LessAccounting

LessAccounting is an online accounting software for service companies we found quite immature for SMEs. LessAccounting failed in reporting and in many other seemingly simple transactions and logic, which we outlined in this review.
Even though, LessAccounting claims that QuickBooks is terrible and frustrating, we found LessAccounting no where close to QuickBooks at all, thus, were we using QB, taking our data from QB into LessAccounting would be the last thing in our minds. Obviously interesting slogan from LessAccounting “All small business accounting software sucks, we just suck the least” could easily be stated vice versa.


Getting Started
LessAccounting has a nice dashboard showing money in and money out, expenses breakdown as well as a bit weird “How much we love you” kpi.  Not sure if the higher number correlates with better support LessAccounting or what.
Navigation looks like Kashoo’s, menu items are in the left side, but relatively better as forms do not require, “you get it?” call as in Kashoo.
Adding GL accounts in LessAccounting is limited to Bank Accounts and Expense Categories, so setting up our company sample data was partial.
Contacts
In LessAccounting, you get an option to import contacts from Gmail, Basecamp, Highrise, unfortunately there is no CSV file upload option.
Adding contacts are simple, however comes with some surprises, liking clicking “Contacts” link taking us to invoice, seemed very bizarre.
Invoicing
There are several inconvenient similarities LessAccounting shares with FreshBooks and Crunch, and LessAccounting proves quite inflexible in many terms, such as customer credit allocation across open invoices, missing “invoice date” and few others.
LessAccounting provides a simple 3-step navigation, “Invoice”, “Preview” and “Send It”, so unless you walk through all these 3 steps, you are not registering any sales. Unfortunately, with every edit of a sales invoice you would walk down these steps again. Strangely, LessAccounting misses an important component “invoice date”.
Basically, you cannot register invoices with a back date, and each line item in sales invoice popups in a new window. So, if you have multiple line items, issuing a sales invoice gets so cumbersome, if not unfeasible.
Expenses
In LessAccounting, users can create one time or recurring expenses and register mileage expenditures. However, when creating an expense and marking “already paid” option, brought some ambiguity, as there was not even an option to choose a bank account, so we rushed to find out what account was credited. Unfortunately, we can recall and easily compare LessAccounting  to Crunch in terms of “what went wrong”. From Balance Sheet we could not understand which asset account reduced by the “paid” expense amount. When we dug further, Transaction report showed Cash balance minus expense we paid. But balance sheet did not reflect this change.  (Download the reports).
Reports
LessAccounting provides key financial reports and here is where the system fails big time
Reports in the system are broken down into three categories:

• General Reports
• Money In
• Money Out

Transactions report in the system is actually their General ledger, so when we clicked Transactions report we were taken to General Ledger report. Even though Tthese two reports share similarities, they still should be in different in formats.
As we mentioned earlier, Balance Sheet and Transaction report had discrepancies, when we recorded a paid expense. On top of that, their Receivables report also failed to reflect customer credit (payment exceeding an invoice amount), and instead showed debtor balance by invoice. So were we using this system , we would not be able to tell how much each customer owed, without digging in couple of reports, assuming there is no discrepancy anymore in the system as we pointed out earlier.
Conclusion
LessAccounting is really a less accounting system, we hardly can recommend to SMEs. As for taking our data out of QuickBooks into LessAccounting is really not a good option at this stage.