Substitute for Quickbooks on my Mac for a very small business??

December 1, 2017 2:58 PM

So, latest Mac OS update broke my 2012 version of Quickbooks so I finally need to find a replacement. For privacy reasons, i require something that will run on my laptop, not on the cloud. Otherwise, simple is fine - the only thing that requires a business level solution is the need to track payments against invoice.

I have a very small business - about 20 sales per week, about 5 expense items a month. The main feature that I need is the ability to match payments against invoice. Mostly I am just tracking income and expenses for tax purposes and to reconcile my back statements. No fancy reporting, no customer-facing invoices.

Biggest constraint is that it must run on my Mac. Other than that, easy to use and cheap are both good (with easy to set up and use the higher priority)

posted by metahawk to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Best answer: So I haven't used this but it came in a Mac software bundle and I remember it that way--AccountEdge Basic is desktop small business accounting program, not cloud, with a desktop app that you can demo for 30 days so you can find out if it does what you need. Their basic program is $149.
posted by foxfirefey at 4:27 PM on December 1, 2017

Yeah, it broke my old Quicken too. I do have 2016 Quicken which I haven't used yet so I'm going to give it a try but I can't find this year's register with info. All very annoying. I'm going to have to start from scratch 1 Jan 18. Good luck.
posted by MovableBookLady at 5:19 PM on December 1, 2017

Last I looked into this, about a year ago, all the ones that I thought were even remotely acceptable were cloud based. It is the direction pretty much all of these companies are going, so by avoiding it you’re limiting your options severely. Given the low sales volume and the constraints, I’d be tempted to just use Numbers or Excel, both of which work just fine locally on the computer. You’d need to do some upfront work to get it all set up, but once you’ve done that it would work fine, if not as smoothly as an accounting application.
posted by primethyme at 6:21 PM on December 1, 2017

Best answer: I have been using AccountEdge for years for our small business (retail with a separate POS system, so not for invoicing, but it does support that, of course). It should work fine for your purposes. You can import Quicken format files, like to reconcile with bank accounts. You’ll have to download and import, it doesn’t connect to banks on its own.
posted by jimw at 9:16 PM on December 1, 2017

As PrimeThyme suggested, I'm going with Excel. Basically, Quicken has gotten too many bells and whistles and I just don't need the complicated bookkeeping/investing stuff. I spent yesterday setting up a basic spreadsheet for two bank accounts, showing checking and savings and a list of regular bills with their due dates and amounts. Basic formulae for the running balances. Etc etc. Once I got my Nov. statements, I started there and am now up to date. We'll see how it goes.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:31 AM on December 4, 2017

Have you looked at GnuCash? Free, open source, it’s been around a long time, probably will even talk to your Quicken files. It may be more than you need, but may also scale down to suit you. Works on OSX. Did I say it’s free?
posted by lhauser at 7:52 PM on December 4, 2017

Response by poster: AccountEdge Basic was the winner. Complex enough to manage my invoicing situation, easy enough to use that I got up and running fairly quickly. Overall, slightly better for my needs than the old Quickbooks I was using before. All in all, a net win. Thanks!
posted by metahawk at 4:14 PM on February 4, 2018 [1 favorite]