QuickBooks Online is an incredibly powerful tool to manage your business' accounting - and it's free.

Well, the 'Free' version is free - there's also the 'Basic' and 'Plus' versions of the online software suite. More than likely, you will be able to use the 'Free' version of the software for some time. One of the largest restrictions the 'Free' version has is the inability to utilize more than 20 clients (yes, there's a loophole where you delete old clients), but if you want to actually save more than 20 clients, you may want to bump up to one of the paid options.

So that's essentially the mini-interview QuickBooks Online gives you after you start it up for the first time. If you want to change something it didn't ask you at this time, you can always delve into the preferences section of the software and customize it.

Notice how it asked you if you charge sales tax? Big question, really big question. Don't mess that one up. Remember, in most cases, if you deliver your materials through electronic means (meaning there is no physical or tangible exchange of products), then you are providing a service, and services are not subject to sales tax in most states. Be sure to check with your state's tax office, but more than likely, you won't have to charge sales tax.

There's a sample invoice - I have my fictitious setup to show the date the service was provided (if you are billing a firm, as opposed to an individual agent, you want to let them know which date the service was provided on to help keep the records straight), the agent's name, the address of the listing, then the amount. You can then save it, print it, or even have QuickBooks Online email it (A topic we'll go into further below). Pretty neat for free, eh?

If you do decide to print it to mail or hand-deliver, this is what the invoice winds up looking like. Nice and clean if you ask me.

Another great feature of QuickBooks Online (this isn't unique, most accounting software does this for you) is the ability to run reports on just about everything under the sun. Here's a quick look at profits and losses, year-to-date. It's very simple to run these reports, as well as create presets to run specific reports that you find yourself running frequently.

This screen will give you a run-down of all or your transactions by date. Since this is all made-up stuff, there's nothing more than the sample invoice. Yours will mostly look like a bunch of invoices with a whole lot of small purchases here and there.

This screen allows you to customize the automated message your clients receive when you have QuickBooks Online email it for you. Change the message to whatever you want, check the box 'Copy me', and you're probably set to do paperless business.

One gripe I have with Quickbooks Online is it's incompatibility with certain browsers, even it's incompatibility with browsers it supposedly supports. For example - Safari 4 was in beta for quite some time before it became an official release. Well, many mac users were left in the dark when they 'upgraded' to Safari 4 because QuickBooks Online didn't support it. If you were sly enough to change the user-agent on your browser, it didn't matter, it honestly didn't support Safari 4. Certain links were inaccessible, things displayed incorrectly. It was a mess. Even today, when Apple updates Safari 4, if you update, you may experience problems.

You may be asking yourself, why not just use Firefox? Well, guess what, Firefox isn't supported on the mac - not yet anyway. I know, it's a pain, it really is, but you just have to play with the cards you're dealt, especially when you're playing for free. I imagine Firefox will eventually be supported for the mac, but in the meantime, you have to use Safari and cross your fingers when you update.

There are plenty of features QuickBooks Online has, I just didn't get to them in this brief look at the online software suite. Just go to the site, sign up (you need a credit card, even though it won't bill you anything), and try it out.

One of the largest advantages of QuickBooks Online is the fact that your data is in the cloud. Some may be a bit weary of having all that sensitive data 'out there', but really, it's as secure as your email or making a purchase online. The fact that it's in the cloud means that you can access your accounting records from your computer, your phone, or even someone else's computer if you are away from yours. Also, if you computer ever crashes (more like, 'when'), all that data is still accessible. One less thing to have a heart-attack about, right?

Visit QuickBooks Online here.