QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition 2009 Review

QuickBooks is virtually a standard in business accounting and bookkeeping. Your small business accountant almost certainly not only has the tools to take your data files and run with them, but is likely very comfortable with virtually every aspect of the program and its data. But QuickBooks Pro isn’t cheap, and it has a reputation for being a little more complicated than necessary for the smallest of businesses who don’t have the time to do the complex up-front setup, nor to keep everything up to date.

QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition seems designed exactly with those complaints in mind. The program is FREE of course. But, even more than that, it is a remarkably simple way to handle a home office based operation.

Not long ago, I tried Microsoft’s free small business accounting software package, Microsoft Accounting Express. Though it seemed to be a decent way to handle the accounting needs of the home office based small business owner, it required a memory hogging SQL service that not only ran when MS Accounting Express was running, but also insisted on running at startup and staying in memory even after shutting down the accounting program. FAIL! QuickBooks Simple Start also ends up installing an always on process (called QBCFMonitorService), but fortunately, it weighs in at a relatively light 14,000K. Shutting it down permanently takes some doing, but at least terminating it via CTRL-ALT-DEL keeps it off until you shutdown your system.

Beyond that, installation is relatively painless. Choose the install directory and let the installer do the rest. The program itself varies in its memory usage with the size of the database and the complexity of your actions, but starts at around 80,000K. Add in another 40,000K for the QuickBooks Database Manager (plus 60,000K if you leave the Help bar open) and you have a program that certainly doesn’t run light, but that cannot be faulted for its size based upon what it gives you.

Of course, getting the program on your hard drive and getting it ready to actually do anything are two different things. Fortunately, even this is simple in QuickBooks Simple Start 2009.

The first time QuickBooks Simple Start is run, it launches an “interview” in which the user fills in some screens to get the basic information into the system. The interview screens are mercifully short and require only the information the average small business knows off the top of their head.

In fact, one of the key strengths of QucikBooks Simple Start is that it designed so that you can start by doing what you need to do right now and everything else can fall into place as you need it. If the program requires a feature or setting that you haven’t setup yet, a pop-up message alerts you to what is missing along with a link to set it up now.