Small billboard companies used to have either to pay an accountant to keep track of invoices and financials or spend several hundred dollars for accounting software which would only run on a single computer. If your accountant was on vacation or your computer crashed you had no access to financials. Those days are gone. Insider recommends Quickbooks by Intuit to keep track of your billboard financials. I’ve invested in 17 different finance, media and outdoor companies and each company uses quickbooks online. Here are the benefits.

• One signin accesses all your accounts.

• The service is cheap. $10/month for basic service. $24-36/month for multiple users.

• You can give your accountant free access to quickbooks which limits the number of info requests you’ll have to field at tax or audit time.

• The service is on Intuit’s servers which means you can conveiniently access financials from any internet connection.

• The service is secure and reliable. I cannot remember a service outage apart from normal maintenance.

• You can set up recurring invoices for long term outdoor clients.

• The system processes credit card as well as cash or check payments.

• The service handles payroll which frees up your time for more important matters.

There are a couple drawbacks with quickbooks.

• It is almost impossible to downgrade service, so think carefully before upgrading. You can’t switch from from the $36/month service to the $24/month or $10/month service without cancelling your old account and setting up a new account, which means setting up accounts and reentering data from scratch.
• Quickbooks credit card service is expensive and take days to process.  Insider cut credit card charges from 5-6% to 3.75% and processing time from days to hours by switching from quickbooks credit card processing to Square.