Simple accounting software with zen cart, eBay

Hi everybody -

I've been doing a little research, and I decided that I should probably just post here to get some opinions before I get ahead of myself.

I recently had to turn in my sales taxes for the first time and found what a pain it was for me to add up everything between my zen cart sales, my eBay sales, and my telephone orders, especially considering I use the same credit card processor for zen cart and telephone orders. It's not a huge deal at the moment (my total sales taxes for the quarter added up to about $11 -- I do mostly out-of-state sales), but I still have to report my total sales figures, and I came to the realization that I needed a much better way to keep track of the totals.

So my question to everybody is: what type of software might work best at tying in zen cart sales, eBay sales, and telephone orders with minimal manual data entry?

I have tried quickbooks but have been turned off by the complexity. My business is very simple and I think quickbooks is overkill. It also seems like a pain and/or expensive to link to zen cart. I haven't even looked into linking to eBay yet.

I need to track sales, payments, write occasional invoices, and most importantly, generate sales reports that cover my entire spectrum of sales. That's about it.

I am currently looking at osfinancials and phreebooks, and leaning a bit toward phreebooks but still very much undecided. I'm hoping there might be some other packages out there that I have yet to discover.

Any suggestions?

I have dabbled - only a small bit to get a feel for it - with osfinancials. I didn't like it, it didn't feel very intuitive to me. I tried phreebooks and like it much more. It's a bit more "plain jane" with the user interface, but it uses a modified zen cart admin interface so it was already somewhat familiar to me. I like it's simplicity yet it has everything and then some for our more-than-simple needs. Plus, the developer, Dave, is simply fantastic with the support on the phreebooks forum. He will help you with anything and has written custom reports and modules based on individual requests. Add to that the zen cart connector. I have been implementing phreeboooks and haven't looked back. I would highly recommend that every zen cart user check it out.

Thanks for the reply! That's all good to know.

The thing that I must admit gives me pause is having all that info web based vs. stored locally. I know that will make it handy to keep my business portable, but I would feel more comfortable having everything stored on my own hard drive. Any thoughts?

Lard_Lad:

Thanks for the reply! That's all good to know.

The thing that I must admit gives me pause is having all that info web based vs. stored locally. I know that will make it handy to keep my business portable, but I would feel more comfortable having everything stored on my own hard drive. Any thoughts?

You can set up a server on your computer and run phreebooks from that so it's local, although I am not sure how it would connect to zen cart. I haven't tried it yet so I don't know. The author, Dave, just reported on his forum that it shouldn't be a problem to run phreebooks on a local machine and still access online features like the zen cart connector. It just gets better and better....:D