The thing about running your own business that sucks is… being at your home office all day tied to your computer when you need to do a little bookkeeping. It would be wonderful if you could enter customer payments, track sales and expenses without having to come back home and enter all that info into your computer. You know I’m just setting you up right; of course you can do that stuff and more. Hey, let’s face it sales aren’t made in your comfy kitchen table office. Sales are made on the streets a.k.a. wherever your customers are and why shouldn’t you be able to keep your financial records there too. For example you just sold one of your fabulous hand crafted necklaces at your booth in the local craft fair and you want to record the transaction and email a receipt to your customer but you don’t have your computer with you. No problem, just whip out your smart phone and start your QuickBooks Online Simple Start app and go to town.

You are free…you are liberated from the tyranny of the desktop version of QuickBooks Simple Start. O.K., maybe I’m being a little dramatic here but it’s true that QuickBooks Online Simple Start replaces the Simple Start desktop product for 2011. This is a pretty cool thing for many businesses that are just starting out have just one person, the business owner/entrepreneur, doing everything and wearing many hats.

Simple Start is available for a monthly fee and allows for one user, plus an additional accountant user (hopefully me so I can help you keep everything straight), here are some of the things you can do in the clouds:

• Create and manage standard invoices
• Enter customer payments
• Track sales and expenses
• Charge Sales Tax
• Customer Center (improved)
• Track payments
• Create 20 different business reports
• Export data to Excel
• It’s Automatically backed up if you’re forgetful or just plain busy
• Print checks
• Email technical support is included
• Pay bills
• Import customer data from Excel

One of the advantages of taking your work to the cloud is that you don’t have to worry about having the latest software or the fastest computer. I think this solution works well for my one person entrepreneur superheroes clients; the best part is they can access their information online from anywhere (like the beach). All they need to do is upload their documents to me and I do the rest or they can take a more active role and enter transactions and run their own report and I’ll be there to get them started and support them. If you are interested in getting set up with QuickBooks Simple Start, check out our QuickBooks Services page.