QuickBooks and Accounting Support
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Why bother keeping good books?
Good bookkeeping is at the core of running a successful business. First, it sets the stage for understanding what's happening within the business. This, in turn, allows for proper control and better management decisions to be made.
Secondly, many business owners may wish to sell their businesses at some point. This will require a potental buyer to conduct due dilegence of the business and books. If the books are a mess, it will be difficult to determine the true value of the business and will likely result in an offer for less than the business is really worth. It will cost the owner either way: pay for good bookkeeping up front, or pay when the business is sold.
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A Word about QuickBooks
QuickBooks is a good small-business management software choice. It allows for invoicing customers, purchasing supplies and inventory, paying employees and reconciling accounts, to name a few functions. As accounting software, it is marginal. In fact, many accountants do not like QuickBooks. The reason is that it allows transactions to be entered that don't conform with sound accounting principles. Unless the user is trained to understand what is happening "behind the scenes" from an accounting standpoint, QuickBooks permits erroneous entries to be made. This will ultimately distort the true picture of the business.
The keys to using QuickBooks effectively: Setting it up correctly, especially on the items list and chart of accounts, and entering the transactions properly. We can help in both areas.
How We Can Help
We primarily support QuickBooks, as most (85%) small businesses use it as their accounting and management software. We can support other software such as Peachtree and a few others, but most of our staff are QuickBooks Certified Professional Advisors and are best able to work in the QuickBooks environment.
These are really tune-ups, as corrections to client books are typically made on the spot. The business owner or QuickBooks user typically finds this process highly beneficial, as shortcuts and tricks to using the software are demonstrated. The entire process is usually fairly fast, and are often offered on a complimentary basis.
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Consider outsourcing your bookkeeping function with us. We can almost certainly do your books faster and more effectively than most non-accountants. This will most likely save you money and free up time to allow you to be doing more productive things, such as meeting with clients or finding new ones. So if you or your QuickBooks person is not a trained accountant, consider using us.
Other Services:
- QuickBooks set-up
- QuickBooks clean-up
- Month and Year-End
- Troubleshooting QuickBooks
- QuickBooks Training-group or individual
- Fraud Deterrence
- Payroll Services
- Sales Tax compliance and reporting
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Paperless office set-up
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Understanding Financial Statements
Bookkeeping is not done simply for the sake of keeping a set of books. Generating meaningful reports and financial statements is the purpose for good bookkeeping. However, many QuickBooks users and business owners don't generate reports. In effect, QuickBooks is serving as simply an expensive checkbook for those users.
(A word here about terminology: bookkeeping is generally meant the proper entry of financial data and transactions; accounting refers to report generation and IRS compliance.)
Why don't many users generate reports? Because they don't understand what the reports are telling them. The information doesn't mean anythng to them. In fact, most accountants are unable to interpret financial statements from a management standpoint. Why? Because the accountancy world is designed for reporting purposes, that is, for tax reporting. While important, tax reporting doesn't help business owners interpret financial reports with the objective of running their businesses more profitably.
Yet, most business owners want to run more profitable businesses. This will require one more step after 1) good bookkeeping, and 2) accounting: financial management.
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