Quickbooks: How it means to your Financial Fitness

The thought of money in business is enough to give you a headache. Then there is the need to manage it. On top of that, it needs to be monitored so you know how much you are gaining and losing as a medium or small business owner. The task can be so daunting that it would make one want to do some studying once again, or let someone else do it entirely. And if that doesn’t work, there is a software called Quickbooks which makes more than a pretty good alternative.

What Is Quickbooks?

It is a line of bookkeeping software which helps small business owners stay organized by combining various processes used in accounting tasks and fitting them into one system, so that you have little to no use at all of the spreadsheets that the owner and his staff have been used to.

Made by Intuit, the system is designed to be customized to meet the needs of the business or company utilizing Quickbooks. For example, you may want to have your logo customized in the invoices, as well as the clients ‘or customers ‘data. It is also convenient for online banking so you can keep track of transactions with fellow vendors and customers.

A little history

So many things have changed since the day man discovered how to manage and keep track of their profit and overall finances. We have come a long way in making the accounting process easier but no less sophisticated. Located in Mountain View, California, USA, Intuit is a company founded by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx in 1983, after the successful launch of Quicken which was a software developed for individual financial management. Then came Quickbooks with a promise of offering services similar to that of Quicken.

The software gained immediate popularity among small business owners who had little formal accounting training or knowledge. They didn’t need a professional accountant to take advantage of its features so that Quickbooks soon carried up to eight five percent of the market in accounting software. It is safe to say that it became a massive hit, and with good reason.

What Else Does It Do?

It does a nice job of accurately tracking profit, income and expenses. This means the businessman wouldn’t have to worry about his tax return because it is already taken care of and well recorded. Transferring or even manually entering bank transactions made, including credit card and loans are made real time. You save time, you get to save money.

Among its many features is being able to save pdf copies of payments, bills and all other important information that deals with your finances. Every businessman needs to know a thing or two about being paperless and this is just a very good way to start, nice and easy since the software is also popular for being user-friendly.

About the Versions: Pro Vs Premier, Key Points

In an office, it is expected that you would want more than one person to use this software and the number of simultaneous users should match the number of paid licenses you have. The Pro version allows three users and you can have five with the Premier version working on the one and the same file at the same time. Intuit says no exceptions so that should be easy enough to understand.

There are some things not included in the user guide and one of them is the allowable file size for data. These versions can use some updates and when it does run some serious updates, there will be problems in storing data that needs a bigger space. This will cause a delay in running reports, so really, both versions are not as indispensable as some of us thought, for technical reasons. With the bigger file size, neither one of the Pro or Premier is safe from being corrupted, in a worst-case scenario.

So, we look at the capacity of the next version which is the Enterprise. It is designed to allow bigger storage for the files of the man whose business and market is growing by the year. If your data can take up to one gigabyte of storage, then you have a good excuse for outgrowing your Pro and Premier version and install Enterprise.

Even if you transition, you can still create and email forms to your clients in three different ways, which all three versions allow and those are by using Microsoft Outlook, web-based e-mail client (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) and the QuickBooks e-mail servers. The last one may require some extra fees. If you are comfortable of email tracking, Outllok is ideal. If you are good without that, you can use the Quickbook email server, whichever you feel safe with.

QuickBooks offer payroll services so you will not have to go over each employee’s payout or salary breakdown with deductions. You can either subscribe or use any reliable third-party payroll system. Your call, but take note that this type of service costs differs from the one charged by using the software itself. You can choose a third-party service which can import data to Quickbooks. If you do not want the third-party service, then you can be sure your data would already be integrated with the software.

It is easy to think about hiring manpower and professional, licensed accountants to manage and take care of the business finances, but most people aware of the advantages of technology and Quickbooks in particular, would also know it is easier to use this software especially if you still consider yourself a small business owner.

Having a pro on your side can win you good financial decisions. But then that may not provide you the results you are expecting to get and achieve, real-time.Quickbooks provides accuracy and having an easy to track, accurate records is an essential function in businesses that cannot be taken lightly, otherwise you may be suffering financial losses before your business can even develop. And that can be painful because there will be no assurance in getting it back once it happens.