Here are seven ways you can make the most of your QuickBooks experience and improve your productivity and accuracy.
Every profession has its own set of best practices. These are simply guidelines for how employees should be doing their jobs and what steps management should take to ensure the best outcomes. They’re not set in stone. In fact, they can vary from business to business, and they tend to change over the years as technology evolves and individual industries are faced with new challenges and regulations.
The accounting profession's best practices are referred to as Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures (GAAP). Public companies must comply with them, and many other businesses follow them because they’re simply the most effective way to operate.
In the same vein, we'd like to discuss seven tried-and-true guidelines that you can follow to make your work more accurate, comprehensive, and safe. With these practices, you can align your business's practices with those of many successful small businesses.
Assign user permissions if multiple people will access QuickBooks
When you begin involving employees in your accounting process, it's crucial that you only grant them the access they need in order to perform their duties. Everyone should have their own separate log-in to QuickBooks, and nobody should share their log-in credentials with anyone else. We'll walk you through the user set-up process now.
You can restrict additional users to limited areas of QuickBooks.
Open the Company menu and click Set Up Users and Passwords, then Set Up Users. In the window that opens, click Add User. Enter a User Name and Password for the individual. If you’re not sure whether your version on QuickBooks has enough licenses, click F2 and look in the upper left corner of the window. Click Next and continue to follow the instructions in the wizard. Questions? Please don’t hesitate to ask us.
[Greatly expanded - QB Enterprise has greatly expanded user role definitions. You may want to upgrade to Enterprise if you're interested in acquiring greater discretion and customizability for your business. Pro and Premier used to have about 12 roles, while Enterprise had approximately 15. Instead of just a few pages of roles, like in Pro and Premier, you'll have a great deal more options for control available in Enterprise]
Run these three reports on a weekly basis
If you’re not running reports regularly, it’s time to start. At a minimum, you should be creating three reports in QuickBooks on a regular basis. Open the Reports menu and go to each of these:
A/R Aging Detail (Customers & Receivables) See who owes you and who is overdue. You can also look at Open Invoices.
A/P Aging Detail (Vendors & Payables) See who you owe, and whether any payments are due. For a quicker look, see Unpaid Bills Detail.
Profit & Loss Standard (Company & Financial) Is your income greater than your expenses? Are you making a profit?
Have standard financial reports analyzed regularly
There are several reports that you could run in QuickBooks, like Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows, that are difficult for non-accountants to analyze. But they’re critical to your understanding of your company’s financial health and its future! And if you're applying for financing or seeking investors, supplying this information will be required. You'll want to prepare these reports on a monthly or quarterly basis,depending on the size and volume of business you do.
Reconcile your accounts
Yes, it’s that important. Reconciling your bank accounts can, above all, help you find damaging errors.
You can't run an accurate financial report without accurate financial data. So before you go preparing your Profit & Loss report or any others, ensure that each month is reconciled for all of your accounts, including banks and credit cards. Reconciling your accounts can help you:
Learn more about your cash flow,
Make your reports more accurate, and
Discover errors and missing transactions.
Create a best practices manual for your business
There may come a time when you or a member of your accounting team will be away from their role for an extended period of time. Whether this absence is planned or unexpected, documenting best practices for your company's accounting procedures can help avoid any serious pauses or problems with your business. We can help you document your daily, weekly, and monthly best practices, as well as ensure your team is appropriately trained. If this is something you'd like our help with, please reach out.
Send invoices immediately and enhance your customers' bill pay experience.
Your business and customers alike will benefit from speedy invoice shipment. Customers can plan their cash flow better (nobody wants to be surprised by a bill that was out of sight, out of mind). If they’re not paying fast enough, you can generate and send a QuickBooks Statement (Customers | Create Statements), which includes all invoices and payments during a set period of time, or consider accepting alternative methods of payment through the use of QuickBooks Payments (we've said this before, but we highly recommend you sign up for QuickBooks Payments through us, so that you can benefit from the lowest processing rates possible!). With QuickBooks Payments, you simply email the invoice, and your customer can click to pay online. Remember, too, that you can use the form customization tools in QuickBooks to make your invoice as polished and helpful as possible.
Narrow down your reports and use Classes
Your QuickBooks company file will consist of hundreds or thousands of records and transactions. There will be times when you only want to see a subset of them, like all customers in a specific ZIP code or all individuals and vendors that have balances over a certain dollar amount. You can do this by customizing QuickBooks reports. Open the report you want, like Customer Contact List, and click Customize Report in the upper left. Click the Filter tab to locate the search field you want.
You can also assign Classes to transactions to isolate related invoices, for example. These can be things like New Construction and remodeling. Open the Lists menu and click Class List to create them. You can also use Classes to determine profitability within specific departments of your organization.
Making the unintuitive more intuitive
If you thought a few of these suggestions seemed like common sense, that's great news; it means you're already implementing best practices in your accounting processes! There are plenty of actions and practices that may seem a little less common sense when it comes to accounting. If we can help you better understand (and execute) your accounting procedures, please reach out to us. As always, we’re happy to consult with you on any of your QuickBooks and point-of-sale needs!
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