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Grand Rapids, MI | MS Money and Quickbooks are two quite different types of programs.
I would categorize Quickbooks as an accounting program and MS Money (and Quicken) as book-keeping systems.
I use Quickbooks regularly for my businesses and many clients use it as well. It is a respectable basic accounting program. As pointed out, it will not track inventories very well for Ag. It also isnt real great if you want to do enterprise accounting, and if you want to go to the next level of cost/profit center accounting that would be extrodinarily difficult to do. For these you will need a much more advanced accounting package.
I use Quicken for my personal finances, and it really works well for that. All the tools are geared toward personal finanaces and it is actually a pretty impressive program for that purpose. When it comes to business accounting though it falls well short of what I require.
The biggest difference is "single entry" vs "double entry" accounting. A good example of the benefit of double entry is seen in this example:
Farmer Jones bought a new tractor from the Joe Mule co. and traded in an old one to the dealer. He financed the new tractor with Joe Mule Finance to which he also still owed some balance on the old tractor. The dealer just arranged the financing so that the new note paid off the old one and added the balance onto the new note. Since Farmer Jones didn't write a check, there was no expense recorded, he simply gave the purchase price and trade values to his accountant to modify the depreciation schedule. Nobody caught the fact that in the refinancing Farmer Jones new loan paid the $10,000 of interest that was due on the old note, so it was never deducted on his taxes. If he were using double entry accounting, he would have quickly seen that the note balances were not correct and been able to correct the error. | |
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MS Money vs Quickbooks
