Quicken

Quicken (Essentials) (Intuit - $50) is a good, solid program, the oldest and best-known finance manager for the Mac, and can do the job for most Internet marketers. Quicken has irritated Mac users over the years, however, with slow updates and by not maintaining feature parity with the PC version.

Intuit recently gave the software a complete overhaul and released it as Quicken Essentials for Mac. The software's interface looks practically like something out of the Apple iLife suite, but Intuit has irritated some Mac users by omitting some of the features from the previous versions of Quicken for Mac, which is why it called it "Quicken Essentials." (Intuit promises more features in the next version.)

Quicken has many features that most Mac users will never use anyway, but the question of concern to us is, does it have the features needed by Mac Internet marketers? I think it does. Quicken allows the creation of multiple accounts, income and expense tracking, categorization, and all the other features you need for tax purposes.

Quicken has the advantage of being a long-running software program maintained by a well-established company, Intuit, although even it has recently had some financial shakeups (Intuit bought Mint.com and installed its founder and CEO as the new VP and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group).

Choosing a stable and long-running software program is important if you want to stick with it awhile and don’t want to be bothered with the hassles of having to switch to another program if the software should be discontinued (like the Mac software FinanceToGo and the cloud-based service Wesabe). Also, if you're migrating to the Mac from a PC, it may be easier to make the mental shift to the Mac version of Quicken rather than an entirely different program. However, Mint.com has so many of the features of Quicken Essentials that you may find that the online based service is enough, at least for now.

QuickBooks

Quicken's big brother can create invoices and track receivables and handle purchase order processing and inventory management. QuickBooks can handle a large range of financial business processes, such as creating sales receipts, handling purchase orders, and managing inventory. It handles employee payroll and tracking and the printing of paychecks.

If you are familiar with Quicken, then learning QuickBooks will be somewhat easier, since the two programs have several similarities between their interfaces. The program doesn’t require you to understand accounting procedures like double entry bookkeeping, and the transactions are recorded on screen in interfaces that resemble paper forms like invoices and checks. QuickBooks 2011 offers merchant services, or the ability to accept credit card payments from within QuickBooks, a fee-based service that currently goes for $20 a month with a $60 setup fee.

QuickBooks can sometimes be overkill for a one-person business. If you use ClickBank, this service will act as your payment processor. If you are an affiliate marketer, the companies you are an affiliate for will keep track of all purchases and present your statistics to you in the form of easy-to-read graphs and charts.