As the owner of a small business, I know how hard it is to find good, cost-effective resources to help you run your business more effectively.  It is hard enough bidding on, working on and completing projects, but add in all the finance and administrative work required and you almost need another employee.

With the need to quickly and easiliy track our income and expenses, Jen Kaufman Designs searched online for accounting software (for bookkeeping purposes).  We reviewed several different paid and free accounting software, including: Quickbooks, GnuCash, Office Accounting Express and Outright.com.

Our requirements weren’t many, but they were specific:

• Easy-to-use – Both myself and my partner needed to be able to easily add transactions into the system.
• Free – Duh… With little capital to start the business, we need as many free tools as we can get.
• Helpful – We’re not accountants and have no bookkeeping experience, so we need a tool that helps lead us in the right direction, clearly labels and communicates the information on the screen.
• Tax Help – Not accounting or tax services, but the ability to export our records for tax purposes.

Of these tools, only one met all of the requirements: Outright.com

Easily Manage Income/Expenses

The interface is simple and allows you to enter the client information, a brief description, the amount of the transaction and what category it falls under.  Buy a computer or laptop, pay for your new office utilities… regardless of your expense category, Outright provides you the ability to choose or even create your own custom expense category.

Accounting Online for Free w/ Tax Help

Outright.com helps estimate your quarterly tax responsibilities based on the income and expenses you have entered.   Frankly, I have no idea when I need to make estimated tax payments or even how much they will be, but this accounting tool helps provide estimates (see screen shot below). While this is not the only tax resource you should be using when running your business, it certainly helps to have a general idea of where you’re at each quarter.  They even offer a Google Calendar that you can import to your calendar, which has pre-set tax payment dates & other important dates for your business.

Give Outright.com Online Bookkeeping Software a Chance

I’m not asking you to abandon your existing accounting program or even make an investment to start using one.  Outright.com is FREE – signup and give it a try.  If you don’t like it, all you’ve lost is your time – and I could make an arugment that you haven’t even lost that.  You will learn how to better run your business by using Outright online accounting software.

Signup for a Free Outright.com Account

Click below to visit Outright.com and signup for your new online bookkeeping account.