Hey folks!

Been making a kit for airsoft replicas for a couple years, averaging 3-12 orders/month and making enough to be worth the time. It’s just me working at home with a couple printers, a mill, and a lathe, no employees. Healthcare is through disability (why I started the business, something to keep busy and moving forward with income).

I signed up for Quickbooks Online earlier this year thinking I needed it for bookkeeping and handling taxes, but my actual books are in Excel. I’ve learned a lot of functions and bit of automation in calculating things that makes entering in order details pretty painless.

Basically, each order comes in, I record Who, When, Where, shipping address, what they ordered, and the different expenses/payments for that order. Excel is also set up to figure out quarterly costs/income as well as non-CoGS expenses that I also manually record. I keep receipts for large expenses, though smaller purchases are tougher as the receipts I get from website purchases don’t really come as “receipts”, but the expenses are still recorded as “When”, “What”, “Where”, and “How much”.

On the other hand, there’s QBO; which I can’t even tell if it’s sorting my extries out correctly. Purchases come into my website (sometimes by card, sometimes by PayPal), PayPal (directly or through invoice), and sometimes third-party retail websites. Then the payments are transferred to my bank account at a later time. None of these transactions are automatically recorded with the correct order number (Excel it’s easy to do), so I have to manually update and edit both the order number, transaction number, and any details about the order that are effortlessly entered into Excel. Then I have to go through all other transactions and mark/tag/categorize and link any transfers between accounts (personal and business, though it seems half the time they don’t link correctly…)

In effect, I have no idea if my QBO is actually accurate…

It’s a mess to try and sort out which transactions are already recorded in another transaction, or if they’re just a paper-trail and not actually a real transaction or not a mistake that’s being double-recorded…

It’s a mess and I don’t know if it’s my fault or what, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be making my life easier let alone $30/month easier…

Excel-entry is easy to do at my current order-load and my tax-accountant said they would’ve been able to file my business taxes without QBO, but I can’t help but feel like I’m not doing enough with Excel and should be using actual accounting software.

Do I really need to be using QBO right now or is Excel more than adequate for my business at it’s current size?

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Thank you,

Kevin at ReMag Airsoft LLC