Wylie,

I took the time to look at quickbooks based on your requirements and here is what I found.

Customer Entry

Simple customer entry. All the information you need and you can select customers from a drop down list when you have a sales transaction.

Product Entry

Simple product entry. Keeps track of your inventory and tells you (through a report) when you need to order more of any product. I set your re-order point at 1 so any order automatically indicates you need to reorder. This also keeps track of any inventory you might have on hand so you don’t need to order it. This is essentially your tally sheet. I made your item name = Debbies code, but you can see the description when you are selecting an item during a sale. Inventory also keeps track of the cost of the product and your selling price.

Sales Invoices

When you have a sale, you create a new invoice. All the customer and product information is selected from drop down lists and populates the form automatically. The class field will let you enter any campaign number you like so you can sort sales by campaign or however you choose (I choose 008). You type the quantity and select and item and it calculates the line.

Tax

One flaw I found is that you cannot enter multiple tax rates on the same invoice ( a problem I was having with the database as well). My suggestion is that you just put food orders on 1 invoice and non-food orders on another. You can select the tax rate for an invoice by choosing the tax drop down box ( I picked food above).

After a sale the customer screen gets updated with outstanding balances. After the last sale it looks like this.

You can set up an item called shipping and manually enter any extra shipping charges. There is a discount feature that allows you to discount orders by a percentage that you enter. You can also manually change the price on an order without changing the price anywhere else.

Reporting

The built in reporting allows you to easily generate a customer list, product list, tally sheet, sales invoice (although you won’t be able to print the entire campaign at once from what I can tell) as well as customers with outstanding balances. There are several other extra reports like profit/loss, accounts receivable, etc. All reports let you export the data to excel if you are more comfortable working with a spreadsheet.

Extras

After generating a sale you can collect payments into a checking account that quickbooks will track. Essentially you can manage your company checking/credit cards through quickbooks. When you buy your inventory from Debbie or any other vendor, the checking account will be updated accordingly. If you are familiar with Quicken, this is the same format.

There is also a payroll and time tracking feature if you wanted to start paying your kids to work and store that tax information.

Depending on how detailed you want to get, you can have Quickbooks track all your companies tax related information on sales, purchases, and payroll.

I don’t know if you have these kinds of problems, but if customers are late making payments there is some good account collecting features that alert you when people are late and charge them extra or offer them a discount when they are on time.

If you choose to go with Quickbooks, I would be happy to help you set it up (not that I’m an expert, but I have used it before). I think this is the right software for you because it will let you grow as you get bigger and give you the extra functionality you will need when your business changes (employees, inventory). The database I created would be a short term improvement, but it certainly won’t have the features Quickbooks has built in.

-Matt

480-610-8626