August 26, 2009
Op Ed By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Ecommerce store owners are accustomed to managing most of their daily activities online. Now they also have a lot of options if they want to have the flexibility of using online bookkeeping software. This means that anywhere you can get online, you can quickly check in on your business finances or even update your expenses. Some providers even offer mobile options or mobile friendly web pages to make it even easier for you to access your bookkeeping information.
Most businesses are familiar with the bigger players in accounting software like Quickbooks or Quicken, but online focused bookkeeping sites are now becoming increasingly popular choices. Many ecommerce or shopping cart solutions offer limited bookkeeping functions with their packages which can sometimes not be powerful enough for the small business owner. There are many online options out there, but the two that we found most useful were Outright.com, and Bill.com.
Outright – This is without a doubt one of the most amazing, simple, and easy to use online bookkeeping sites. Both Co-Founders have a background working at Intuit, the maker of Quickbooks, and the company is backed by notable early stage investors. The online tool will allow you to easily track all accounting activity for you business including invoices, income, expenses, and profit/loss statements. They even offer quarterly tax reminders and estimates to help you prepare your taxes. If you already use FreshBooks to handle your online invoices, then you can easily integrate with Outright to view everything in one place. Most important, all of your information is encrypted, secure, and backed up hourly, so you can rest assured your accounting is safe. Overall Outright is a very solid online free tool that you cannot afford to miss checking out.
Bill – If you still want to have all of your bookkeeping done online, but want very advanced tools, then you might want to check this site out. You can try it risk free but on going it is not free and runs $24.99 per month. It has all of the great features you would expect in an online tool, but also has incorporated things like 10 free check payments and unlimited storage of your financial documents. There is also the ability to pay a bit more and add on additional users if you need.
All told, either online solution will help both ecommerce and brick and mortar merchants keep their finances in order. In this author’s opinion, Outright is the best of the two, and it’s free. Still, many users get peace of mind with a service that they pay for because those payments hold companies accountable. If you are a store owner, consider taking advantage of this rising trend and organize your finances online.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
