If you’re tired of having to buy expensive upgrades to your accounting software, which is far too complex for your simple business needs anyway, then
check out these free and easy bookkeeping solutions:
Outright.com is a server-based accounting resource that’s made for small business owners who aren’t bookkeepers and need a really simple way of keeping track of money in and money out, and submitting profit and loss reports at tax time. The entry level at Outright is free. Having tried it, I’ve found that the free version suits my needs just fine. You can link your Outright account to your bank account(s), or just use it as a stand-alone ledger. Backup of your data could be improved. At the moment you can download a profit and loss statement as a .csv file. I do this weekly, in case the server might go down.
Outright doesn’t yet enable users to issue invoices. That’s a feature that many users are requesting, so it might be included in a future version. Meanwhile, since my business uses a WordPress website, I’ve installed Shaken Invoice Lite, a free version of a unique WordPress invoicing theme (not a plugin) that enables customers to pay online using PayPal. I have linked my PayPal account to Shaken Invoice, so that when an invoice is paid the income gets registered by Outright, and the PayPal transaction cost gets listed as a business expense in my Outright account.
This free invoicing solution, using Outright and Shaken Invoice Lite, completely eliminates my “back end” invoice work: finding issued invoices and marking them paid. It would be really handy to set up an automatic invoice system at the “front end” to invoice my customers for recurring monthly website fees. Unfortunately, automatic invoicing isn’t yet available in either the Lite or paid versions Shaken Invoice. This is a feature I hope the designers build into a future version.
If you don’t want to set up a separate website to run Shaken Invoice, WP-Invoice is a free WordPress plugin which gets good reviews, and does include an automatic invoicing feature.