QuickBooks Necessary or Not?

Is QuickBooks Necessary or Not for your business? Do not under estimate the value of answering this question, as the wrong answer will cost you time, money and unnecessary stress to fix the wrong answer.

Let’s start with this. The QuickBooks home screen appears to make things relatively simple. But don’t be fooled. Behind each of those click-on icons is are large amount of upfront set-up.

QuickBooks is a full scale accounting system, albeit the most popular and least expensive. QB requires creating and setting-up a Chart of Accounts, which includes Asset, Liability, Equity, Sales/Revenue and Expense accounts.

image of QuickBooks home screen for QuickBooks Necessary or Not by Oak Hill Bookkeeping Service serving Passaic, Morris, Essex and Bergen counties New Jersey

If you do not have a college degree in Accounting or extensive real world experience in Bookkeeping and/or Accounting, you will find setting-up and using QB extremely challenging.

Is QuickBooks really necessary for your business?

From someone with over 20 years of experience with QB and a NJ CPA, I can tell you the primary and perhaps ONLY REASON you need QuickBooks for your business is – if it is absolutely necessary that you must have a full set of standard financial reports including a Statement of Income (aka P&L), a Balance Sheet, a Statement of Cash Flows, and perhaps a Statement of Owners Equity. In most cases, this full set of financial reports are only necessary if you must provide them to a third party such as a bank which provided financing (a loan) for your business.

So if not QuickBooks, then what? In most cases, the standard check-book you keep for your business is all that’s really necessary to produce a P&L for the business. I call this “Check-Book Accounting”.

For 14 years, we owned and operated a small business of our own – Your Own Winery in Butler NJ – a personal wine-making business. Short story, the Covid pandemic killed this business. For the first 5 years (2012-2017), we used QuickBooks, but ultimately concluded this was not necessary – and converted to Check-Book Accounting (2018-2024).

See About Us. As a NJ Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a Certified QuickBooks Bookkeeper, we can assist you with all your business set-up, admin, bookkeeping and tax needs.