
Ask HN: Best Intro to Accounting/QuickBooks? - kogir
I&#x27;m bad and should feel bad and only do my corporate books once a year right before taxes. Each year I&#x27;ve completely forgotten everything about QuickBooks specifically and accounting in general, and have to rediscover everything.<p>Is there a quick, written overview somewhere of creating&#x2F;classifying accounts, processing transactions from banks feeds, etc? Ideally it would also cover common things like what taxes we&#x27;ve paid (state, local, federal) I need to pull out and track separately from payroll and the like.<p>We only have about 100 entries a year right now, and mostly with the same few vendors. It feels silly to pay someone else to do this, though I&#x27;m willing to hear that I&#x27;m insane to be doing it myself.
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philiphodgen
1\. Wildly overpay someone now and save yourself some learning curve and
errors. There is a reason we pay for tuition when we go to school.

2\. Failing that, make your chart of accounts in Quickbooks be exactly equal
to the tax return you are filing. If there is a line item on your tax return
for "Rabbits" then make a "Rabbits" account in Quickbooks.

3\. Only make accounts to match the expenses you have. Don't try to guess the
future and pre-populate the chart of accounts.

4\. Be willing to have 5% - 10% of your expenses fall into "Misc." It isn't
worth being anal-retentive.

5\. All of this advice is based on the assumption that you are tracking
expenses for the purpose of preparing a tax return, not gratifying your inner
MBA with all sorts of management-related financial reports.

~~~
kogir
> make your chart of accounts in Quickbooks be exactly equal to the tax return
> you are filing.

This seems obvious in retrospect but is actually super helpful. Since I'm
trying to do the minimal work required to do taxes, it makes sense I should
work backward from there.

2016 was all pre-revenue, and hopefully in 2017 it'll be worth taking option
(1) :)

~~~
philiphodgen
The "don't spend money before you have to" rule is in effect! Good work.

Seriously, you don't need to be really good with this tax return. Say you
wildly miscategorize expenses. The net profit is the same, so the tax is
unchanged.

And an auditor can swiftly go through 100 transactions to put them in the
"right" buckets.

Greetings from TUS.

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soundlab
I feel pretty strongly that managerial accounting is a MUST have skill if
you're running a business. Part-time book keeping is not very expensive and if
you sit down routinely and review your chart of accounts, pull financial
statements, AND have a professional cashflow projection setup for you it will
save you an enormous amount of stress and time. It's also possible to learn as
you go with this, especially if you have an advisor or someone that can check
in on your books on a rolling basis. It takes all the mystery out of tax time
and will enable you to operate the business with much greater confidence and
clarity. I'm partial to Xero instead of Quickbooks FWIW, I find Intuit QB to
be death by a million small charges...

~~~
kogir
I suppose I should clarify a bit: I don't ignore finances until tax time. On
any given day, I can tell you what's left in the bank, outstanding
obligations, where money is going, and how much runway we have.

Right now professional bookkeeping (even part time), would exceed the cost of
offering our entire service, and likely be our largest expense except
salaries.

~~~
zhte415
So write it down in a version-controlled spreadsheet, keep auditable records.
This should solve your problem and assist hugely if ever you wish to sell the
business.

Book keeping takes no time at all.

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Deckard256
The best accounting book I've read is called "Double Entry, a history of
accounting." pay particular attention to chapter 4, if you want a good primer
on basic double entry accounting.

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kapauldo
The vocbulary you are looking for is "double entry accounting," google this
and read a few tutorials. Understand the basic concepts of asset, liability,
revenue, and expense. Understand the concept of income statement and balance
sheet. This will get you by til you have the money to hire an accountant.

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rhythmvs
Accounting is miserable. We’ve had three accountants, and every one of them
has been failing to offer a truly paperless workflow, with data exchange in
the cloud (instead of e- or snail-mailing documents). They are using outdated,
proprietary, arcane, obese accounting software, and each time we end up paying
a lot for junior staff retyping invoices and entering data that is already
available in a digital, structured format. FWIW, I’ve bookmarked some
apparently very interesting plain text accounting tools. Though, I’ve no
experience with using these myself (yet), I think they might interest some
people here:

– [http://plaintextaccounting.org](http://plaintextaccounting.org) –
[http://hledger.org/](http://hledger.org/)

~~~
rahimnathwani
When you selected accountants #2 and #3, did you specify your requirements
(paperless workflow, data exchange in the cloud, importing existing data)?

If so, did they say they could satisfy those requirements, and then later fail
to do so? If so, did they give any reason why they misled you?

~~~
rhythmvs
Yes we did, and they promised a completely paperless workflow, relying on
Dropbox for upload of raw documents (invoices, bank and credit card
statements), and proprietary accounting software which would ‘automagically’
fetch, parse (including OCR), categorize, and eventually book those.

They did not maliciously mislead us, but failed on their promise because
apparently the ‘automagical’ part does not seem to work out so well. Yet,
that, imho, is more the fault of the implementation and of its users (the
accountants), than it is because such things are too hard to accomplish with
the state of current software development (and ‘AI’).

For one, I found it beyond comprehension that any such software would blindly
rasterize well-structured PDFs, as does the software used by our accountant,
to then OCR the resulting low-res jpg, while wastefully of resources throwing
away most of the relevant information, with obviously bad ‘detection’ results.
Worse, duplicate uploads would differ, resulting in double bookings requiring
the accountant’s assistant using the software to manually fix those errors
produced by the software. In the end we end up with a much more expensive
accounting bill than we would have had when we sticked to a paper-based flow.

But is doable, and I truly hope some startup grabs the opportunity to
implement it well.

~~~
rahimnathwani
So they didn't mislead you, but it sounds like the service they sold you was
something they had never delivered before. So perhaps they were optimistic,
hopeful, or just thought "what's the worst that can happen if we can't
deliver?"

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pards
I found Wave Accounting much simpler than QuickBooks. It can directly download
transactions from your bank account, and you can email receipts and attach
them to transactions.

The simplicity means that I'm more inclined to stay on top of it rather than
leaving it all to tax time.

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andrewljohnson
I have a business degree and took accounting in school, but I didn't feel
comfortable doing my own books until I did 2 one-hour sessions with my
accountant, who refreshed my accounting knowledge and taught me some of the
wiles of Quickbooks. I'd recommend this approach to anyone who wants to do
their own books.

I also like the strategy of classify your own transactions, but pay your
accountant to reconcile your accounts quarterly, and to do your corporate
taxes. This lets you stay close to the money and keep your books up-to-date on
a weekly basis, which helps you forecast and manage cash flow. At the same
time, it ensures your books are correct, and that your year-end tax filing are
simple and quick.

