Why is there so much accounting software out there?
So, you have yourself a business, and you (obviously) need to track money in and money out and cost of things and a whole bunch of things that seem to get lumped under the header, “accounting.” So, first thing you do is get a piece of whizbang software that claims it will do all of the things you need done and like 50 things you didn’t think you would need but they sound cool.
Look, for a while, that will probably work for you, but at some point you are going to come across a problem that your accounting software isn’t going to be able to fix. So you go find a particular little widget to do that thing. And maybe you encounter something else, and need another new piece of tech, and another new piece of tech, and they don’t integrate, and they don’t play nicely and after a year or two, you are spending twice the amount of time on accounting as you would have if you’d hired an accountant. I mean, I get it. I can’t find personal budgeting software that doesn’t give me a giant headache. So I have gone old school with it, because it WORKS. I had a lovely old couple bring in an old school ledger the other day—they were so adorable, and she used it to keep track of their deductible expenses, and sometimes, you know, the best way is just to do it the way it’s always been done. We still do leather work the way Neanderthals did. 50,000 years, and we haven’t found a better way.
Now, I’m all for new stuff. QBO? Great. You need a mileage tracker? It’ll do it. You need Inventory tracking? Well, QBO is kind of bollix at that if you want to do more than track it by hand, but there are a dozen apps that integrate with QBO and make your life easier instead of harder. Same with Xero. You want to hop on a Zoom meeting to talk about a snag you’ve encountered and need to figure out how to tackle it? Done. If I can automate something for you, or help you automate something to make your business run smoother, more efficiently, or just better? Absolutely. But piling on software for the sake of software isn’t going to help anyone, and with as much as there is out there to wade through, once you’ve graduated from “I can do this myself” to “I can’t do this myself anymore,” it’s probably time to call in an expert.
