This Quickbooks tutorial will examine what you should be thinking about prior to setting up the program, but will also be useful to those who have an existing Quickbooks installation. Of course the same will be true for any accounting program you may use now or in the future.

In anything you do, whether in your business or in your personal life, you will get the best results if you begin with the end in mind!

That's the case whether you are training for the New York marathon or planning a Thanksgiving dinner for all your relatives.

When analyzing your accounting needs, give some thought to how many features in the accounting software you will really need. Are you going to use the software as kind of a "glorified checkbook", merely recording your revenues and expenses so that you can have an accurate cash balance and streamline your tax reporting, or are you needing to have a full-blown job costing system?

Either approach is fine, or anything in between. It's your choice.

As will many other areas of life, it will benefit you greatly to invest the time in learning the capabilities of Quickbooks before settling on any one plan in setting up the software. Again, give some serious thought to your current or anticipated needs. What features would make your life or that of your staff and accountant easier?

Here are some questions that need answering:

How often do you contact your customers, and what method or methods do you use? If you collect your customers' full mailing addresses and email addresses as well as company name, the result will be a list that you can use for market more products and services to customers that you know want to buy from you.

Who do you owe, and who owes you? This relates to accounting processes as well as the structure of your accounting system. You will likely want to structure your reports to easily report your payables and receivables.

Do you operate in multiple currencies? If you currently sell to customers or buy from vendors in countries other than your own, the multi-currency feature will need to be enabled.

Do you create estimates for customers? If so you can easily transfer that estimate to an invoice. Doing so is not only a time saver but also prevents data entry errors.

When do you record expenses into your books? This gets to the issue of whether you are on the "cash" basis or the "accrual" basis. In the former, you record the expense only when the money is spent; and in the latter, you enter the expense immediately when you receive the bill. Any good accountant will do his or her best to encourage you to use the accrual basis; it doesn't really take much more work and it allows much better management reporting.

Do I need to track inventory? Tracking inventory is optional but highly recommended, and Quickbooks gives you a great amount of flexibility in how to handle it.

Do I (or should I) charge interest to customers who don't pay in a reasonable amount of time?

Do I charge my own or staff time to customers? If so, you can enter time sheets just once, and then easily push that time to invoices.

Use the functionality in Quickbooks for your benefit - you can enter a transaction just once and if your reporting is set up properly, you can produce all kinds of reports that will track expenses by department, location, or whatever works for your business.

Quickbooks is such a full-featured program that you can learn something new, even if you are an experienced user. If you keep an open mind, you can use the program to its full advantage.

This Quickbooks tutorial should have given you at least one actionable idea.

Source: www.isnare.com