Quicken or Quickbooks - Which is better?

I'm often asked whether a small entrepreneur should start using Quicken or Quickbooks. Many people think that Quicken is simply for personal finances, and Quickbooks is for business finances. It's not that simple, as a Quicken Home and Business edition is available.

I really like Quicken-it's a great product, and you will spend less time working in it than in Quickbooks. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly as enamored with Quickbooks. It's is sometimes hard to search for data in Quickbooks as you have to tell it exactly what kind of data you are looking for (in its terms). You used to be able to use a Quickpay add-on with Quicken to handle payroll, and as long as you didn't need to provide direct deposit to your employees, the solution worked great. Intuit has discontinued this and other payroll solutions for Quicken in order to try and force businesses onto the more expensive product line.

If you are running a simple small business, I'd recommend Quicken Home and Business. When would I recommend Quickbooks? If you have any of the following needs: payroll, complex inventory or the need to track project costs, or the desire to store you data file on a server other than the one you are working on. Quicken's data file is sensitive to damage, and bad things can happen when the computer you are running Quicken on even temporarily looses connection to the server a data file is stored on while the program is open. Quickbooks, on the other hand, is designed for server data file storage since businesses using Quickbooks often have the need for more than one employee to be able to access accounting files. Also note that some accountants prefer getting your data in Quickbooks format rather than Quicken since many have no experience with the later.

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