I sometimes find myself asking – Why am I so faithful to QuickBooks? Why do I love it?
In my opinion, it just keeps getting better and better! Why?
- Purchase/Ongoing Cost (See previous post)
- Network of over 5 million users worldwide (See previous post)
- Outstanding reporting and integration capabilities
- You don’t need to be a book-keeper or accountant to use it
Last week I covered point 2, 5 MILLION USERS WORLDWIDE
Today – let’s consider point 3, REPORTING AND INTEGRATION …
There is not a report yet that I have not been able to produce with the help of QuickBooks – in over 16 years of use! Depending on your version of the Software, you might have up to 135 reports already built in without doing any set up yourself. New reports can easily be added, based on these pre-defined reports, and then memorised for future use. – Preferred formats, fonts and layouts can be saved making future production of a similar report a breeze.
Easy to read
Skilled and successful company owners rarely have the natural ability to pick up accounts reports and understand the strengths and weaknesses that could be facing them within those figures. What I like to do is keep it simple for my clients – 1 standard report shows 1) what is in the bank and 2) what is owed by the company to their creditors. The basis of any company – you cannot survive if you do not have funds to settle what you owe. You also need up-to-date information – there is no sense in knowing what you had in the bank last week, thousands could have been paid out since then. Similarly, if you do not have a figure of what is owe by the company to creditors, how can you plan accordingly? QuickBooks pulls this information together at the touch of a button – it may not be good news, but at least you have not spend days collating bad news! Other required information can then be gleaned to support that report – ie What is the firm due in by way of monies due by their customers, debtors?
Export to Excel
If a QuickBooks report does not give exactly the information that we require (perhaps we want some figures from a Profit and Loss report, and some figures from a Balance Sheet report to collate our required information) – we can export 2 or more reports, and manipulate these using Excel spreadsheets and formulas to collate the desired information. I have worked with firms to build macros to automate this process – to reduce the time spent on these production.
Third-party integration
I cannot even begin to list the software that integrates with QuickBooks. There are desktop programs, mobile apps, cloud add-ons, and so on – you name it – thousands of applications that have a connection with QuickBooks, and more appearing every day. A very simple (free) program I make use of is ‘QB_Timer’. This records the time I spend on each client, I import that information into QuickBooks and QuickBooks generates my invoices. – It saves HOURS, literally! Have a look at QuickBooks marketplace for information on further integrated apps and add-ons. Depending on your industry, there are hundreds to suit.
