3 Reasons to Use QuickBooks for Your Business

As a small business, which would you rather do: improve your bottom line through increased sales, customer recruitment and customer retention OR spend your valuable time figuring out your back office accounting?

Owning and/or working in a small business is challenging. It requires patience and hard work. Yet, while most small business owners are also entrepreneurs who thrive on the ability to work for themselves and do what they love, getting paid for your products and services is vitally important to the health of the business.

As a result, you need to figure out how to record, track and manage your money. QuickBooks® does that by making it easy to organize all of your financial data in one central location. With QuickBooks, you can manage your money, pay bills and track payments.

Get Away From Excel

One of the first decisions facing a small business owner is the type of accounting the business will use. You’ll want to track income and expenses, and monitor the business’s overall financial health. Knowing exactly how much money is coming in and going out is critical.

It’s not unusual to find many business owners keeping their books on an Excel spreadsheet. While the information seems to be organized, your data has no way to integrate with the rest of your business, let alone generate the kinds of reports you need and the information you’ll need at tax time.

For this reason alone, QuickBooks is ideal because it tracks and organizes your financial data. It puts all of your financial information at your fingertips so that you can make smart business decisions.

Cash Basis vs. Accrual Method

Small businesses must also decide if they are going to use a cash method or accrual method for their accounting. The cash method is the most commonly used method for small businesses. Here, you record income when you receive payment, whether by cash, credit card or check, and you record expenses when you pay them. With the accrual method, you record income when a sales transaction occurs, even if you have not received payment. Expenses are recorded when you physically receive the good or service, even if you haven’t paid for it. This method is common for larger businesses or small businesses that rely on invoicing.

QuickBooks supports either method. In fact, the first time you use QuickBooks, the software will walk you through the process with a simple set of questions to help identify the accounting method you’ll use. You can also turn additional features on or off, and customize QuickBooks for your needs.

Compliance is a Snap

QuickBooks keeps accurate records in accordance with the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to ensure that you maintain balanced books and accurate orts. This is made possible by recording income and expenses, and while this process sounds simple, having a system in place to do this automatically is key.

QuickBooks puts all of your transactions in one place, performs calculations, organizes and posts transactions to the appropriate accounts, and provides critical orts such as the income statement, balance sheet and year-to-date and year-to-year comparisons. It even helps you track bills and sends you alerts when bills are due.

Running your business is all about focusing on what you do best, whether that’s being in front of your customers, spending time on sales and marketing, or even taking a well-deserved vacation and letting someone else at your company sweat the small stuff.

This sound SMB accounting advice brought to you from our (super experienced) friends at Intuit.

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