I’m an independent broker in the very competitive Newport Beach, CA market.  As an independent broker and one man show, I wear a lot of hats: realtor, broker, SEO expert (I use this term very loosely), blogger, a transaction coordinator, bookkeeper, marketer, graphic designer… well you get the point.  So, as I said, I wear a lot of hats and I thought today I would write about one of the issues facing the one man show and what technology solution has actually helped make my life a little easier.

There are a number of different options when it comes to keeping track of my bottom line so it’s not a disaster at the end of the year.  A friend of mine swears by shoeboxed as he just keeps a box of receipts and mails them all in and they scan and file it for him.  For him this works, for me I hate collecting receipts and filing them at the end of the year.  I have found the best option for me is Quickbooks (not Quickbooks online).  If you are using a large bank for your business checking like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, etc. you can actually sync your account up with Quickbooks and now all you need to do is use your card for EVERYTHING!  Once every couple of weeks you will open Quickbooks and download all new transactions with one click.   Next you mark the transactions for the appropriate categories and submit.  The best thing is Quickbooks actually learns what the expenses are and starts to mark them into the correct categories for you.  You will always be able to see what your bottom line is as the year goes on and at the end of the year tax time takes 5 minutes and your CPA will love you.

The one other thing I would mention with Quickbooks is getting everything set up correctly in the beginning is paramount.  I’m not talking about installing the software, I’m talking about setting up the different categories of expenses inside quickbooks.  This coupled with a 30 minute lesson cost me $50 and it was well worth it!

Lastly I am a mac user and I read a lot of reviews that Quickbooks for Mac really isn’t as good as the PC version, and while this may be true, for me Quickbooks for Mac has worked really well.