Whats the best software for opening a bookkeeping business? -

I am in the process of starting a bookkeeping business and am having trouble deciding what I want to do about software. The companies that I ll be doing the bookkeeping for will be rather small, and won t have much need for anything more than a basic bookkeeping software with maybe the capability to do payroll. Some of these small businesses will have attempted to do the bookkeeping on their own but have for some reason decided to outsource. Since they may have tried to do the bookkeeping, they may have purchased software to use such as Quickbooks, Peachtree, Quicken, etc. There s no way for me to predict what software they will have and I m trying not to buy each version just so that I can transfer files. I would much rather use Quickbooks for all of my clients. Now, I don t need Quickbooks Accountant software because my clients will not also be using the software, only I will. If I buy one of the basic versions of Quickbooks like I mentioned before, can I just have it set up to where I ll have numerous company files. I d create a new company each time I take on a new client and input the bookkeeping information they may have from before manually. I know you can create more than one company file in Quickbooks, but I don t know if there s a limit on how many you can create. So can I actually have those numerous company files, plus my own for keeping the books of my business, in that one program? If so, does anyone know how many companies you can create a file for in Quickbooks (or Peachtree, Quicken, etc.) without having to purchase a license for multiple users. And if not, does anyone have suggestions on what I can do.I have a degree in Accounting and about 6 years of experience doing bookkeeping (4 years in Quickbooks) so I do know what I m doing but with each previous employer, they only had their one company file created and I never looked to see how many companies you could actually create. Thanks for taking the time to read my question; any and all suggestions will be very much appreciated.-Taylor

I am not a bookkeeper. However, I am familiar with free open source software. The Accounting and Bookkeeping Tutorials site by David W. Marshall has this in the review of osFinancials:http://www.dwmbeancounter.com/software.h�� Accountants and bookkeepers will also profit from this release, they are able to store and maintain unlimited client administrations, can easily exchange data with their clients or directly login into the clients dataset. You can see a list of companies using osFinancials here:http://www.osfinancials.org/mediawiki/in��Installation and User Guides (in Dutch and English) are available here:http://www.osfinancials.org/mediawiki/in��The discussion forum (in Dutch and English) is here:http://www.osfinancials.org/index.php?op��