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My husband and I are opening a business and my husband currently works as a contractor. While we realise consulting an account and a lawyer would be wise, we are operating and living on a shoestring. We are looking at profits in the lower hundreds to begin with for the business. We simply cannot afford the costs of the proffesionals at this time.

We are doing what we can on our limited budget. This includes purchasing financial and tax software. We want the most for our meager dollar and we like the idea of being able to manage his income, the business finances and all our taxes in the same place.

I am currently looking at MS Money's Deluxe and Business software and also at Quicken. If anyone has any feedback on these products or something entirely different, I would appreciate the time you take to share your thoughts.

I used to use Quicken all the time and loved it, and use TurboTax every year for my taxes. Now that most banks have on line banking, to be honest I just use the on line banking to handle everything. I didn't feel like re-entering everything into Quicken <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Since I write checks on line with the banking system, it was easiest just to use that to reconcile too.

Hello, my wife and I have also just started a business in UK, and had the same problem. We have actually produced an Excel spreadsheet to do this job for us, though it is of course geared to the UK tax system. Apart from allowing us to record all items of income and expenditure in a faster way than in a ledger book,with all the 'income over expenditure' totals of course calculated,(and in a much nicer presentation) it also calculates tax liability as you go in real time so you know on what day you start paying tax and how much. There's also a 'what if' section which allows you to experiment with different levels of taxable and non-taxable expenditure based on the figures to date. The spreadsheet allows 12 pages of income and 12 of expenditure but is of course expandable. The column headings for different items are of course able to be customised as well. The tax calculations are based on a number of values entered at the top e.g. thresholds and percentages, so if the US system is similar in principle, maybe it can be customised to suit. You and other members of this forum are most welcome to have a copy to see if it is any good for you, free of charge. You will need Microsoft Excel to run it. Regards, CliftonVilla.