At this time of year, your taxes are hopefully done, and you are probably not thinking of taxes at all. That’s all well and good, but have you begun planning for next year? Because whether your business is brand new, has never had a “regular bookkeeper”, or has been doing bookkeeping the same old ways for numerous years, it never hurts to consider if this year is the time to update your bookkeeping programs or stick with what you’ve always done.

I am bringing this up now – after tax time – because if you are thinking updating to something new, now is as good a time to start as any. With taxes out of the way, it is the perfect time for any business owner or bookkeeper to take a little bit of time to invest in updating their bookkeeping programs and “catch up” on anything that is still unprocessed.

The reason now is the best time is because… most banks will let you download ONLY the last few month’s worth of bookkeeping transactions instantly.

What I mean by that, you may wonder.

All banks have updated their online banking programs to create “downloadable bank transactions” for a specific period of time (meaning a specific number of months). The benefit here is that any business can instantly download hundreds and thousands of transactions instantly and with the right bookkeeping program, have those transactions posted to the correct bookkeeping accounts instantly.

NOW is the perfect time to upload those transactions into your bookkeeping program and get those books up to date FAST whether or not you have the time to “work on the books”. If you wait, you may find that you have to manually key in those hundreds and thousands of bookkeeping entries, which will take a whole lot more time.

There is one catch, however. The banks do not create these downloadable transactions for ALL bookkeeping programs. Yet, because QuickBooks and Quicken are the most popular bookkeeping programs on the market today, most banks do setup the transactions into these downloadable files in such a way that QuickBooks and Quicken can process them. In fact, many banks (especially smaller banks) ONLY create these files for QuickBooks and Quicken, but for no other bookkeeping programs.

The Difference Between QuickBooks and Quicken

Not going to go into too much detail, but here are my quick thoughts on QuickBooks and Quicken.

As far as business transactions go, I believe QuickBooks is the best program out there for any type of business. QuickBooks is based on four key concepts: Customers, Vendors, Items, and Accounts. Fairly easy to use, to input transactions, to correct mistakes, and to create all the financial reports you need.

As for personal finance and for investment accounts, I like Quicken. Quicken includes investment tracking and reporting. It reports on average annual total return, capital gains, and investment income. Amortize mortgage loans: each time you record a payment made on a loan, Quicken updates the dollar amount of payments made and calculates the amount credited to principal and interest. You can create reports for personal finances. Fairly easy to use for those who are accustomed to using a checkbook register.

(article abridged from various sources)