Bookkeeping woes - a RANT

Bookkeeping for Dummies, indeed.

Why does Shay hate bookeeping? Let me count the ways.

For years I used Quickbooks, but it was way too much for my needs and very expensive to keep updating.

Switched to Quicken Home and Business, which required me to use Parallels or some other dual-boot/emulator program to run a Windows environment since they don't make it for Mac. It was great...except when it wasn't. It was slow to begin with, running things like that in the first place; and since I had to launch a whole different environment, I would often lag behind in my data entry because it wasn't just something that would pop open and work on a moment's notice. When I could no longer connect to my banks and had to start manually importing the data, which meant jumping in and out of my Mac vs. Apple environment to transfer files around, it became too onerous.

So for two years I tried Moneydance, which is made for Mac. I tried really hard to make it work, but it has always suuuucked. It isn't smart. It can't connect to anything, requires various plug-ins by third parties to attain basic functionality, won't let you manually control naming rules (so you have to rename clients/payees by hand every time), wasn't learning categories properly so I was doing that all by hand, too... So I thought I would suck it up, pay $65 and go back to Quicken, this time "for Mac" and not Home & Business, which they don't make for Mac. It'll be better since it's native, right? Plus I was thinking it would bring back at least SOME of the functionality I missed with H&B. Which it does...and doesn't.

Naming and auto-assigning to categories is smarter, though they removed any ability to create your own naming rules, which the Windows version has, so why not the Mac version?! It connects to my bank. Great! And Paypal! Great! Wait...it only imports gross sales and you have to edit every single transaction by hand to split out fees paid out. So it is reporting I made, say $100, instead of $95 after fees--over-reporting my income.

Okay, I will just grab a QIF file export from Paypal--a Quicken format file--surely that will import cleanly. Nope, they don't support QIF any more. Okay, I will do a CSV. Nope, doesn't support CSV at all, nor tab delimited. Is there a way to convert CSV or QIF to QFX, the format it requires? Not unless you spend another $40 on a third party software to do so. I spend hours scouring official Intuit forums--a thinly veiled attempt at getting out of supporting paying customers by making us talk to each other about our problems while no one from the company comes by and offers any real solutions--trying to find out how to proceed. As expected, run into hundreds of users with the same complaints, going back 10+ years, and no solutions offered by Intuit.

So I decide to suck it up some more and purchase the third party conversion software for another $40. It is ugly as hell (designed by a Windows developer who doesn't care how it looks or functions, clearly), but it gets the job done. I have a QFX file of all of my 2016 Paypal activity! I create a second Paypal ledger to make my edits in so I don't muddle it in with any imports already done by the software. It doesn't do splits per transaction, it instead makes a "Payee Gross" and "Payee Fees" as separate lines, and does some funky renaming and non-naming of some payees. I spend 3 hours cleaning it up and transferring every transaction individually to the "real" Paypal ledger. And then I want to cry knowing that this is how I am going to have to reconcile my Paypal transactions... forever. Either:

a) Download a CSV, put through a converter, import into a second ledger, edit every transaction for accuracy, transfer to my "real" Paypal ledger by dragging and dropping. OR

b) Allow the program to automatically download all my transactions, open Paypal in a second browser window, then flip through every single transaction between the browser and Quicken and edit all the categories to include splits for every fee incurred.

I have spent all day for two days just trying to get together one P&L report for my accountant tomorrow...and I am only half way through reconciling my imported bank statements and haven't begun my Square reports.

HOW DOES ANYONE DO THIS? I feel like most of my home business life has been an agonizing experience trying to do what SHOULD be simple bookkeeping. I don't have a complex business model here, and I don't make bazillions of dollars that needs to be tracked across investment accounts or something. I just need...money comes in here...money goes out there. When you see *GROSS SALES BLARGSNAP* please change it to *Lovely Client Name* and put in "The Thing I Do For That Client*. And then give me a report of that to hand to my accountant once a year.