Today I am going to share a failure I have as a business owner, and a little of how I am trying to change for the better. Yesterday I grew up as a business owner, just a little bit. Blue Fish is growing. We are set to have a record year have had a record year and are setting our sights higher. But every business owner has their achilles heel. Mine just happens to be bookkeeping. Try as I might I just hate it so much I ... I just hate it. I do not mind sales, marketing, project management, learning or actually doing the work. But I hate bookkeeping
As much as I hate bookkeeping I realize that if Blue Fish is going to move forward over the next year or so I am going to have to get over my hatred of bookkeeping. I am going to have to find a system that allows me to easily categorize and make sense of the expenses. Other requirements are that the system have good reporting, specifically I want to see a regular profit & loss statements, accounts receivables and your general "how much am I spending on this category" type reports. I want to be able to push a button or two and provide the accountant all of the information that he needs to do our taxes at the end of the year.
I've know Allan and Steven for a couple of years now. They are the makers of LessAccounting. But I just could not bring myself to use their product. It had nothing to do with either of them as I love them both. But it was that it was ... a real bookkeeping app.
I've tried other systems. Years ago I bought Quickbooks because I thought that was what all business owners had to use. That was laughable. I installed it on my computer and, even as technical as I am, I was immediately lost. Talk about paying no attention to User Experience. It has to be one of the worst pieces of software I have used in my (almost) 20 years in the software business. Business owners are not accountants. Most of us never took accounting in college. I didn't major in Business. And it seemed like there was very little help or explanation even during the set-up phase. Anyway... I digress
Off the top of my head I know I've also tried YNAB, spreadsheets and Xero Personal. I won't name them all here but I've also looked about half a dozen other systems too. Well, yesterday I finally gave LessAccounting a fair shake. I registered and spent the 10 minutes or so walking through the onboarding process. I went ahead and hooked up to the Blue Fish bank accounts. Granted our type of business does not have a ton of transactions but in another 10 minutes I had easily set up the bank accounts and categorized all of the transactions... and enjoyed it. Yes... there... I said it... I actually enjoyed it...
Hats off to Steve and Allan. They have made everything really simple for their users. How they did it I do not know but the interface is intuitive. They use language that, as a business owner, I understand. So I am writing this blog post as a thank you. If you are in the market for an easy to use bookkeeping system then do yourself a favor and take a hard look at LessAccounting. When you do, here is my email so you can thank me :)