As a professional magician, you’re running a service business. You book shows and perform them for various clients, and you are paid. While you can track your income and expenses using paper and pencil, you can also use a computer and an accounting program to perform and automate your bookkeeping. In particular, computer programs are great at the end of the year when you have to summarize your income and expenses for taxes and can potentially save you lots of time. On the other hand, there is an investment getting started with such programs.
Computer software such as Intuit’s QuickBooks and Best Software’s Simply Accounting and Peachtree perform core accounting tasks to create invoices, estimates, and sales receipts; write checks; pay bills and record expenses; track customer payments and output reports; manage inventory and sales; handle payroll and generate standard financial statements that show where your business stands. These programs were largely designed by CPAs for CPAs, but over the years, they have gotten a lot easier to use.
Personal finance programs such Intuit’s QuickBooks and Microsoft’s Money, on the other hand, manage personal checkbooks and investments; help individuals plan financially for the future and retirement and let you know where you stand with your money. While these programs are designed for personal use and not to manage a business, they can and are often used by small businesses for just this purpose. In fact, both QuickBooks and Money come in small business versions that handle traditional accounting tasks such as receiveables, payables and more.
