Create Self Employed Invoices for Businesses Effortlessly

Self employed invoice for businesses

hi everyone i'm jamie troll cpa and financial literacy coach and today i'm going to be doing a little bit of a deep dive into quickbooks self-employed and specifically talking about a few of the reasons that i don't recommend it now do i think that quickbooks self-employed can work for a certain subset of people yes i do but even for that subset of people i still recommend other options i'm going to tell you a little bit about why so i do recommend quickbooks i have some specific quickbooks deals that i've worked out directly with them so you can check out my specific deals which typically are better than what you can get on the direct quickbooks website especially considering my deals are for an entire year and include a free trial so go check out jbtrawl.com forward slash quickbooks to see the current best deal that i have available for quickbooks online products you will notice that quickbooks self-employed is not on there and that is because i don't really recommend it for a lot of reasons so first and foremost if you're thinking about quickbooks self-employed you're probably thinking about it because you're looking for something that is affordable right you're looking for the most affordable way to be able to keep up with your finances but there are other ways to do that on an affordable basis if you don't need the functionality within a system like quickbooks so first and foremost the reason i don't recommend quickbooks self-employed is that it really isn't a fulsome accounting system it's a glorified spreadsheet and i say that with all the love in my heart for spreadsheets y'all who have been around a while know that i love them but that's ultimately what it is so you're paying for a glorified spreadsheet that you will be using and it's a spreadsheet you can't even customize there isn't additional functionality that makes it a true accounting system and what i mean by that is it's not double entry bookkeeping so you may not notice that as an end user but as an accountant that's super important to me if you're going to bill yourself as an accounting system then you need to be doing actual accounting which is double entry bookkeeping which means that every time there is one effect of a transaction you will have an equal and opposite effect somewhere else so what that means is that you may be having amounts hit your p l right so you may be having revenue and expenses that run through your p l and that's what quickbooks self-employed is tracking but they're not tracking your cash balances for example the things that end up on your balance sheet there is no balance sheet to be found anywhere within quickbooks self-employed it does not exist because they aren't tracking anything that would relate to your balance sheet so your balance sheet is typically going to show your assets like your cash or other things that you own your liabilities which are things like your debt potentially that you owe or any other payables that you owe and your equity in the company as a business owner so you don't have any visibility into what your company is actually worth if you're using quickbooks self-employed tax preparers also don't like it for this exact same reason so that is reason number one that i'm not a big fan of quickbooks self-employed because it's not really a full accounting system now if you're saying to me jamie i just need something really simple i don't want anything fancy i don't need a balance sheet well if that's you then i would recommend maybe using something a little bit different so i actually have a tax time bundle that i've put together that includes a great p l worksheet so it is something that you can use to take your bank transactions and put them into this p l and basically do the same thing that quickbooks self-employed does but there is no monthly recurring cost associated with it and it's more customizable to your needs so i would check that out it is part of this tax time bundle that i currently have a youtube special rate that is running on it so check out jamietroll.com forward slash tax time for more information it also includes things like a mileage tracker home office tracker lots of other amazing things to get you ready for tax time no matter what time of the year it is okay so let's jump to the second reason that i don't think quickbooks self-employed is the best version of quickbooks and that is because it won't grow with you what i really like about the other quickbooks products the quickbooks online products like simple start or essentials or even plus right what i like about those is they will grow with you you continue to change between those different versions if you need to you can start out with simple start and move up if you need to right and that's a simple upgrade that you can do it doesn't require you reinventing the wheel however most people don't know that quickbooks self-employed is a completely different platform than quickbooks online okay it's not even part of the same product and so therefore if you are in a spot where maybe in the beginning quickbooks self-employed really is okay but then you go to try to upgrade because maybe you decided to elect to be an s-corp or perhaps you hired some employees or you just have additional functionality and reporting that you need right you cannot easily upgrade to the next level so that's something really important if you have any of the quickbooks online things like simple start essentials plus you can move between those fairly seamlessly without any issue however that is not the case with quickbooks self-employed once you're on it you have to start completely over if you want to work on one of the other quickbooks products and the third reason that i do not recommend quickbooks self-employed is because you can't customize it i love a customized chart of accounts right those are basically the accounts that you are going to be putting all of your expenses into you basically get what quickbooks gives you and that's it and for me a person that loves data and data analysis i love to create what my p l should look like right i don't want something cookie cutter i want something that's really going to help me make business decisions within my business and quickbooks self-employed just does not give you that customization however when you jump into quickbooks online one of their products you absolutely can customize to your heart's desire and so can your accountant so if you don't really want to customize your bookkeeper or accountant can help you with that if that's something that you want and you can just do so much more with it right there's just so much more functionality with it you can track different streams of income within it there's just a lot more tracking reporting capabilities again it's something that you can grow with but quickbooks self-employed is really bare bones as far as what it offers in the past one of the draws to quickbooks self-employed was the fact that they had mileage already built in right that you would have mileage tracking that was part of that app and that did not previously exist in quickbooks online but now it does so quickbooks online now has that same ability to track your mileage or you can use an offline mileage tracker if you want to however that's no longer a draw for quickbooks self-employed so many of you are probably considering quickbooks self-employed because it's economical so let's talk a little bit about price because i want to show you a couple of things now of course prices and promotions are going to change over time so right now i'm going to show you pricing as of the middle of 2022 but obviously this can change at any point in time so check out the website for current pricing details and we're going to jump into a little bit of actual math here to see what makes the most sense for your business so i want to look at this specifically for the next 13 months and the reason i do 13 months is because of the way that my pricing i have preferential pricing that basically lasts for 13 months so we're going to compare the cost using my preferential pricing versus the sticker price versus what's on the website currently right now as the quickbooks sale for each of the different versions so you can make the best decision for you so you can see here i've just put into a spreadsheet because i love my plug-in play spreadsheets i have put what the per month sticker price is and the web sticker price now almost always quickbooks is going to offer you a discount of some sort usually for the first three months that you sign up usually you can get that discount or a free trial but not both when you sign up directly through the quickbooks website so these are the current sticker prices however when we take a look at what's currently on their website quickbooks is currently offering 50 off for the first three months sometimes that's 30 sometimes it's 50. however right now it's 50 for the first three months so i've calculated that in for 13 months so i've put the discount in for the first three months and then the other 10 months because remember we're looking at 13 months i'm using the regular rate for so when you look at it this way yes quickbooks self-employed looks quite a bit cheaper than quickbooks simple start okay so i can see why people would go there instead of simple start however i still recommend simple start and the way that you can do that is by using my partner link to join and get a special discount so i've put on here on this schedule my current preferred pricing now again this changes but this is currently what it is we can offer 30 off for an entire year plus a free trial right now so when we're doing that calculation you can see that simple start now is quite a bit more comparable to self-employed so we're only talking about an additional 20 over a 13-month time period now it is true that once that 13 months is up you are going to be paying the monthly sticker price for that specific version but i still think that it is worth it to you to be able to do simple start and then have it be able to grow with you additionally you can see that our discounts pretty much always are going to be better in the long term from what you're gonna get off of the website directly from quickbooks so i do recommend that regardless of which one you go with that you take a look at the different deals that i have going right now at jamietroll.com forward slash quickbooks so hopefully you found this video helpful if you're trying to decide between quickbooks self-employed and something else hopefully i gave you a little bit of food for thought i do recommend quickbooks online products i do think that they are very robust and they are something that can grow with you so you can check out some of my other videos as well about quickbooks and even diving into which quickbooks online version might be right for you my favorite is plus because of all the capabilities that it gives you however like i said you can start with the lowest and upgrade whenever you need to if you're getting quickbooks online and i hope that you stay tuned for more content and more information and make sure to like and subscribe to this channel i really appreciate it when you do and i will see you all next