The most popular small business accounting software by far is QuickBooks. It can be easy to use, is very affordable, and can help you to run your business better. Unfortunately, QuickBooks is quite often not used to its potential. Here are some things you should be doing with QuickBooks:
Running Financial Reports: To know how your business is performing you can do so by running a profit and loss report to view income and expenses. You can easily compare results from year to year, month to month, or any time frame you wish. The same applies to running a balance sheet, which shows you amounts such as customer receivables, loan balances, cash balances, and equity balances.
Reconciling Your Accounts: QuickBooks makes it easy to reconcile your bank, credit card, and other accounts to your monthly statements. This way you know that your balances are correct and can quickly fix any discrepancies.
Customer & Sales Metrics: It is important to know who your largest customers are and you can figure this out by running a report called “sales by customer.” You can also run reports to see sales by product, service, or item. Additionally, by running accounts receivable reports you will know your customer balances.
Keeping Track of Vendors: While it’s important to know who owes you money, you also want to know who you need to pay and when. Bills can be entered with due dates and amounts so you can better plan your cash flow.
Budgeting: Instead of using Excel to create a budget and manually update it, you can create a budget within QuickBooks. Then you can plan for the future better and compare the budget vs. your actual results.
An alternative to QuickBooks is to go back to using ledger paper, which is shown in the photo above, but let’s not go back in time!
It is important to utilize QuickBooks as much as possible as a tool to help your business prosper.