Overall Satisfaction with QuickBooks Self-Employed
I use QuickBooks Self-Employed for my sole proprietor business. (I also use Quicken, which I find to be a little easier to manage, actually.) My main reason for choosing QuickBooks Self-Employed was the mileage tracking feature, as well as the ability to have transactions auto loaded. The mileage feature works pretty well, but the auto transaction feature tended to miscategorize many of the entries. This resulted in a lot of extra time spent.
- QuickBooks Self-Employed does keep a running total of your income and estimated taxes. Of course, this requires that your entries are accurate.
- The mileage feature is particularly helpful. One just needs to either use the phone app in conjunction with QuickBooks Self-Employed, or keep a log of all mileage.
- When tax time comes around, it's easy to use TurboTax software and import your data from QuickBooks.
- Automatic entries could be improved. QuickBooks Self Employed requires you to login every day or two to check on your entries to ensure they are in the correct category. You can mark certain entries for certain categories
- I find the whole site to run a little slow. While going through and marking the entries to the correct category, the page will sometimes get stuck and entries won't update very quickly. It slows down the process.
- Overall, QuickBooks has a fairly steep learning curve. It does try to intuitively do some things for you, but if you have to go and correct them, I think you spend more time, and it defeats the purpose of the software.
- A positive impact on my business is, of course, keeping track of income and expenses, and approximate quarterly taxes. QuickBooks is a little better at this than Quicken, I think.
- By using QuickBooks (and Quicken) it saves me having to spend money on an accountant. (At least up to this point.)
- However, the time I spend on daily or weekly entries takes billable time away from other things.
Alternatively, I use Quicken to manage bank entries and create reports for tax purposes.