Want to go into business on your own? You’ll need the best self employed bookkeeping software and the best tax software for self employed. These resources can help you learn more while maintaining control of your client’s books and taxes.
When starting a self employed business, there is so much work to be done. It can feel overwhelming and exhausting at times, but that doesn’t mean you should give up. Self employed book keeping software makes it possible to stay on top of daily bookkeeping tasks, such as expenses and revenue projections, without completely breaking the bank. Here are several self employed book keeping software programs to help you stay organized and grow your small business.
QuickBooks Self-Employed
If you prefer to file your taxes on your own using TurboTax, QuickBooks Self-Employed will save you a lot of time when tax season rolls around. Since both TurboTax and QuickBooks are Intuit products, they’re integrated. Automatically transferring data from QuickBooks into TurboTax when it’s time to file taxes saves hours—or days—of manual calculations and data entry.
But even if you hire an accountant to prepare your taxes for you, QuickBooks Self-Employed is an excellent bookkeeping tool, particularly for tracking expenses and tax payments. Connect it to your business or personal bank and credit accounts to automatically capture all transactions. For freelancers in the U.S., QuickBooks also calculates how much you owe in federal taxes each quarter so you never overpay or underpay.
The QuickBooks mobile app provides even more features. If your business and personal accounts are combined, you can swipe left or right on the mobile app to tag expenses as either business or personal. And if you turn on automatic mileage tracking, the app records the number of miles traveled every time you drive. Then, categorize trips as business or personal later.
QuickBooks Self-Employed Price: $5/month for Self-Employed which includes expense tracking, invoicing, and mileage tracking; $10/month for the QuickBooks Online Simple Start plan that includes tips for maximizing tax deductions and sales/sales tax tracking.
Wave
Wave is probably the most popular free accounting app available online. And it’s also one of the most user-friendly and easy to get stuck into.
It’s an all-in-one package that’s designed to cover all of the basics: Accounting, Invoicing, Payments, and Receipts.
From the clean and simple dashboard on the home page, you can get immediate insights into income and expenses, expected payments and upcoming deadlines, as well as some useful suggestions to help you take action when it’s needed – like sending out automated reminders when your invoices become overdue.
It’s especially good for anyone who wants to:
- Jump straight into sending out professional estimates and invoices with your company logo and brand colours – with options for sending customisable reminders on certain dates.
- Avoid the manual entry of expenses. You can take a picture of a receipt with the free companion app for your smartphone, and all of the relevant details will be uploaded into your accounts on Wave.
- Keep a record of your customers, products and services, and prices. Whenever you create an invoice, Wave saves each customer and their details, as well as each thing you sold and the price you charged for it. So when you create the next invoice, you can fill out the whole thing in seconds with a few quick clicks.
Wave is a massively popular service, and that means you can rely on it to be continually updated and improved as the months and years go by.
But it does have its limitations.
While it’s great for smaller businesses and freelancers, some of the features might be a bit too basic for medium-sized companies and anything larger.
And although the vast majority of the features and services are free, you’ll have to fork out for things like:
- Payroll services (which are also only available in the US and Canada)
- Live chat support
- And taking payments online (there’s a small per-use fee for processing credit cards and bank payments).
FreshBooks
FreshBooks started out as time-tracking and online-invoicing software. But it’s evolved into a platform that can be ideal for simple, service-based businesses.
If you have inventory, payroll, or need advanced job costing, you’ll need to look elsewhere for accounting software, or plan to learn an integrated app, too. But if your business is a relatively simple service-based business with no fixed assets to track, FreshBooks could be the best self-employed accounting software for you.
Zoho Books
If you already use the Zoho platform for your CRM, mail, and/or expenses, adding Zoho Books could be the accounting software solution of your dreams. All of Zoho’s products integrate nicely with each other, giving you a true ecosystem for a relatively low investment.
We think Zoho Books works best for extremely small and simple businesses. If you often have “split” expenses (i.e., you go to the office supply store and buy not just office supplies but also janitorial supplies and have brochures printed for advertising), you might find Zoho Books a bit frustrating. That’s because you can’t easily split expenses from the bank feed.
There are some other quirks to Zoho Books, too, but again, these only really become an issue in more complex businesses.
Unlike Xero, Zoho Books sometimes uses terminology that isn’t the most intuitive to non-accountants. Still, with a little patience during the learning process, small businesses already in the Zoho ecosystem may enjoy working with this accounting software.
Adminsoft Accounts
If you need a little more functionality than something like Wave – but you’re still not ready to commit to a paid service – Adminsoft offers an in-depth package that’s 100% free to use.
As well as the usual invoicing, ledgers, and expense software, Adminsoft also comes with:
- Stock Control and Purchase Order tools
- Human Resources and Payroll options – including holidays and absences, and records of employee communication
- Room for different users, different departments, multiple companies and multiple currencies
- Specialised software extensions for both the retail and car-trading industries.
So if you’re running a café, bar, restaurant or shop, Adminsoft can give you an exhaustive answer to everything you need in one self-contained piece of software. It can handle refunds, customer tabs, and gift vouchers – and you can also connect it to receipt printers, cash drawers and bar code scanners.
As far as accounting apps go, this one has almost no limitations to its free services.
But if you don’t want to shell out for a paid version, you will have to put up with a few minor inconveniences, such as:
- Background adverts
- The addition of the Adminsoft URL to any emails you send out with the software
- The opening of a browser displaying the Adminsoft website when you close down the accounting app.
FreeAgent
If you create estimates for large projects as part of your business, FreeAgent may be the right accounting app for you. Directly within the tool, you can create and send project estimates to prospective clients. If those prospects become clients later, track future invoicing against those estimates to see which of your contracts are profitable and which aren’t.
Additionally, including estimates as part of your bookkeeping records allows you to get a full picture of both your historical income and potential future profits. Quickly view both received and anticipated income on your FreeAgent dashboard to stay on top of the health of your freelancing business.
FreeAgent also has helpful bonus features like time tracking and invoicing. Use its built-in time-tracking tool to capture every second that you work on a project, then transfer that time to an invoice to bill clients quickly. And like some of the other apps on this list, invoicing can be set up to send automatic payment reminders that nudge late-paying clients.
FreeAgent Price: $12/month for the first six months; $24/month thereafter.
Conclusion:
Thousands of snowflakes hit the ground as winter draws to a close. We have just completed another successful fiscal year as a self employed person. Here are the tips I have been using for years to manage my income taxes as well as those of both my self employed kids. They work really well to minimize taxes and self employed bookkeeper fees.