Evaluating Quicken for Mac Business & Personal

R1456

I am considering using my Quicken experience to maintain the simple books for a non-profit organization. I have an existing subscription for Quicken for Mac Classic Deluxe.

What are the steps to evaluate Quicken Mac Business & Personal, to see if meets the needs of the organization? If I purchase a subscription to Business & Personal, use it for a while, then change our mind, would the data file still work when I downgrade the subscription back to Quicken for Mac Classic Deluxe?

NotACPA

I have used QWin B&P for several non-profits and homeowner associations.

BUT, you'd need to tell use what features you need before we can really respond.

I'll tell you initially, that Q doesn't support payroll or inventory management. If you have those needs, you should look at Quickbooks.

Jon

If you do decide to downgrade from Business & Personal to Deluxe you can still use the same data file, you just lose access to the extra Business & Personal features. For example, your Business accounts are still there but they are no longer flagged as Business accounts and kept separate from your Personal accounts, they're all grouped together.

jacobs

Since you have experience with Quicken Deluxe, you can probably answer what additional functionality you think you need to keep the books for your organization. I kept the books for a small business and for a small non-profit using Quicken Deluxe before the Business version was available. For the non-profit, I used an external database to manage memberships and conference registrations; the invoicing features in Business & Personal might have been enough to avoid external tracking, but probably not.

So it really depends on what types of revenue stream(s) your organization has, and whether Quicken Mac's invoicing functionality is enough for your tracking and reporting needs. Business expenses should be pretty straightforward in Quicken, assuming there's no payroll you'd have to manage completely manually. Do you need to track any inventory? Is there any significant equipment needing depreciation tracking?

You would definitely create a separate Quicken data file for the non-profit. As @Jon said, if you downgrade to Deluxe, your accounts and transactions remain, but you wouldn't be able to edit or even access invoices.

R1456

Thanks for those responses.

I'm just hoping to produce a simple balance sheet and a simple revenue/expense report. No payroll, no inventory, no depreciation, no sales to track. I would hope to track the membership of the association as customers; but honestly that's probably being handled just fine in a spreadsheet.

I'm also looking at Quicken Business & Personal [i.e. Simplifi]. To me it would be advantageous to not have the organization's records on my own laptop — and the treasurer role could easily migrate between officers every few years.

NotACPA

You could track membership as if they're customers … but it kinda becomes a numbers game. At some point you might have so many member/customers that another product would work better.

Q Business (both Win & Mac) are really intended for individually owned smaller businesses and ideally "personal-service" type businesses.

But I have, in the past, used it for the books of my, and wife's, consulting practices, a homeowner's association, (4 units), and a small non-profit.

But for the operating entity owned by that non-profit, we kept track in Quickbooks because we needed inventory management. The non-profit itself had an investment account which QB (at least at that time) couldn't handle.

smayer97

AFAIK, there currently is no way to import or export data from the Simplifi products, so if you change your mind on the platform, the data are not portable.

QMac can generate a simple balance sheet and a simple revenue/expense report. You will have to determine if it meets the needs of your organization.

jacobs

I would hope to track the membership of the association as customers

@R1456 I think this is the tricky part. You could use member names as the Client for each membership/dues payment. If it's a fixed membership base, you could generate an invoice for each member, an use unpaid invoices to track unpaid memberships. But there's no way to automatically generate 100 invoices to 100 different members. When I did the books for a small national non-profit (which was before Business & Personal existed), I ended up creating a separate database (FileMaker Pro, back when it was inexpensive) for auto-generating invoices and tracking paid/unpaid memberships.