Quickbooks vs Excel

salad17

I run a sole trader/partnership since 2019. We've always used excel for accounting, a spreadsheet per year, page for expenses (date, description, amount, category drop down, payment type, vat rate, vat), similar for income, and an income statement with formulas calculating all the totals, separating capital allowance, etc, and it's worked fine. But it's a bit slow, especially for VAT accounts, so at the start of this year we switched to quickbooks to give it a try.

I recognize there will be a learning curve but the workload seems to have increased immensely, while having a good overall visual and easy to spot mistakes seems much more difficult to navigate.

Having a UI with drop down lists etc should be easier for data entry, but since the drop downs often include every item in the "chart of accounts" and not just expense categories, and I can't just put most used at the top, that workload has only increased.

Photographing receipts seemed great, and extracting the data, but by the time you confirm and categorise everything it still isn't any quicker than just typing in the info. ChatGPT says it should get faster at learning what goes where but that doesn't appear to be happening, I still have to define the vat category (which is written on the receipt, why can't it read it), expense category and payment type. I then have to manually go through the bank transactions, and only some (what seems like very few) get automatically matched up with the receipt entry, I'm guessing because the dates are 2-3 days out so it's not automatic.. Surely quickbooks should account for that.

On top of that it seems difficult to just have a view of all the transactions, or see entries in order they were entered if I've just made a mistake etc.

Getting my head around the chart of accounts was a bit of a nightmare and tbh I'm still not really there.

My business partner who just follows the instructions I give him in terms of entering his expenses etc is struggling to understand why we're using this software which to him also takes way longer entering receipts and expenses.

The only thing that's nice is setting the "rules" for bank reconcilliation to automatically go through repeat entries, but even that now seems that I have to confirm them.

Am I missing something? Courses or tutorials I look at either seem far too full of irrelevant info and in depth or don't get to the problems I'm facing, or one's that do end up being for the US version.

Is there a good course/advice/basic tutorial… or better software? Or should we just go back to excel at the end of the year..?

clohamon

Have a look at this.

https://easybooksapp.com

It's UK focussed so some features don't work for Ireland. Quite simple and cheaper than Quickbooks (which I haven't tried).