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Are you a typical small business owner that wants to be more efficient and save money then read on to learn how an online accounting system can help you save time, and make your employees more efficient, and may even streamline one of your businesses processes to save you money. These are just four common examples that may be indicative of your business. Many other examples exist, however this article will was written to solely address these four examples. Do You Have These Business Problems ? 1. Your checkbook is out of balance and you or your bookkeeping have to contact the bank daily to get the checkbook balance. 2. Your bills are manually prepared in Word or Excel and then re-entered into your computer without any reconciliation. 3. You do not have or use the invoice estimating feature of your accounting program. 4. You do not keep a real time listing of your receivables and payables and its always takes a lot of time to get customer and vendor information or you keep this information on Excel. With an online based accounting system, such as QuickBooks Online Plus, you can change and have real time access to your accounting information from any web enabled computer from your customer’s office,your home, on the road, hotel or virtually anywhere. You can access accounting information on your Blackberry or I-Phone. You can even be at a customer’s office, and you or your employee has completed a project,you can prepare the bill and print it out and personally deliver it to the customer. This time savings will facilitate your cash flow for two reasons. First, the bill is given to your customer in real time and the second reason, you are able to bill in the field in real time, or your employee can email the bill to to you for your approval. Alternatively, you can access review and correct the bill as soon as its prepared by your employee in the field, providing you have an online accounting system on your computer, with WIFI or wireless air cards. Now it gets better, by using the estimate feature in QuickBooks or any other online accounting system, you can have consistency, accuracy and completeness between the estimate and the final invoice. Two more important benefits is (a) cash flow improvement resulting from quicker billing and (b) the potential to improve the process, you may be able to save considerable time for yourself or reduce the time required by your bookkeeper. Remember, you do not need a wired network when using an Online Accounting system, since youre getting the information from the Internet through WI-FI. And don’t forget the time savings and fuel savings by not having to go to your office to get your accounting information when you are now able to access the information online. Too often small business owners do not reconcile their bank statement to a checkbook balance and rely on daily calls or online inquiries to the bank to determine their daily cash balance. At a minimum every business should know their daily checkbook balance and to do otherwise, is not a good business practice. Without a procedure to reconcile a company’s checkbook monthly to a bank statement, is a serious weakness in any system of internal control and could very well create the opportunity for fraud. Many small businesses do not use the accounts receivable or accounts payable programs included with their accounting packages or if they use it, they do not use in real time. This type of information is crucial to running your business. Accounts receivable and accounts payable systems gives real time information to make business decisions and to properly understand your future cash positions. Another benefit of any online accounting system is having one central source, in real time for all of your invoices and support for customer deposits,i.e. a general ledger and accounts receivable and accounts payable journals. With an online accounting system you can view from anywhere the accounts receivable and accounts payable balances in detail or with summary aging reports. One tip, is to use the emailing feature to bill your customers from the accounts receivable program. Save the postage and time. From the accounts payable side, its equally important to know what you owe, in real time. Its important to have a procedure in place to detect duplicate, erroneous bills or fraudulent bills. With up to date accounts payable information, you can review the accounting payable reports to answer a vendor’s questions right over the phone as to why a bill remains unpaid or to inform the vendor when payment can be expected. QuickBooks or other comparable software provide this information in real time to you, eliminating the need for your bookkeeper to list what you owe in an Excel spreadsheet. If your bookkeeper enters the bills into an online accounting system, like QuickBooks Online Plus, then you can assess that same report from wherever you are and select the bills to be sent out. Again, with an online accounting system you can be anywhere and you will know how much is owed. I have only addressed three important areas i.e. cash, accounts receivable and accounts payable. Another important feature, with an online accounting system, is the ability to compare your actual monthly profit and loss statements to a budget. With a budget tool you can plan for next year and the budget is the prospective statement that helps you understand and see future financial problems before its too late. One last comment, QuickBooks Online Plus does not support inventory and purchase orders, thereby preventing manufacturers, retail and distribution companies from utilizing this software, unless you purchase a 3rd party add on module. There is a significant limitations to QuickBooks Online Plus accounting when inventory is a major part of the balance sheet, the solution is using an accounting system that has remote access, such as QuickBooks Pro or Premier with remote access or a 3rd party inventory add on. This issue has been analyzed in another article that I wrote. Please contact me for a copy. Another time savings is that your accountant or CPA, can review and make necessary corrections online from the accountant’s computer in real time. So if you have a problem, the accountant has easy access to your accounting information to quickly fix the information, thus avoiding the time for the accountant to schedule a visit to your office. As electronic calendars such as Google Calendar or Outlook on our Blackberry’s and I phones have changed the way some businesses utilize secretarial skills, online accounting software may very well be able to improve the way small business run and operate their businesses. About the Author:
Learn how QuickBooks Online provides the essential online accounting tools to manage your business and the freedom to access your financials from work, home, or the road. Sandor Lenner, C.P.A. has provided accounting services for 35 years. He is also a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and works as a part-time small business consultant for a Miami Accounting CPA firm
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Posts Tagged ‘bookkeeping’
Why Online Accounting Makes Sense for a Small Business ?
Sunday, June 28th, 2009Outsourcing Your Small Business Accounting Functions to Family
Friday, June 12th, 2009| Scentsy | Flameless Candles | Wickless Candles |
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If you own a small business, interested in minimizing a portion of your payroll, considering outsourcing your current bookkeeper or accountant, and someone in your family is not working, outsourcing to family may be a viable alternative for you. Outsourcing your accounting or bookkeeping functions may result in reduced payroll costs, or the conversion of fixed costs to variable costs, insurance, benefits and some tax savings, etc. However, before you start outsourcing, you will need to invest in a quality fax machine or scanner. The type of fax machine or scanner depends on the volume and frequency of documents(i.e. vendor bills,customer invoices bank statements, etc.) to be scanned and sent to your outsourced accountant. Scanning or faxing is necessary because all of the source documents have to be sent either by email or fax to the outsourced accountant to record the bookkeeping transactions. As an owner of a small business or the person responsible for the accounting or bookkeeping, it’s important to establish a process by which to monitor the activities of the outsourcing company or person. Outsourcing may make sense, providing a competent and independent person oversees and monitors the financial results on your behalf. We often read that that if you outsource, some of your business accounting functions to a foreign country, then your labor costs will decrease as compared to what you would generally pay in the United States. In these uncertain times, when small business owners are facing survival issues resulting from lost sales, skyrocketing costs, contraction, often exacerbated by family unemployment, then it may make sense to give thought to employing a family member to help with the small business accounting. By employing a family member in your house or outsourcing your accounting function with family in a distant location, rather than outsourcing to another country, you may actually help the U.S. economy, in your own way, by keeping jobs in this country. A baby step,but certainly the right one for our country. This idea works, if the owners or members of the owner’s family can learn QuickBooks, or another comparable online accounting software program. It’s helpful, if the family member has some basic financial knowledge to undertake this responsibility of entering the financial information into an online accounting software. Given the current economy in the United States, there are situations where family members are now unemployed and are now ready, able and available to help and make a positive contribution to the family business. QuickBooks Online Plus is one of many online accounting softwares available and easy to learn. With training, most people with common sense can handle QuickBooks. If you decide to chose this option, it’s important to have a CPA or accountant available to ask questions and to receive timely answers, as well as a mechanism in place to allow for real time or after the fact corrections or adjustments to the accounting records. Under either option, outsourcing to a foreign country or to a family member, an accountant or CPA is the ideal person to monitor either in real time, or after the fact i.e. monthly or quarterly financial information, and to check that the reconciliation process is working and more importantly, that the outsource team or family member,are doing their job. With the correct QuickBooks Online or other QuickBooks versions with remote access, it is possible for your CPA or accountant to remotely monitor an outsourced accounting department, whether the outsourced department is in a distant location or outsourced to family. If you are thinking about outsourcing, it is recommended that you consult with your CPA or accountant to make sure that outsourcing is well suited for your particular small business accounting situation and to help access the skill sets of the person to provide the outsourced service. This concept of outsourcing to one or two family members may not work for a large or mid size business. However, if you own a small business, interested in effectively reducing a portion of your payroll costs, have decided or thinking about outsourcing your current bookkeeper, and someone in your family is unemployed, outsourcing may be right for you. Once again, this will work as long as the outsourced family member is properly supervised and monitored by a CPA or accountant. In the beginning there may be more time required by your CPA or accountant to train and to oversee as compared to time that your accounting professional currently spends each month or quarter. In the long run, the amount of time required by your accounting professional should diminish. Notwithstanding, some time will always be required of your accounting professional to monitor the activities of the outsourced person. About the Author:
Sandor Lenner,C.P.A. / M.B.A has been providing accounting services for companies for 35 years. Also, he is a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and provides QuickBooks support while working as a part-time consultant with Susan Missal Lenner, P.A. . Subscribe to our free monthly newsletter on timely accounting, tax and small business topics. We will not share your email address with anyone.
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Online Accounting - Do You Need QuickBooks Help in Deciding What is Better for My Business,QuickBooks Online Plus or QuickBooks Pro using remote access ?
Saturday, June 6th, 2009| Scentsy | Flameless Candles | Wickless Candles |
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This article has been written to provide QuickBooks help and to assist a small business owner when considering the advantages and disadvantages of QuickBooks Pro with remote access and QuickBooks Online Plus. It should be noted that a less robust version of QuickBooks Online is available and is offered by Intuit,the manufacturer of the QuickBooks products. That software was purposely not analyzed in this article. We should understand the term remote access before we undertake this analysis. Basically, remote access is data communication between a local and remote location and the ability to remotely access such data. Today, its sometimes called a Virtual Private Network. There is also the term, remote desktop which generally means the ability to have a graphical interface shown on a local computer, while a remote computer is in another part of your office or another state,country or world. The definition of online accounting is the ability to process accounting information through the World Wide Web. Now that we have an understanding of the remote vs. online accounting,we can provide some QuickBooks help by comparing and contrasting the differences in two typical small business accounting QuickBooks products,- QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Online Plus. Remote access with QuickBooks Pro allows you to remotely use your desktop QuickBooks Pro accounting program and data while the data is maintained on a networked server in a different location. Accessing QuickBooks Online Plus is similar to pressing a shortcut button for any internet application. QuickBooks Online Plus is a web enabled software application providing many useful online accounting features and functions. An important disadvantage is QuickBooks Online Plus’s inability to handle inventory. For companies that have inventory, this drawback is critical and for those companies that do not have inventory the drawback is not important. The advantages and disadvantages of QuickBooks Online Plus as compared to QuickBooks Pro is analyzed below. The advantages of QuickBooks Online Plus as compared to QuickBooks Pro with remote access are summarized and ranked by level of importance as follows: 1. No wired network required. You can connect different departments or offices in multiple locations or from home as long as you have WIFI. 2. Three simultaneous users plus your accountant are included. You can also add another 25 users for approximately $3 per month per user 3. The Intuit servers back up each day off site 4. Automatic software updates and QuickBooks help support included in cost 5. Quicker and simpler sign in ” Just press your Web shortcut key” The disadvantages of QuickBooks Online Plus as compared to QuickBooks Pro with remote access are summarized and ranked by level of importance as follows: 1. Does not handle inventory and purchase orders, this rules out retail, manufacturing and distribution type companies from using QuickBooks Online Plus 2. Cannot process multiple currencies 3. Unable to open multiple QuickBooks windows in QuickBooks Online Plus 4. No Company snapshot/dashboard in one desktop view You can even outsource some of your bookkeeping and online accounting functions with QuickBooks Online Plus, as long as you establish a system to check and monitor the outsourced employee(s) work. Also by using a typical web based sign-on for QuickBooks Online Plus, you can have simultaneous access from any location, which allows owners, employers, investors to share,collaborate,communicate, and make timely and informed decisions, since everyone receives in real time the same online accounting information. Now, your accountants can provide QuickBooks support by reviewing your QuickBooks online accounting financial data with QuickBooks Online Plus,from anywhere as long as they have internet access. There is no time waiting for them to get back to their office to answer your questions. QuickBooks Online Plus’s small business accounting advantages outweigh its disadvantages of using QuickBooks Pro with remote access, as long as you don’t have inventories in your business or you don’t transact or conduct business in multiple currencies,then my preference is for QuickBooks Online Plus to handle those companies with small business accounting needs. Notwithstanding the above recommendations and before you make any decision it’s important to meet with your CPA or accountant for QuickBooks help,to perform an accounting needs analysis of your business. No matter what you do, it’s also important to test the processing speed of your computer to determine whether the QuickBooks Online Plus as compared to QuickBooks Pro with remote access is best suited for your particular situation. You should also observe and test how your employees manually enter the day to day accounting information to evaluate the speed by which the employees are able to enter the data and the computer/web performance and speed of your significant online accounting processes i.e. billing customers,recording deposits,paying vendors,etc.. About the Author:
Sandor Lenner,CPA has provided accounting services for companies for 35 years. Also,he is a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and offers QuickBooks support and business advisory services . As an Intuit Authorized Affiliate he can offer your businessspecially discounted QuickBooks software.
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