Why does nobody talk about how bad QuickBooks is for small construction companies

I spent 6 hours last week trying to match invoices to job costs in QuickBooks and ended up just using a spreadsheet instead, which took me 20 minutes. Has anyone here found a decent software that actually handles material orders and payroll for a 5-man crew?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_ruby26d agoMost Upvoted

Six hours on something a spreadsheet fixed in 20 minutes sounds like a user problem more than a software problem. QuickBooks is clunky for construction, sure, but it's not that deep. Most guys I know just use it for the basic accounting and run payroll through a separate service like Gusto. If you're trying to force it to do everything, yeah, you're gonna hate it. Maybe stop trying to make it do material orders and just use it for the stuff it actually handles decently.

charles_chen9326d ago

Oh man, @the_ruby you nailed it. I had a buddy who was spending hours trying to get QuickBooks to track his crew's hours by job site and materials all in one place. He finally just gave up and started using a Google Sheet for the daily tracking and only puts the totals into QB at the end of the week. It takes him maybe 10 minutes now. I ran a small crew for a bit and did the same thing. QuickBooks is fine for the basic stuff, but once you try to turn it into some all-in-one project manager it just falls apart. Better to keep it simple and use other tools for the messy parts.