What system should a freelancer/company use to account/manage money?

Question

Freelance

I am a freelancer. I constantly encounter problems with accounting for the receipt and expenditure of my clients' funds. When there were few of them, I just memorized them, it became a little more, I began to write down in a paper notebook / google docs. Now there are a lot of them, receipts are made every week, expenses are similar. Sometimes they are asked to report, for example, for half a year, how much and where it was spent. It became very difficult to do it. I don't always find all the information.
What system can be used to record cash flows, maintain a customer base, accounting information?
Naturally, I do not ask without being prepared. I tried to use systems like Megaplan, Redmine and other free and paid ones. Somewhere it is too expensive, somewhere there is not enough functionality. I am currently trying Bitrix24.
Maybe someone has already gone down this path.
I am not a company, it is clear that if there was an accountant, there would be no questions.
up.
The first answers advise to use something like "table processors". Tried, but apparently the right approach is needed. Therefore, I wanted to know if there are "automated" systems.

Answer 1

in googledox a table or tables for each client is a separate sheet or a whole document

Answer 2

As an ex-accountant, I would advise you to use a regular excel (libracalk, etc.) Or anything with a pleasant interface for you. The main thing is that everything is in one place, stupidly simple and fast. That is, the question is not in the tool, but in the approach.
One page per client, in a simple column date-service-amount. In any accounting program, no matter how it looks (newfangled Bitrix24, etc.), you still manually drive in each fact that happened, only it takes longer to get to the desired cell.
More accounting software for other purposes in general, where the complexity is justified by the complex relationships of documents, the need for reporting, a lot of additional information, standards, and so on. Accounting is generally needed only for reporting to the state and to the leadership, but you don’t have such a task and rejoice.
“Clients ask to report” - I don’t know the specifics of your work, but in general I think that the client’s accounting department should deal with this, because you receive every payment for something / for something. They should deal with statistics and analysis.
As a last resort, hire an outsourcer accountant for a certain average ceiling amount per month to manage your accounts, although in fact you will provide information to him in almost the same form, but he will systematize (and here this is a minimum).

Answer 3

https://zenmoney.ru/ - simple, convenient, functional.

Answer 4

I use harvestapp.com
Tracks time, generates beautiful invoices, detailed statistics on clients and projects.

Answer 5

There is a CRM Client base - in fact, an advanced Excel - with interesting features like sending SMS to a client when an order is completed.