I have used Excel for years now, ever since I retired the Commodore Amiga! My wife has used Excel at her office and set it up for me, so I cannot say much about the pros and cons. I definitely think that QuickBooks is a great program for folks like us. It not only keeps the books, but I write all business checks on it. well now most bills are paid online, but those all go through QuickBooks too. You can download your business credit card bill or bank statements straight into QuickBooks. It also produces reports in seconds. One could be sent to your tax expert, or directly into TurboTax. Last month, I looked at profit and expenses in 2008 and compared to 2007. I like to track which kind of work is increasing or decreasing. I made much more money doing shop work in 2008 for instance. There is a program called Customer Manager which is designed to work with QuickBooks, made by Intuit also. It is designed to help with appointments, projects, and communications. It will also synchronize with QuickBooks and other programs to reduce the double entry of data. I recently upgraded computers. what a pain! I had to retire the E-mail program I have used for years: Earthlink Total Access and Mailbox. I found that it is no longer supported. Also that there is no straight forward way of transferring the data into a new program.. I had to hire a dude from the Geek Squad to transfer it into Outlook. Say what you like against Microsoft, at least they upgrade and support software. I have dealt too many times with the little guys who faded away. Here is an article that ran in the Journal a few years back; not much has changed. Follow the Money By Bruce Dornfeld, RPT Economic Affairs Committee When running your own business, there are many reasons to keep good track of your money. If you want accurate records for taxes, good information to make budget decisions, or the data to compare this year to a previous year, you need to do some bookkeeping. It may not be as much fun as buying a shiny new tool, but if you want to keep doing the work you love and keep the family happy and fed, you've got to do it! When I started my piano service business, I used the Dome Simplified Weekly Bookkeeping Record. Earnings for each day were entered in one box, expenditures on the facing page. Everything was totaled for the week and year-to-date. At any point you could compare one year to another, but to compare one month to another required doing a bit of math. In the later years of using the Dome method, I did not add up expenses regularly. This was in part out of being busy and lazy, but I collected the whole year's cash receipts at year's end and added them in then. Now I use QuickBooks by Intuit, the same folks who bring us Quicken. I've used several versions; currently it's QuickBooks Pro 2006. It does everything the Dome books did and a lot more. All of my business checks are printed from QuickBooks, all of my income is entered to make out my weekly bank deposits; it prints out my deposit slips. The business credit card statement is downloaded online. With these activities, there is very little else to enter and using this system forces me to keep up-to-date. Of course, it does the math and hasn't made a mistake yet. QuickBooks does a lot more than the bookkeeping too! One helpful feature is to keep an inventory of items sold often, such as Cory polishes, caster cups, Dampp-Chaser systems and Humidifier Treatment. You can choose what level of any item to reorder; so when there are only three bottles of Humidifier Treatment left, QuickBooks says it's time to buy more! It can also remind you of clients that have not paid you yet; I chose to set it for forty-five days so I don't have to look at everything just billed. When bills should be paid, it reminds you of that too! As bills come in, they are all entered with an amount and date due. The list of vendors makes it easy to keep all information about them at hand. When I start to enter a bill from a vendor that I have done business with before, after two or three letters, QuickBooks fills the rest automatically. It will include the address, account number, category (see next paragraph), and the vendor's terms. When I enter a bill from Schaff, it will show their terms: 2% 10 net 30, so if I want the two percent discount, it needs to be paid right away. When it is paid, my Schaff account number will print out on the check, as will Schaff's address. Bills to pay or invoices to clients that are on a regular schedule are set up on the Memorized Transaction list. The reminder list will show the library and churches that are invoiced quarterly. Even if a phone bill gets misplaced, and not entered as it comes in, a reminder will show it needs to be paid. When tax time comes, everything is ready for a tax specialist: all expenditures are categorized. For example, when a check is written to OfficeMax or to Kinko's, QuickBooks categorizes them as office expense and has the proper tax line for IRS schedule C entered. Most years, the computer sends this information to the TurboTax program and I prepare my own taxes with that. TurboTax is another Intuit product and like QuickBooks, has video tutorials for key tasks. Other software that QuickBooks is designed to work with include Excel, Word and Outlook. Business planning and productivity tools are plentiful. It is easy and fast to create custom reports on anything related to your business finances. You can compare last year's income to this, by month, quarter or whatever makes sense. You can create sales and expense forecasts, or break down your advertising costs for each company you place ads with. If you are applying for a mortgage, you can generate the kind of report that will satisfy any lender. In short, you can get great control and understanding of your business's finances. If you aren't already using QuickBooks, try it! You can bet that your competition is! Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net North Shore Chapter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090303/1764a549/attachment.html>
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