I’m sure you are aware of how important accounting software is as an interior painter. It will help you to grow your painting business, manage your valuable resources and make more profit. But there is no best app for painting contractors. Because the best accounting software for contractors depends on what size your company or organization is and how many employees do you have.
Are you a painting contractor, who needs to keep track of your expenses and income? Check out our list of the best accounting software for painting business! We’ve taken all the hard work out of this, and compiled a thorough list of reputable software packages that might be ideal for your needs.
QuickBooks Online
There’s a very good reason QuickBooks Online tops this list of best accounting software for the self-employed. QuickBooks is the reigning incumbent for accounting and bookkeeping software in the U.S. It’s easy to use, inexpensive, and training resources abound.
QuickBooks Online comes in three different varieties: Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus.
For the best accounting software for self-employed people specifically, Essentials is the best place to start. That’s because Simple Start is too simple for most businesses. As your business grows, you can move up to Plus. But be warned—once you upgrade your subscription, you can’t downgrade it again.
What About QuickBooks Self-Employed?
QuickBooks Self-Employed is a nice solution for freelancers and independent contractors, especially now that Self-Employed users can collaborate with their accountant or bookkeeper right inside the software. That said, QuickBooks Self-Employed lacks certain features that most sole proprietorships will need eventually—if not right away. If you’re not a freelancer, you may want to look into QuickBooks Online instead.
Jonas Enterprise
The Jonas Enterprise accounting software is made for painting contractors. This easy-to-use software package provides all the features you need to do your work efficiently and professionally.
Jonas Enterprise Features
- Records customer information and job details, including start date, end date, paint type, number of coats, etc.
- Helps you calculate materials quantities, lead times, and labor charges.
- Provides over a dozen reports that help you keep track of your work.
- Quotations and invoices can be printed directly from the program.
- Produces invoices and quotes right in the software.
- Prints customer mailing labels and receipts.
- Includes a color paint calculator, access to trade loan rates, and more.
Jobber
Jobber is online accounting software for painters. It provides features such as invoicing, job costing, scheduling & estimates, and more. It has a robust set of features, including invoicing, job costing, scheduling, and estimations. This software also has a rich history of customer service.
The software is available in both free and paid versions. The free version includes unlimited jobs, invoice templates & quotes, and all Jobber features except import/export facility. It’s hard to beat the ease-of-use of this accounting software with its user-friendly interface and intuitive drag-and-drop design.
Jobber Features
- Invoice clients.
- Determine jobs cost and track time on jobs.
- Schedule projects to keep on top of deadlines.
- Get a quick estimate with their estimator tool.
- Create work orders and purchase orders with just one click to ensure you have the right supplies for the job before beginning work.
Many other features help make Jobber an excellent choice for painting contractors looking for an easier way to maintain business management while staying profitable.
Knowify
If you have ever had to try and manage a painting contractor’s financials, you know that it can be a tedious and time-consuming task. However, with Knowify, this task is made much simpler. By using proprietary technology that combines the best features of Excel with those of QuickBooks, contractors are now able to reconcile their invoices while maintaining accurate records easily.
Knowify C.A.R.P (Cash, Assets, Receipts, Payments) feature allows users to record every transaction for each job efficiently without the need to enter data twice. This network service also tracks both bank and credit card transactions, allowing for easy reconciliation of financial statements and online billing—a feature that many accounting software do not possess.
In addition, Knowify software offers scheduled payment reminders and integrated payroll services, making it easier for small businesses to remain under the regulatory requirements of the government’s payroll laws.
STACK
Such a high-quality painting job deserves the same type of accounting service too. However, STACK is designed specifically for the painting contractor. It has all the information you need about your accounts, offers financial insights, and has a feature that allows you to adjust overhead costs for each project.
STACK is designed for you to process your client invoices automatically. The process includes checking if they are overcharged, providing feedback, and updating the invoice with new prices!
You can keep track of all expenses using the dashboard that shows you how much money is going on each job. It also tracks time spent on each job, so you know how much profit you made or lost. This is a unique feature that makes sure your cost per job stays up to date, which helps you control costs more effectively.
You can also track the time spent working on each project, which will help you follow your profits more efficiently.
STACK’s dashboard also has a cool feature to calculate taxes. This is an excellent feature if you paint contractors who work in multiple countries because of how complicated the tax code is. STACK does calculations for you so that you never have to worry about calculating taxes. Instead, you can just focus on making money.
And one of the most valuable features for painting contractors is that STACK calculates gross profit margin. This info is very important because it gives you an accurate picture of how much profit comes from each job.
JobNimbus
JobNimbus is accounting software specifically designed to help painting contractors keep track of contracts, business expenses, employees, revenue streams, and invoices from customers while working remotely from home or on the go where internet connectivity may be limited.
Ideally, this software would save you a significant amount of time from manually creating invoices and estimates for clients while also providing a convenient online workspace where you can easily calculate routine business expenses.
JobNimbus is currently designed as an online application that will be available for free. The company plans on charging a fee for some additional tools and features that they think are useful for users, but they have not yet determined what these fees will be. Any other features that will be added or additional tools that will be made available as paid add-ons can simply be described by outlining the benefits that users may reap from using them.
The EDGE™ Estimator from Estimating Edge
Estimating Edge markets its software as being an all-in-one solution for painting contractors. It includes features like Smart Labor™, which helps with labor cost estimation, and it’s so easy to use that you can update your entire project with just a click of the mouse.
On top of that, The EDGE also includes powerful analytics and reporting features. With those, you’ll be able to stay well-informed as you make decisions that can affect your business.
Best of all, the company also offers one-on-one training and excellent customer service to improve your experience after you’ve started using it.
The Paint Estimator by Patrick Miller
If you prefer software that’s a little simpler, then you’ll appreciate The Paint Estimator. This software is a ‘for painters, by painters’ type of product designed for independent painting contractors. Its features and design come from Patrick Miller’s 30 years of experience in the painting industry, which is evident when you look at it for the first time.
The user interface looks good, but the software is focused more on functionality. It offers you a few different estimating methods to choose from, which gives you a lot of flexibility. You can also export any proposals you create to all sorts of formats, like PDF, Docx, and even OpenOffice formats. You can use it to send professional-looking invoices to your clients too.
Paint Scout
PaintScout is an easy to use, mobile and desktop software solution designed specifically for the needs of the modern painting contractor. Not only can you estimate painting projects quickly and accurately, but the software creates work orders, proposals and invoices simultaneously.
These features combined with sales reporting and team management allows contractors to build their sales team efficiently with consistent estimates.
Field Circle
Field Circle is another well-built all-in-one software for painting contractors. Its creators have tailored the software to pretty much every type of employee directly or indirectly involved in the painting job. Whether your employee is a manager, supervisor, worker, or even the accountant, this software has a feature relevant to most of your employees.
You can allocate jobs efficiently to workers and track their progress. Those workers can then keep track of their tasks using the same software. Whoever’s in charge of the numbers in your painting business can also analyze costs and revenues through the analytics features.
Estimate Rocket
Estimate Rocket software is user-friendly and simplifies the running of your painting business. You can use it to create and send documents like estimates, work orders, and invoices so much faster to customers. It cuts down on your overall paperwork and even helps you avoid mistakes like duplicate entries and other errors. The software is entirely browser-based. That means you can use it from any device you may have. Better yet, it also backs up all your work data automatically. You’ll never lose your data, no matter what.
No matter whether you’re a painting contractor, roofing contractor, or HVAC contractor, software helps simplify your administrative business needs.
On Center
On Center is another excellent software option for painting contractors looking for estimating software. This software’s three most notable features are its On-Screen Takeoff, Quick Bid, and Digital Production Control.
With the On-Screen Takeoff Feature, you can easily calculate the precise area you and your team will need to paint. That includes height and width calculations of the wall, the ceiling, and any other part of the structure.
Quick Bid helps you put together estimates for bids while filtering out minor mistakes in calculations and data entry. Digital Production Control is your project management feature that allows you to plan and measure your team’s progress. All-in-all, this is a very versatile piece of software.
Conclusion:
Anyone who has ever owned a small business knows what a pain bookkeeping is. When you are keeping tabs on bills, purchases, invoices and paycheques, sometimes it can feel like more work than actually running the business. The good news is that technological improvements have made it easier to manage your books and automate parts of what you have to do. Whether you are a painting contractor, carpenter or run any kind of side-line business, there’s an application out there that will help improve your workflow and take some of the stress off your shoulders.