Yes! This is a huge, huge problem. I just installed Quickbooks 2009 -- 2010 is fraught with problems (see amazon reviews) so my accountant recommended 09. 2009 REQUIRES me to pick up my phone to register the software -- I dialed, was on hold, and then hung up. It also couldn't open an existing quickbooks 2009 file because it needed to download a 300MB maintenance release... Quickbooks 2009 is like Microsoft Streets 98. Someone needs to make it completely obsolete by writing Google Maps.

2009 is bad? I installed 2008 on Vista, and the screens would hang for several minutes at a time. I remember it being very fast in the past. I had the opinion, based on nothing in particular, that QB was ported form C++ to .NET, and it didn't go too well.

I thought that was the goal of http://lessaccounting.com/. Anyone have any experience with it?

less accounting is great and I've met one of the cofounders who is a stand up guy. problem is, it still operates within the confines of accounting software. Within those confines it's certainly simple. someone just needs to rethink the entire notion of it. I don't need accounting software.

i built corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) after getting fed up with trying to use quickbooks for my small business, and most other web-based apps at the time were just project management or invoice creation.

i use my business debit/credit card for almost everything, and send checks out for my monthly bills. with corduroy i can receive a bill, print a check for it, and then automatically download the transactions from my bank to mark that check cleared, and quickly categorize all of the new debit card transactions. at tax time, i just go through each of the categories and put the totals into the tax software.

of course it does invoicing and project management, too.

I use a spreadsheet to do my record-keeping. I have multiple sheets that do: cash flow, the balance sheet, income and expenditure (double entry), and profit & loss. Everything's linked together nicely: e.g., if you make a new transaction in the income sheet, it will be reflected everywhere else. Insanely simple. No need to use MYOB etc. Can copy the data out and paste into Matlab, Mathematica etc.

Message me if you want a copy of the template.

i can put it up on google docs or my public dropbox if you let me and share it with everybody here

can't message you but I would be interested

May be I am gone make some changes to sql-ledger to make it this much easier (and release open source). Stay in touch. (See my info)

I met some of the people from Docsnaps.com showing of the automated bookkeeping website. I think for an early startup the service can be real helping hand.

Have you tried Ledger (http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/)?

Have you tried mint.com? It will automatically categorize payments based on who you are paying

I like mint for general, personal money tracking but would not use it for anything like a business.

I've found it too unreliable and inflexible to be anything more than a supplement for my needs. They do not track all institutions, their ability to login to systems frequently breaks (for me), I find their "trends" charting really lacking, and you cannot add your own documents.

We need a Mint.com for small business. It's simplicity and automation blow away the competitors.

The best part is that it learns how to categorize your transactions.

It is missing invoice and payroll functionality in it's current form, but it really is so close to being the perfect accounting software for SB.

Accounting, not personal budgeting.

You'll also need income stmt & balance sheet to prepare the annual tax returns.