New Year QuickBooks

When I started my home business, designing plastic injection molds, I did what most people who start a home business do. I used a computerized spreadsheet for my accounting. I created and kept track of quotes and invoices in MS Excel. For just starting out, it worked just fine.

I had been using Quicken for keeping track of my personal finances, so after about a year or so I upgraded to Quicken Home & Office. Seemed like a logical step and worked out great. While Excel is an extremely powerful tool, using Quicken Home & Office was a vast improvement and I was very happy with it.

Then this fall I took a class on Computerized Accounting and the course used QuickBooks. As expected I quickly found that; while Quicken Home & Office was a vast improvement over Excel, QuickBooks is a much more powerful tool for tracking finances.

After the second class, I told my instructor that I was already sold on QuickBooks. I told her I planned to purchase the software for my business and go back to the standard Quicken for my personal finances. She made the recommendation of instead of buying the two software programs, just get QuickBooks and create a  separate "company" for my personal finances.

Besides teaching business classes at the local Technical College, my instructor also has an accounting and consulting business. She told me one of her clients started doing this and has been quite happy with the results. So the idea was in the back of my head through out the course.

Well the course is over. I bought QuickBooks Pro, and last week, while on "use it or lose it" end of the year PTO from my day job, I got both my business and me set up in QuickBooks. I don't need to go into detail on how to use QuickBooks for your small or medium size business. Many of you already know this. But I'm pleasantly surprised how well it works for personal use.

I'm just getting started and have a few things to try out; but I know QuickBooks is going to great tool for me.  It is going to be very useful for budgeting and planning finical goals. I will be sure to post tips and cool things I find while doing this here.

This could be a lot of fun!