This is a topic every year or two, but it seems worth asking again because there's some moving targets on the cloud side of things.

I have never had more than one or two clients in a year and haven't really thought about invoicing or accounting too much as a result. I'm ramping that up slightly, but not too much. I'm concerned, though, that if I don't set up a usable system now I might accidentally end up in a situation where it's hard to do it later because I've entrenched myself into something that isn't scalable.

I am not good at being administratively organized, so I have two goals:
1) Quick set up of clients or projects and invoicing
2) Structure

If it stays fast and easy, then I'm more likely to get it done, but I don't want to create a headache down the line by just shifting the pain.

Quickbooks seems like the typical answer. Is that the right thing?

We're talking a sole practitioner doing half their time for a large consulting firm and half of their time elsewhere. Tracking invoices and payments is a big deal, dealing with business expenses and the odd subcontractor as well. Time tracking would be nice but I can do it outside if necessary. I'm more of the twenty hour type of project person, rather than the eight hundred one hour projects in a year type of person.

I am wary of cloud stuff, because a service shutting down would be a giant pain. That being said, I won't have anything complicated enough that it's really a big deal, so maybe I'm overthinking.

I don't love that quickbooks is subscription only for the same reason, but it's been around long enough that there's obviously going to be some path forward from someone if they ever decided to depreciate it.

What are other people doing.

Oh, also I'm in Canada which biases me towards the couple of solutions that build in Canada specific stuff.