Accounting Software Recommendations? - Contractor Talk - Professional Construction and Remodeling Forum

LakevilleHomes · 05-13-2009, 12:44 AM

We were spec builders doing $7-10 million annually. We are currently remodelers who will do maybe 25% of that this year.

We are currently using Timberline, but I think that is expensive and tedious for the transactions we anticipate for the foreseeable future.

So what do you use? Would you recommend it?

I've been told Dexter Chaney and Quickbooks are worth looking into...but thought I'd get good information from people at the source.

Your comments are appreciated.

maurajbo · 05-13-2009, 02:30 PM

I love Quickbook. Google Quickbook and it will show you videos that explain how it works. We tried several programs and found Quickbook to be the best.

naptown CR · 05-13-2009, 02:34 PM

Go with quick books pro just curious you spent a lot on Timberline already and know how to use it why switch now?

jimmys · 05-13-2009, 03:03 PM

QB Pro is very competent and smartly written. It has a couple of problems: it lets you change stuff you probably shoudn't (like offering a choice to Void or Delete, when Void is the only correct way); and it slows down some as it fills up with data. Then you archive your data to speed it back up and those data are not useful any more. Other than that, it's great.
Get someone in construction accounting to help you set it up; you'll save time and frustration.
Still, I don't think I'd change if I had something I was used to and liked...
Jim

LakevilleHomes · 05-14-2009, 05:55 PM

We're looking to change for 2 reasons...1) Timberline costs us almost $2000/year. 2) We have a change of management/personnel in that area anyway, so if there's a time to change, it's now.

I guess there's a 3rd reason too. It's way more software than we need for the forseeable future, which returns me to reason #1. I'll look into Quickbook Pro and someone to help us set it up for construction purposes.

**Double-A** · 05-14-2009, 10:52 PM

If you're going from Timberline to QBs I think you're gonna be disappointed.

If you're doing 2.5M a year, 2K is less than 1/10 of 1% of your gross and isn't going to make or break you. The learning or unlearning curve, if you will, just might.

I haven't used Timberline since it was Master Builder, but check back here for a couple of weeks. We have someone that posts here that used to work for Master Builder back in the day and now they do Timberline consulting as well as QB's consulting.

**Double-A** · 05-14-2009, 10:54 PM

Moved to Accounting Software.

LA Remodeling · 06-02-2009, 02:41 AM

to each his own... you should experiment with trial versions.
i like quickbooks.

mickey69125 · 06-02-2009, 01:07 PM

I use Quickbooks Pro and like it. Like another poster said it lets you do somethings you probably shouldn't, but it works for my small business.

ScipioAfricanus · 06-02-2009, 02:11 PM

If you want the experience of a cranial aneurysm let me suggest PeachTree Accounting software.

Thank god my wife is the one who does the books and not me anymore.

Andy.

Sarah9910 · 06-08-2009, 10:36 PM

QuickBooks should do fine for you, too bad Timberline isn't working out for you.

Chris Breezy · 06-12-2009, 09:16 AM

We just finished installing Jonas Software, it's great and the learning curve was less steep than it was with Timberline (our previous software) and the price is comparable. You have to ask yourself, do you want a software that can do the bare minimum and nothing more? Or a software that can do alot, even if you don't need to use all of the functions all of the time. Consider your company is Lebron James, do you want a coach (software) like Mike Brown that let's your company run free and let it make it's own mistakes? Or do you want Phil Jackson, a tenured coach who can prevent mistakes from happening all the time.

Sarah9910 · 06-14-2009, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris Breezy

We just finished installing Jonas Software

Interesting, I came really close to being one of their trainers about 5 years ago.

Mike Finley · 06-14-2009, 04:17 PM

In my opinion the only thing QB is going to do for you is keep track of your checking account, let you write checks, maybe make invoices or God forbid use it for estimating...

, do payroll if you wanted to and that's about it.

If you want to use it for much of anything else forget it. You'll be hard pressed to actually 'run' a construction company with it, such as doing job costing, POs, estimating, reports, what if scenarios etc...

It's even just about worthless for those pesky insurance audits we all have to do. You'd think that a software with a contractors addition would be set up to actually do things that contractors need to do?

mdshunk · 06-14-2009, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mike Finley

If you want to use it for much of anything else forget it. You'll be hard pressed to actually 'run' a construction company with it, such as doing job costing, POs, estimating, reports, what if scenarios etc...

You're talking out of your hat. I do each and every one of those things with QB.

Mike Finley · 06-14-2009, 06:14 PM

I'm sure you do them to some degree, we all do the quickbooks work arounds and limp arounds, but no matter what it's not to what a full fledged accounting program is capable of like he has been using.

If you can get quick books to give you accurate reports on job costing you're way ahead of me. My CPA can't get them, my wife's a CPA and can't get them.

The only way I get anything meaningful is dumping it to Excel.

If you like I'll give you a scenario of what I'm talking about and you can tell me how to do it. I'd be much obliged.

rbsremodeling · 06-14-2009, 06:28 PM

give me a scenario i am slightly sober right now

mdshunk · 06-14-2009, 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rbsremodeling

give me a scenario i am slightly sober right now

Yeah, seriously, lay out a couple. Purchase Orders, you mention. That one right there has a freaking button. You can even email the PO right from QB. What, exactly, is the problem?

Mike Finley · 06-14-2009, 06:45 PM

In a growing business, one of the most imporant things to know is job costing as you grow, as you grow you need to be able to see if profitability is remaining stable, going down, going up... as you grow and expand you change your business dramatically.

Let's say for instance I want to query quick books and see how we did this first quarter of the year compared to last quarter. Sounds simple, but this simple report shows you the fatal flaw to quickbooks in that it queries by date in most reports. So I pull up all the jobs we did between Jan 1,2009 and the end of march 2009 and it pulls it together and you get your percentage and you look and see holy sh*t my labor number for instance lets say it's usually 21% of gross sales is saying it's 15%! Well holy crap that's awesome isn't it? Unfortunately all you are seeing is the inaccuracy of how quick books reports, there is no such thing as closed jobs in quickbooks that I know of. When you query over a date range say starting Jan 1st, you might have a job included in this report that you started in Dec and maybe you didn't record payments until Jan 4th. So this report is inaccurate since it will show for instance $20,000 of income and no offsets against it of expenses since in this example most of them were recorded in Dec. At the other end of the query, lets say at the end of March you recorded $15,000 worth of labor on another job that didn't end for 2 more months and you have payments showing up in May.

Because quickbooks is only pulling up transactions based on date ranges to create it's reports and not doing anything in regard to whole jobs, the numbers are worthless. You have to do about a dozen work arounds just to get anything accurate and meaningful.

Like I said, it's great for simple accounting, beats the hell out of a shoe box and a bag of reciepts, but it's far from robust and the contractors addition is nothing more than a name taped on the box.

Mike Finley · 06-14-2009, 06:56 PM

There are many, many, many more things quick books refuses to do. Over the last few years I've posted many times on quick books forums thinking I'm just too dumb to figure out how to do it, and usually almost every time is the answer that gets replied is: You can't do it.

Not because it's something out of the ordinary that you want to do, just that quickbooks is not designed to and Intuit could careless.

Here's a typical absolutely retarded glitch with quickbooks, -- it can't keep track of your payroll check numbers, go write 3 checks to pay bills, use for instance checks 1201, 1202, and 1203... now go do payroll, the check it wants to write will be 1201! WTF????

Is this an earth shattering problem? No, not really, but it's pretty much an example of how screwed up a program quickbooks is. This is a program that is the best selling software in it's category and has been on the market for what 20 years or more and it can't keep track of a check number???????

This guy going from Timberline to quickbooks is probably going to be very painful.