed to show off the writing, which makes it quite persuasive.

It has a good Unique Selling Proposition (see the Copy Hackers Series for more information on that) and it identifies me quickly (their novice button), and I have a clear action to take. based on those two factors.

The information presented was all useful, both to me, the end user, and my accountant (who needs to approve these sorts of things).

On the whole, it was good enough to get me to sign up and try it.  They identified my frustrations and promised me a cure with at a decent price and nominal risk.  My big concens were importing American Express data, as well as connecting to my bank without additional fees, which they put more of less on the home page.

On the whole, their signup process gets an A+.


08
Jun 12


Written By Steve French

 

Less Accounting Review – Intermission Part II

It’s been a little while since my last update.  I have finally gotten all of the invoices (ten years worth) into Less Accounting.  For some reason their import procedure marked them all as drafts and did not import the invoice numbers, which pretty much made them useless and I had to go in and change ever one of them.  That took many hours.

The rest of the review is coming soon!

 

 


21
May 12


Written By Steve French

 

Less Accounting Review – Intermission

I haven’t been blogging any more about my Less Accounting experience, largely because I haven’t made much progress in actually using it. Much as recessions will reveal what auditors cannot, changing accounting systems reveals Quickbooks flaws that will not come up in any other way. Everything has been on hold while everything gets properly imported into the new system.


03
May 12


Written By Steve French

 

Less Accounting Review – Part 1, My Accounting Background

'Accounting Sense != Common Sense' photo (c) 2007, Paul Downey - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/I recently signed up with Less Accounting and I will be publishing a Less Accounting review  and experiences with the setup process here (read the introduction).

  1. Introduction
  2. My accounting background (This post)
  3. The Signup
  4. Import Quickbooks File
  5. Wire Account
  6. Set Recurring
  7. Hook up Bank Account
  8. Hook Up American Express Account
  9. Less Accounting – One Week Later
  10. Less Accounting – One Month Later

In the beginning, by which I mean my awesome web company’s beginning in 2002, there was Microsoft Money.  That was my first accounting software and it served me adequately for about five years.  It was nothing special, but it did the job with a moderate amount of hassle, but after a while it began to show it’s age.   Somewhere along the way I started using BlinkSale, which was one of my better decisions.

Along about this time I first heard about Microsoft Office Accounting.  It was a relatively easy migration over from Microsoft Money and I was able to do my minimal accounting and bookkeeping tasks in significantly less time.  Plus, it worked like every other Microsoft product, and if you know Microsoft products well (which I do) then using it was a breeze.  Then Microsoft decided to discontinue the program and for reasons I don’t recall I thought that was a big deal and did not want to get stuck using obsolete software.

So I got a copy of QuickBooks, and away I went.  Specifically I went through a painful migration software.  I also came to the realization that there were many parts of QuickBooks that were not compatible with 64 bit software at that time.  I debated using Quickbooks Online, but that did not seem like a good option.

The good part of using QuickBooks for my Accounting Software

My accountant knew and liked the system, and we could do the entire thing remotely.

Beyond that, there were no good parts.  After a while, and inspired by Peter Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive, I began looking for options.  That led me to Less Accounting for my financial management and financial analysis..


11
Apr 12


Written By Steve French

 

Less Accounting Review – a 10 part series – Introduction

I recently signed up with Less Accounting and I will be publishing a Less Accounting review  and experiences with the setup process here

  1. Introduction (this post)
  2. My accounting background
  3. The Signup
  4. Import QB File
  5. Wire Account
  6. Set Recurring
  7. Hook up Bank Account
  8. Hook Up Amex Account
  9. Less Accounting – One Week Later
  10. Less Accounting – One Month Later

FYI – I did totally steal this idea from Shawn Wildermuth’s modern web development series, because I only steal from the best!


31
Mar 12


Written By Steve French

 

Why bother with E-Checks?

monopoly-e-commerceI recently tried to buy The Entrepreneur´s Guide to Customer Development for Tech Startups and was alarmed to learn that the payment method I used (PayPal) uses an e-Check system by default.  My PayPal account is tied to a regular bank account and everything comes out of that.   Now apparantly I must wait for my check to clear, which won’t be until Friday.  I can’t believe I have to wait till Friday to get a PDF download! I did not see any notice of this on their site, and they did not take credit cards on the site where I bought the pdf.

I don’t begrudge them outsourcing their payment system, taking credit cards is a hard setup with many upfront costs.  However a notice that they will not send me the pdf for a few days would be quite nice, as would the option to cancel my order so I could just download the thing from Amazon.

How has the technology come to this?  Perhaps PayPal has changed their system around, but I have bought many, many things with my linked PayPal account and this has never happened before.

Creative Commons License photo credit: danielbroche

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


22
Nov 10


Written By Steve French

 

Adventures with PayPal Website Payments Pro and Authorize.net

walletSeveral days ago I decided to use PayPal’s Website Payments Pro system for the Stronico credit card processing system.  At the time, I thought PayPal was the obvious choice.  It had relatively low fees (about $60 per month), no setup fee, and it seemed to be the 800 pound gorilla in the space, so how bad coudl it behard could the setup be?

As it turned out, I was very, very wrong.   I spent part of the day Sunday and all day Monday wading through non-working sample code, looking at near duplicate setup guides for the 56 (how it is 56 I don’t know) versions of their Website Payments Pro system, installing all of the add-ons needed to get the sample apps going and so on and so forth.  All of that merely to make a Get request with the proper query string (which is all the Website Payments Pro System really is). Continue reading →


09
Jun 10


Written By Steve French

 

A lesson learned in QuickBooks – Capital Investments is a magic phrase

Quick Note: QuickBooks refers to an owner’s contribution (i.e. an investment in the business) as a “Capital Investment”.  Also, Bank of America charges for their QuickBooks integration.    HT: Recording Infrequent Transactions in QuickBooks

Does anyone know of any good online only business banks?

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


24
May 10


Written By Steve French

 

A partial list of my entrepreneurial weaknesses, and one time steps to correct them

Wheelchair OnlyMy weaknesses have made themselves apparant over the past few days, here is a preliminary list.  The first entry is the topic, the one below that is the specifics, and the one below that is the practical step to get me to an adequate level in under ten hours.

  1. QuickBooks
    Problem: I am terrible at accounting in general, and QuickBooks in particular
    Solution: Spend 10 hours taking free online classes, break this up into one half hour per day
  2. Elevator Speeches
    Problem: Whenever I talk to someone about Stronico I start from scratch every time
    Solution: Create 10 second, 30 second, 5 minute, and 15 minute pitches.  Run these by interested parties and refine and rehearse
  3. Uneven progress in the Stronico Venture
    Problem: The venture breaks down into long unfocused slogs of marketing and development
    Solution: Create master plan, with deadlines and goals
  4. Fame and Goodwill
    Problem: Not enough people know about Stronico
    Solution: Continue prospecting, apply it to the intelligence gathering aspects of Stronico, and make contact with relevant bloggers, then refine the approach.
  5. Metrics
    Problem: There are no good metrics for Stronico, either in profitability, marketing, sales, web hits, etc
    Solution: Create spreadsheet listing weekly goals for all of the above, have second row be the actual numbers.

Creative Commons License photo credit: JoshuaDavisPhotography.COM

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog


20
May 10


Written By Steve French

 

Is it time to replace QuickBooks with Less Accounting?

Where in the world Late Payment ReminderThe internet is filled with hatred of QuickBooks.  After doing much of the hating myself I realize now that people do not hate the program because of what the program can’t do; they hate QuickBooks because the program discourages them in small ways at every opportunity.  Using QuickBooks is like wading three miles through a swamp to pay your taxes.  If you took away half of the options and removed the unwanted spontaneous advertising you would have a nice program. Continue reading →


14
May 10


Written By Steve French

 




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