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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Intuit Quickbooks Self-Employed for my contracting work and it really fucking sucks.

Paid invoices can't be added as transactions. Tax payments aren't correctly imported into TurboTax. The time tracker can't generate invoices.

There are so many sharp edges that can make their way into my Schedule C that I'm worried about being audited. This software clearly doesn't come from the "Have you even fucking tried using it?" school of software design.

And now on top of all that I have to worry about them selling my data to a credit agency that's a boil on the face of the economy.

Is there a better accounting/tax package out there? The only thing Quickbooks Self-Employed does well is scan receipts.

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I remember seeing the Self Employed launch from inside the company. It was somewhat of a skunkworks project from 3 engineers and they got a lot of internal PR for creatively targeting the gig worker market. I guess the plan was to eventually branch out to other self employed people, but the initial motivation was Uber drivers and such rather than small business owners, because that would cannibalize the QuickBooks Online market. It doesn't sound like much has changed in the 5 years since I left. It sounds like you fall a bit in between their product offerings, but I wouldn't count on them handling all your needs because they'd rather people like you just moved to their full QBO product.

I also remember attending a session that Intuit offered on the competitor landscape and being quite surprised that Wave wasn't covered. Intuit just doesn't take them seriously, but their products, to me, seem better than just about every competitor covered in the session, including Xero. They've got a self-employed offering [0] that might be worth experimenting with since you can start for free and only pay when you need the premium features.

[0] https://www.waveapps.com/accounting/self-employed

Funnily enough, Wave discontinued their receipt scanning feature this month.

My understanding from a brief stint in an adjacent industry is that Xero is pretty good and popular for accounting, but I cannot vouch for it as an end-to-end solution for self-employment needs.

I use Xero for my business accounting. Works well. My accountant had never used it before, but had no problem grokking it.

Intuit has my email address from an abortive attempt to use Quickbooks, about a decade ago. It sucked so hard, I ran screaming.

Every now and then, I get an email from them, suggesting that I “reactivate” My account.

The unsub link is worthless. I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub. The reset password function doesn’t work (non-existent account). I am doomed to get these emails for eternity, but they aren’t frequent enough to be much more than an annoyance.

But Equifax has a crappy record on data integrity. I expect an avalanche of penis pill spam, soon.

> I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub

I would consider this a CAN-SPAM violation. You can have your representative and AG apply some pressure.

Yeah…they aren’t interested in addressing this. Not sure why.

So far, it has only been a slight annoyance.

> The unsub link is worthless. I have to log in with the nonexistent account, in order to unsub.

Ah, hey, that's the same level of incompetence as British Airways. I'm in the same boat there, but that's why /dev/null exists, of course :)

Xero is massive in Australia. Almost every small business uses it and every accountant supports it.

It has a highly populated plugin marketplace to, which is where I think you need to go for the receipt evening part.

New Zealand company, a guy I used to work with in Brisbane is a software architect for them these days in Auckland.

They had a good incentive program for accountants to bring on clients. My account was super disappointed I already had an account and knew how to give them just enough access to it to do their job, but no more.

If you're based in the UK I'd definitely recommend FreeAgent - https://www.freeagent.com

Disclaimer: I used to work for them as a software engineer, but having used Xero when I was self-employed I can definitely say FreeAgent is better.

I can 2nd FreeAgent as a user of about 5 years.

Second this. Been on FA for at least half a decade and it’s great.

I just use spreadsheets, if you design them well they work, and they're relatively portable between the few major spreadsheet products out there. LibreOffice if you're worried about corporate eyes on your data.

Self employed wastes so much of my time. I had to completely redo everything this last tax year.

Switched to godaddy’s bookkeeping which still sucks but not many options out there.

Bench works super well for your use case, provided youre Ok with cash basis bookkeeping.

I'll add another nod for Bench. Been using them for 6 months now and they are friggin great.

Is it just like a Dropbox to upload receipts and someone reviews it? Do they tell you what's missing?

Keeper Tax is very user friendly, but designed for a simpler use-case. It only does expense tracking very well, but it doesn't have income tracking, or invoicing.

I personally use GNUCash for my budget stuff but I know they've got a lot of business oriented tools and reports. Might be worth looking into.

I've been using it for several years. I run all my freelance stuff through a specific checking account so I can just import all transactions and I have my p&L for the year, broken out by category etc etc.

https://plaintextaccounting.org

Not sure about receipt scanning though.

Most probably, they outsource most of the software engineering to consultancy agencies known for H1B abuse.

just curious, why do you even need to scan receipts? Cant you just use a credit card and import transactions from the card provider?

The point of receipts is if the IRS ever audits you.

is the credit card trail not good enough?

For amounts over $75, it is not.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-03-106.pdf

that's strictly for reimbursing an employee for an expense.

Good catch. I’ve been audited before, so I err on the side of caution and keep as much documentation as reasonably possible to substantiate business expense claims. Electronic storage is cheap, and audits are unpleasant.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

got it, makes sense, thanks

Thanks again for pointing out my mistake.

I don't think so. You could go buy $1000 worth of gift cards to give to your family on a business credit card versus legitimate business expenses. The receipt shows what you bought, a credit card statement only shows the amount.

thanks

No, the CC company actually has line-item information for almost all purchases (fall-back transaction processing and really old terminals are likely excluded).

Theoretically you can get your hands on that information.

Expensify has a really good scanner and sync-to-CC data system. I have only ever used it as an employee, but my understanding is that it has good backends synchronization with a variety of accounting packages.

I found Abacus much easier to use. Expensify was extremely convoluted, you had to create reports and then submit them, instead of just submitting expenses with a couple clicks.

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