Dear lazywebs: accounting & job-tracking software

[juliet]

So far I have been keeping track of both deadlines & financial stuffs for the freelance thing in an Excel (well, OO) spreadsheet. This is becoming increasingly suboptimal. Does anyone have any recommendations for software (ideally available for Mac, though I'll accept other recs as I may be able to find Mac/Linux replacements) that does one or both of small-business/self-employment finances, and job/project tracking? Online options also considered.

Extra points for anything that can send me emails when things happen (invoice comes due, invoice isn't paid, deadline coming up: that sort of thing.)

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Don't know anything specific, but could you cook something up out of the huge array of GTD-type personal productivity tools and/or an unholy mess of shell scripts and cron jobs?

[brrm.livejournal.com]

A name that comes to mind for the Mac is 'Budget', though I've never used it and don't know if it fits your required features. Sorry. :-/

[brrm.livejournal.com]

I've also just realised that it might not be what you're after. It might fit 'accounting', but you'd need a separate job tracker (which also exist, but can't remember any names, I'm afraid).

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Whenever I ask this sort of question (I use OO myself) I seem to get one of the Sage programs as the answer.

[juliet]

I'd kinda rather not do the shell/cron hack job, although yes, that is an option. But surely someone else must have done this already & can help me!

GTD is a possibility. I do have my own GTD system for Stuff Generally; but it doesn't do so well for tracking work.

[juliet]

From the look of it, Budget is more about personal finance & that sort of budgeting, rather than invoice-tracking. (But I will keep it in mind for the next time I contemplate the management of my own finances!)

I'm expecting to have to take the job tracking & the finance/invoicing stuff apart.

[juliet]

Simply Accounting looks like it might do the trick, tho it's arguably a little more serious than I need. Thanks!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Yes - it does seem like the sort of thing someone else must have done. It's also, though, the sort of thing where people's individual requirements aren't very easy to fit a single model, and I'd be surprised if there's a single tool that'll do all you want.

(That's certainly true at the medium/large enterprise level, where the packages are essentially software development environments with large standard libraries. And the big money is in selling analyst/development people time, not the software.)

I know that there exist a handful of open source accounting packages, as I'm sure you do, but I've no experience with them.

Good luck!

[juliet]

Yeah, I'm really more bothered about the financial stuffs than the job-tracking; hacking something together for the latter is more reasonable. I find myself much less likely to miss a deadline than I am to forget to invoice for something, basically :)

[brrm.livejournal.com]

Searching LifeHacker (http://www.lifehacker.com/) for this sort of thing might also bring up some good results - particularly as they have a bit of a Mac bias. :-)

[cryx]

Whilst it's a bit of a pain to begin with I hear good things about gnucash, although I've been trying Kmymoney recently which seems ok. Whilst these are all linuxy they may be good for you. That being said I remember when searching around there was a mac app that lots of people raved about, but can I remember it's name? Nope, cos that would be useful!

Ohh.. on a side note, Borax and coffee should be done. Not at the same time obviously ;)

[hatter.livejournal.com]

I point people in the direction of gnucash, and people seem to use it and not swear too much, once they get some clues about how proper accounts actually work.


the hatter

Online Options

[geekboyoz.livejournal.com]

In terms of online options you might want to check out Intervals. This supports both task tracking and invoicing. It's designed specifically for freelancers such as yourself.

[juliet]

I might have a look at gnucash - thanks!

Borax & coffee: indeed yes! Is your preference for post-work or lunchtime or weekends or... um, something I missed from that list? (Due to the whole freelancing thing I am in principle happy with any of these options, though in fact evenings next week would have to be Thu or Fri.)

Re: Online Options

[juliet]

The thing is, right, I tried setting that up yesterday, & I just LOST THE WILL TO LIVE halfway through. This has happened before with other similar electronic options. I think maybe I should stick with having pieces of paper stuck to the wall. That does at least seem to *work*, and does not lead to me contemplating the spork/eyeball interface.

(NB: I don't think that this is anything to do with any of the solutions I've tried, especially. It's just that it takes so *long* to put things into that sort of format. I can cope with it for the finances, because it will avoid IR Tax Horror, but for anything else...)

Re: Online Options

[geekboyoz.livejournal.com]

I can sympathise. Anything that requires any kind of setup (i.e. getting all the information from my head into the software (either local or a hosted option), usually becomes such a pain that I give up fairly quickly, or as in the case of our finances give in and pay the usurious fees to a bookkeeper to do them.

Although having white knuckled it out to get our task tracking system setup (we are using BasecampHQ - a similar online solution to Intervals but with better multi-user capabilities and without the invoicing stuff that we didn't need), I can say that the outcome is worth the pain and potential sporkiness.

I was going to say that it was something like childbirth, but decided that the analogy would be somewhat lost on you (it being vital to the survival of the species that people do not know the truth until it is too late).

[cryx]

evenings are probably better for me, as my lunchtimes can be unpredictable!

Re: Online Options

[juliet]

OOI: what are the ways in which the outcome is worth the pain? Having a specific incentive to aim for might help me get through the icky parts :-)

Re: Online Options

[geekboyoz.livejournal.com]

Well in our case we were looking for multi-user task tracking, so slightly different from you, but here's what we got:

• went from tracking tasks across multiple spreadsheets and pieces of paper to a single online source accessible by everyone


• easy communication of workflow - when one of us finishes a task we can assign the next task to the relevant person and they receive e-mail notification, and the task will show up when they log in


• easy creation of task lists to repetitive tasks via templates. Recently we had to build 20 almost identical websites. Only had to create the list of tasks once as a template


• e-mail reminders of current tasks and milestone deadlines

In your case, I would imagine you could add to the list:

• e-mail reminders of invoices due (both payables and receivables)


• automatic creation of invoices once a milestone or job is completed


• tracking of time and automatic calculation of invoice entries (if you do any hourly rate based jobs)

Does that help?