Rails Monkey

I know a lot of people do this – and I have to admit that I originally used to do this too. Its not a bad thing, its just not the right thing.

I am talking about book keeping and invoicing – especially invoicing. When I first started out doing IT jobs my invoicing was slack – it was better then just a notebook or otherwise, in fact it was an Excel template which I put my name on and it could calculate the tax involved and so on…

That was more then sufficient until I started taking on more and more jobs. In the back of my mind something burned every time I manually incremented a number, saved the invoice, printed out as PDF and emailed off. Something itched and bothered me – so I gave in, considered my options and forked out a few hundred dollars for Quicken QuickBooks for small businesses…

Initially it was ‘OK’, but I soon grew a terrible hatred for this package as I continually had to bend over backwards to suit certain accounting practices which I didn’t care about or couldn’t even see as being useful (sure, if I were a large company which needed high accountability etc…). Eventually I gave up on quicken, it just didn’t work out for me.

This was around the time where cloud was becoming sexy.. its still gaining momentum and I think there will be some time before this stops (so jump on now while you can!). I’ve never really had issues with storing my data on the internet, the way I see it people share more information out on Facebook, which is unencrypted and public, so storing encrypted password protected data didn’t seem too bad.

I found a tool called Saasu, which, compared to the other players (MYOB, Quicken, etc etc) was perfect. It seemed relatively simple and the price was right (i.e. free, so long as I booked out under 15 sales per month…). I had considered other options like software such as Billings, but a lot of these packages were very focused – only for services or similar. What I do is more like a mix between ‘kinda retail’ where I sell goods, but also a service industry – so I liked having the ability to invoice things such as products and so on.

I’ve been using Saasu for a while now, and it seems to have done the job fine for me – in fact I’d even recommended it to others who I know have done no invoicing at all or still use Excel – but I’ve been looking around recently (hey, its a good idea to keep on top of the trends) and there’s a few new players which have popped up that I’m taking a look at.

So I guess the point of this post is twofold… 1 – Watch this space for my decision, poetic waxing etc about the new tool I use to track my books – and 2 – its a good idea to step up your game when it comes to how you track your books etc for your business – Yes, Excel does ‘work’, but only when your fresh in the game…