Best independent Business practices - Quickbooks and more

There are definitely products you can use to ease some of this, but you can't make it just happen. Either you have to pay someone to make it happen, or you have to spend the time and effort on it yourself. Nothing can replace that. People dismiss the importance of this all the time--but small businesses also fail all the time. Managing your business finances is as much a part of your job now as the service you provide. People can make recommendations about good software and services, but everything you've said here suggests that you're not taking that side of things very seriously. Start by taking it seriously. Make the process efficient second. Like, this is a very broad estimate without knowing the nature of your business, but if you aren't spending half an hour a day on this yet, you don't have a process that takes too much time, you have a disinclination to actually do it. I suspect you could probably enter all your expenses daily, do invoicing and bill-paying at least weekly, and reconcile all your accounts every month on less than half an hour a day. You could hire someone to do that, but you'd spend time interfacing with your service provide and you'd still have to personally be on top of everything in order to supervise their work. This is like asking how you get fit without spending time on exercise--you can exercise more efficiently, maybe, but you still have to actually go do it every day. It's not something you accomplish in one hour, once. You're not on top of it, and you can't automate being on top of it. Automate the drudgery once you know which parts are actual drudgery and which parts are you avoiding managing your own company. Because you are a company, now, and you need to act like it.

What's your hourly rate (or gross billing monthly)? If you bill more than $100 an hour or have gross receipts over $7-9K a month, find a bookkeeper (ideally someone who comes to you probably once a month and then remotely in the interim). If you are asking these questions at this stage, it's probably not worth sorting out if you can get good at it. I've run small and medium sized businesses and have been on my own for about a decade. I use Quicken (not Quickbooks) and FreshBooks. I do not copy data from one to the other (I minimize my data entry that is required, have a small client list that I bill in pretty big chunks). I started out running small businesses so this is second nature to me. I spend about 20 minutes a day tracking time and review general business (time earned, projections, expense management) stuff. Billing takes about an hour a month. I like this stuff, so it makes a lot of sense for me to do it and it enables me to make decisions on the fly about both new work and ongoing engagements (do I ask for a change order? How big? Is it worth it over the long term?) and that feeds directly into my personal financial planning. But if you bill $100 an hour and spend an hour a day on something that you don't like and it doesn't give you meaningful business intelligence (even as a solo operator your should be doing basic metrics to determine some sense of P&L on a client by client basis) then outsource it. Not worth the time. If you bill $40 an hour, I'd advise taking a bookkeeping class at a community college. Because it's better you understand the process and then decide about which tools work best for you. The upside to finding a bookkeeper (ideally who works with other clients in a similar industry) is you get some insight into which practices make sense. Are there activities you aren't billing for but could? Are you trying to recover expenses as a client billable that aren't worth the effort (that's a mixture of opportunity cost and client satisfaction -- if you are premium vendor, billing for cab fare can seem a little miserly to me, regardless of what attorneys say)? Are you doing rate increases frequently enough? Etc. Don't expect to solve this in a hour at your bill rate. Figure a day. You need to explain to someone who knows how to do this what your current set up is, all the details of your business (types of clients, billing, payment methods, how you track expenses, how your accountant wants the data), short and long terms planning and (possibly) some education for you on how to set this up. If you thing your income is going to be stable to increasing over the next 3-5 years, you will recover this spend in 18 months, easy (based on how you've described your business).

I agree with a lot of what 99_ says. This problem, unfortunately, doesn't have a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires a deep understanding of your processes and business circumstances to be able to choose the right off-the-shelf tools that you can make work together for you. Many "traditional" accounting practices are largely unfamiliar with the vast majority of online financial tools and finance apps. They tend to shy away from cloud-based systems and tend to prefer classic, locally hosted systems that they can exercise complete control over (Quickbooks, Caseware). Your current tax accountant may fit into this category. That being said, there are accountants out there who specialize in what you're looking for. I'd suggest looking for accountants who run their own businesses as online accounting practices. They will be much more in tune with the direction it sounds like you want to go. Elance, oDesk, and even simple Google searches for accounting practices will help you source this type of professional. It's easy to tell from their websites if they're technologically current. Wave is awesome. No, I'm afraid, Wave is not awesome. I would strongly caution anyone from building their accounting processes around Wave. It has some great features for integrating and and facilitating invoicing and payments, but it is an accounting nightmare the longer it's used. It lacks basic internal controls needed to keep your books accurate over the long term.