Outright’s Online Accounting for Small Business Owners – Review

Jan Brass writes:  The meteoric rise of the Internet economy has generated an entire class of entrepreneurs who work mostly by themselves. This has created huge market for online accounting solutions catering to small businesses. Such individuals would like to spend a minimal amount of time on tedious bookkeeping and don’t require many of the advanced features provided by many well-known professional accounting solution such as QuickBooks. Outright is the perfect package for them since it automates just about every aspect of accounting and seamlessly takes care of issues such as sales tax, income tax, and 1099K forms.

At its core, Outright is an income and expense reporting system. Its focus is primarily geared towards preparing your business for tax time as well as giving you a clear insight into its profit and loss. One of the benefits of using Outright is its ability to pull data from major financial institutions as well as many online services such as PayPal and Amazon. So all you have to do is add your bank details and authorize Outright to access your transactions. This is updated every night so you always have the most recent consolidated data at your fingertips.


But it’s not enough to merely have an accurate record of all of your business transactions. In order to prepare reports for the IRS, you need to categorize them accordingly. Scheduled C lays down the proper reporting format and Outright can help you do all this automatically so that you’re not swamped at the end of the year. If you’re using the same account for your personal and business expenses (a common, if not ideal situation for solo entrepreneurs), you can easily remove the former with the click of a button so as to ensure that you provide the most accurate data possible to the government.

Perhaps one of the most interesting features of Outright is its ability to integrate with other online accounting solutions such as FreshBooks. So instead of having to manually reenter all of your invoices, you’re able to import them automatically using a simple plug-in. These two solutions – Outright and FreshBooks – complement each other.

At any point of time you can easily take a look at your profit and loss statement to see how your business is progressing.


You can start using Outright for free with no limit to the trial period and you don’t even need to provide any of your credit card details. You pay only when you require Outright to manage your taxes and for that it’s $9.95 per month.

A couple of years ago, the IRS instituted something known as 1099K – a form that is sent to you by online payment processors such as PayPal and Amazon if you have more than $20,000 worth of transactions and have sold more than 200 items. If you’re unprepared for it, it can be a big headache. But Outright automatically handles this for you so as to minimize the risk of an audit – something that every business dreads.

So if you’re a small business owner looking to simplify the recording of your income and expenses, take a hard look at Outright. It doesn’t cost you anything and it makes reporting and integration with FreshBooks a breeze.