First of all, let me get something out of my system: I HATE quickbooks. The only good thing about Quickbooks is that Intuit offers a 30(?) day money back guarantee. No questions asked. And I’ve taken them up on that several times. I’m pretty sure that I have downloaded Quickbooks for Windows at least three different times, and one time on my Mac. Each and every time I am completely overwhelmed, lost, and frustrated because it is obvious that whoever designed quickbooks did so WITHOUT affiliate marketers in mind. And each time I requested, and was granted a refund.
I don’t have “vendors” or “customers” or everything else like that that is standard to most other businesses. I understand that, as such, I’m probably going to be comparing apples to oranges here in several ways, but Quickbooks just sucks. Design sucks, usability sucks, and the fact that they try to upsell you around every single corner (like Godaddy) sucks! Not to mention, I suck at accounting, numbers, and anything that involves taxes. And I don’t have much desire to get better at it. Just give me an f*#ing solution that works and that someone as nubish as me can figure out.
I have been looking for an accounting solution for my small business for probably the last 2-3 years. I finally found one. And it’s free as long as you don’t go over a certain amount of transactions per month. But it’s easily a service that I am willing to pay for as soon as I reach the transaction limit. Thank goodness that I don’t do many transactions though. 
Now that you’re dying of suspense, I’ll let the cat out of the bag . . .
The service is called Indinero! If you already know about it, then good for you why the hell didn’t you tell me about it a long time ago? If you’re familiar at all with Mint, the online personal finance software, you can think of Indinero as the small business accounting version of Mint. I have a prediction that eventually Indinero will be acquired by Mint, but that’s neither here nor there.
The setup is lightening fast, and once you sign up, you simply connect your business bank/checking account and it automatically imports the last three months of transactions. There is also a manual import that allows you to import further back than three months. So, say you wanted to throw all of your accounting history into Indinero from all of 2010, all you’d have to do is export from Jan 1, 2010 to Dec 31, 2010 into a CSV from your bank, if they offer it, which they should, and then format the data into whatever format Indinero wants it in, which is easy, then import it and you’re good to go.
I was completely lost with my 2010 taxes at the beginning of this year when I was trying to figure all of this accounting crap out. I hate doing taxes by the way. Not that I hate paying them, I just hate that it’s so damned hard to figure out. Anyway, Indinero helped a lot with this. I imported all of 2010′s data from my bank like I mentioned above, then using Indinero, I categorized all of the transactions (which sucked because it took forever), then I ran a P&L report on Indinero for 2010, printed it out, then took that shit to my accountant. He’s filling out the mountains of paper work required for my simple s-corp as we speak. Damnit, I was supposed to call him today. . . It’s 1:52 AM right now. fml.
Moral of the story: Thanks to Indinero, I was able to get my taxes done and the accounting future for my small business looks a lot brighter. I just need to keep up on categorizing my transactions. That’s really the hardest part . . . and it’s not hard. Just makes you think, which is never a good thing.
Indinero kicks ass. Not to mention, one night when I was bored/happy with their service, I sent them an email that simply said “You Guys Kick Ass.” They replied nearly instantly asking me for my mailing address. They sent me some free stickers and a free shirt.
I love you Indinero. Thanks.
About Jeremy Blake
