QuickBooks Online: A Valentine

I don’t usually have too much good to say about accounting—seeing that I’m kind of trapped in the profession for now. At the same time, I do believe that people should carefully take care of their own accounting. There are several reasons for this:

1. If one keeps track of financial accounts and transactions on a regular basis, there is less chance of becoming susceptible to identity theft.
2. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have trust in banks, so I regularly do bank reconciliations every month. I have spotted errors at least twice a year which I have had the banks rectify.
3. Thanks to those same reconciliations, I know how much money I have at any given time.
4. When tax time comes around, a nice detailed General Ledger report will make filling out your 1040 relatively fast and easy.

For my personal accounting, I used to use QuickBooks Pro 2008, which was stored on my home computer. About this time last year, I switched to QuickBooks Online, which costs me $19.99 a month. It’s worth it: My data is in the cloud, making it accessible from any computer with Internet access. And I no longer have to worry about the program becoming outdated, as the online program updates itself at frequent intervals.

There are a few wrinkles, such as occasional weekend downtime for upgrades and occasional bugs, which always seem to get ironed out within a couple of days. Still and all, I feel in better control of my own finances than ever before.