Closed the laptop on day two of the trial because of the chart of accounts screen

I signed up for accounting software in January because everyone said get your books right from the start. I have one duplex. Thirty day trial.

Day one I connected the bank. Day two the software wanted me to say what a chart of accounts was for and I closed the laptop. Day nine I came back and categorized about forty transactions, felt great, then noticed it had matched a transfer between my own two accounts as income, so my one duplex had apparently earned $4,000 in a month it earned $1,850.

Day twenty two I got an email saying the trial was ending. I had eight days and a file that was worse than the spreadsheet I'd been keeping.

What I did was pay for one hour with a bookkeeper who works with landlords. She looked at my file for about four minutes and said I had two problems. One was the transfer thing, which she fixed in front of me. The other was that I'd set it up as one business with one account when the point of the software for me was seeing the duplex as its own thing with two units under it.

She also said, unprompted, that for one duplex a spreadsheet is fine and she'd tell me when it stopped being fine. Which was not what I expected from someone whose job is doing this.

I kept the software anyway because I'd already learned the buttons. But I would have paid for that hour on day one instead of day twenty two if I'd known you could just buy an hour.