My Thoughts on Less Accounting

At the beginning of the year I wanted to find all-inclusive, online accounting software. That is, something that kept track of invoicing, other income, and expenses. As much as I loved Zoho Invoices, I needed expense tracking. So after doing some research, I settled on Less Accounting. Here are my thoughts.

Pros:

• You can import contacts from Highrise, GMail, or Basecamp
• It has expense tracking
• You can upload receipts to go along with each expense
• It’s relatively cheap
• The dashboard is pretty nice (though total income and expenses would be nice)
• The reports features are nice

Cons:

• Recurring invoices do not auto send – why even have recurring invoices if I still need to go in and send it myself?
• Recurring invoices weren’t working at all for 3 weeks after I first started using it
• Email messages do no format- All of my emails when sending invoices have been on one line no matter how I format it
• No “Mark Invoice as paid.” I actually have to go in, add a payment, reenter all the invoice information and then associate an invoice with the payment
• Import Highrise contacts also wasn’t working for a while after I first started using it. I reported both this and the invoices twice
• In order for my recurring expenses to have a name, they must be associated with a contact, so all my recurring invoices say “No Contact” instead of the reference name, like “Monthly Subscription to X”
• I had to fix one of my recurring expenses to actually get it to show up, and my other ones still aren’t because I need to fix them, which isn’t very intuitive. If I set the 7th of each month as a recurring expense, it should show up on the 7th (or maybe even a few days before)
• An “Include Paypal link,” while not detrimental, would be nice. Zoho Invoices had it and I used that quite a bit

All-in-all I’m not to impressed by Less Accounting, despite all  the rage about it, and the fact that they sponsor a site called, “We All Hate Quickbooks.” The design is nice as are some of the features, but they took some liberties on user experience (or poorly designed their databases), leading to some pretty big grievances.

Did I miss something? Am I doing something wrong? Comments are open.