We employ 15 or so in a services-oriented industry. Quickbooks works well for us. We migrated from the desktop product to QB online about a year and a half ago. Having done so, I definitely recommend going with a cloud service. The two main benefits are (1) we no longer have to run a server, saving money and lessening the stress of server/network failure and security breaches, and (2) cloud technology is accessible anywhere. The downside is that QB online is more expensive, and Intuit just increased the price again. All in all though, we are happy with Quickbooks. It is intuitive and easy to use.

Having a background in finance, you shouldn't have any trouble putting some structure in place. Just start with a good opening balance sheet and chart of accounts. Put a good A/P structure and file system in place. Quickbooks does give you the option of attaching scanned images of bills, negating the need for paper if you want to go that route.

While I am a CPA, I have a CPA firm do our payroll and file and pay our payroll taxes. I just simply do not want that headache and feel like $100/month is a small price to pay to not deal with that. They pay our employees electronically through Quickbooks payroll module. We then get a summary report and enter that in our books.

As mentioned we are a services business, so I do not have to deal with inventory and COGS to the degree you will, and so I cannot be of much help there.

Good luck! I can appreciate your excitement in building your own system and structure. It is pretty rewarding to put your own stamp on something and watch it grow.

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Posted by RedStickBR

Member since Sep 2009

14577 posts

Posted on 5/28/19 at 7:25 pm to Dusty Bottoms

Thanks for taking the time to provide a very informative response! This will be more or less a services business, with the inventory and COGS merely being incidental to the core business. We will also have a similar number of employees. I was leaning towards QBO based on this thread and the verification I’ve heard and read about elsewhere. In my professional life, I’m accustomed to anytime remote access and wouldn’t want this to be any different.

Regarding the accounting, I think I’ve decided to lean on our external experts to get everything up and running and then take the baton from there with them chiming in regularly in the beginning to ensure everything is being booked appropriately. Good advice on outsourcing the payroll function. I will take that into consideration.