Windshield Repair Forum

Quicken vs. QuickBooks

Small businesses frequently ask the

WOW Brian..you have me curious as to why you chose wr?? in new jersey there are people who operate a quickbooks for hire..i paid 360.00 for the lady to come over and set up my business and forms.. 4 hrs of training and also some special reports...she charges 60.00 an hour for more training or refinement to you business..did you ever consider going into your own quickbooks business??? and she was booked up for months!!!!

I do not know how to use either very well myself. I did not author that post. I found it as I was trying to see which is better for our needs. I was using MS Money and I am now switching to 2007 Quicken Home & Business. I just wish I could figure out how to export/import the data from one to the other. They do not seem to like each other so it will be a real pain in the a$$ to set up all over again.

I have written an invoicing program for my dads service business. He tried all the off-the-shelf software and found them to be either way to complicated or simply not usable for a small service business.

If there is any interest in it, I could modify it slightly to fit the Windshield Repair business. At the moment it is more taylored to a forklift and equipment repair business.

He loves the fact that he can call me up (or email me) and ask me to make a tweak to the program here or there, (make it do this -- or make it do that), and in a day or two he can download a new version from the internet and have it installed automatically just by clicking an icon on his desktop.

He says my program is better than any off-the-shelf program he has been able to find that works for his business.

Without going into a ton of detail, here are a few things that it does...

1. Create customers.
2. Create forklifts (which would be modified to vehicles)
3. Attach a vehicle to an owner.
4. Setup a parts warehouse to sell items from.
5. You can modify the cost of items sold on the invoice.
6. Displays Gross Profit dollars and percentages on every invoice.
7. Displays WIP (work in process) (all open invoices)
8. Displays invoice register and invoice totals
9. Tells you when scheduled maintenance is due on customers vehicles.
10. Allows you to open a Group of new work orders with one click.
11. Sales Tax reports
12. Sales Reports
13. Sales History by item sold.
14. Sales History by vehicle
15. Sales History by customer
16. You can re-open a closed invoice to modfiy or make corrections long after it closed.
17. Accounts receivable
18. View all payments a particular customer has made on one invoice.
19. View all payments a particular customer has made against all invoices.
...
It does a bunch more stuff...but my wife just called me in for Dinner. So maybe i'll post more later.

I also have a program we have been using at work for a number of years that I wrote. I call it "Super Rolodex". More on that later...

Sneck,
And what would this cost us?

Brian,
We just got Quicken 2007 Home and Business also.

GlassWeldTech, Once I have it ready for windshield repair use, i'll probably give it away to a few techs who express interest, and get their feedback from them after using it so that I can tweak it if necessary before making it available to everyone. Final release price??? I don't have a clue yet. I'll take suggestions from the techs who want to test drive it when its ready. Anyone interested can PM me.

But for now, since this thread originally was about Quicken Vs. Quickbooks, I better step aside and start a new thread later so that this thread can can get back on topic.

... Sorry SGT that I sort of changed the subject.

Ok, lets get back on topic...

Sneck,

You must be a mastermind! I will be in touch.

Here in the UK, Intuit have stopped retailing Quicken and have opted to go all out on Quickbooks instead. Hence the latest version available here for quicken is Quicken XG 2004.

Quickbooks is a great software but for the Windscreen repair industry I think quicken is more than adequate. Although I have tried Quickbooks pro 2006 and really love using the software, I can't justify spending another

My bookkeeper is $25 per hour, never more than 20 hours per month, does insurance billing, Quickbooks, all the state reg stuff... I think she is worth it.