QuickBooks 2010 Has Arrived!

Just received my copy of QuickBooks 2010 today. It is now available for ordering or download. Can't wait to check it out and see what new features are available. Stay tuned...

New Year's Resolutions

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas surrounded by family and friends. Now it is time to charge ahead to the New Year. I don't know about you, but I am ready for 2008 to be over with. In addition to the bombardment of bad economic news, we in the Houston area also had to deal with a little storm named Ike. Therefore, I am celebrating the New Year a little early. Are you looking for some resolutions? Here are a few you may need to think about putting on your list:

1. Get organized by setting up a good filing system. Get some manila folders and organize your receipts in them by either vendor or by category (insurance, office supplies, charity etc.). Ideally, separate them by year. If you are audited, you will be glad that you did this.

2. Buy some accounting software and USE IT! For keeping track of personal finances, take a look at Quicken. If used properly, it is very helpful for budgeting purposes and answers that age old question "Where does all the money go?".  For small business, nothing beats QuickBooks. Both are simple to set up and use. Work on keeping things up to date at least once a month so you aren't scrambling at the end of the year to update your data file. When it comes tax time, instead of handing your tax preparer a mountain of receipts, you can just give him/her a copy of your Quicken/Quickbooks data file or printouts from the files.

3. If you are self employed, and you don't already have this, set up a dedicated checking account for your business along with a debit card. If you do already have one, stop using your personal accounts and credit cards to pay business expenses. It makes it much more difficult to keep track of things. If you do find yourself occasionally using personal accounts, submit an expense report to your business and reimburse yourself out of your business account for those expenses. This ensures that you have a good trail and all of your business activity remains in your business account.

Happy New Year everybody! Here is to 2009 being a great improvement over 2008!

Free Quickbooks 2009 Offered Monday Only At Staples

On Monday the 22nd, Staples is offering free copies of Quickbooks Pro 2009.  The offer is good in the store or online.  The savings actually come in the form of a rebate.  This is how it works according to the email that I just received from Intuit:

The regular price at Staples is $199.99.

The customer will receive $40 in instant savings.

The customer at the store will receive a $159.99 mail-in rebate form.

When the customer mails in the rebate form they will receive, some weeks later, a rebate for $159.99.

Once the customer obtains the rebate, their base costs are zero: $199.99 - $40.00 - $159.99 = $0.

The buyer may still be responsible for sales tax at the time of purchase; sales tax is not free.

The offer is limited to one per customer and while supplies last!

Sneak Peek at QuickBooks 2009

I just completed my ProAdvisor certification for QuickBooks 2009 and here are some enhancements you can look forward to if you are deciding whether to purchase or upgrade to this latest version:

1)QuickBooks Messenger – QuickBooks has entered the realm of IM. You can chat with your coworkers while within the same data file.

2)Live Community – Opens to the right when you start the program. It shows a run of forum questions and allows you to enter questions of your own.

3) Multi User Enhancements - A top complaint I get from clients about QuickBooks is the fact that you must be in single user mode for many tasks. QuickBooks has now enabled some tasks, such as making a back-up, in multi user mode.

4) Multicurrency Feature – This one makes sense because even small companies are doing more and more international business. A quirk about this feature is that you cannot utilize foreign currency with existing customer and vendor records. You must set up those customers and vendors as new records in order to start them with transactions in foreign currency. This is because all the prior transactions for the "old" customer/vendor were recorded in the home currency before multicurrency was enabled and any new transactions under the "new" customer/vendor will be recorded as foreign currency.

5) Enhancements to Online Banking – I have found online banking within QuickBooks to be hit or miss. In many cases, it is just easier to enter transactions manually than to struggle with downloading and and entering/matching transactions from within online banking. Perhaps they have fixed some of the issues in the new version.

6) Company Snapshot Screen – I think that QuickBooks may have copied this from Peachtree because I noticed that Peachtree 2008 has a similar feature. This is a screen that gives you a “snapshot” of your business with an income and expense trend graph, account balances, a listing of customers who owe, vendors to pay, and reminders.

7) Create a Website - The ability to easily create your own website FREE through Intuit online services. The free trial is for 30 days and then it is just $4.99/month after that to maintain.

8) External Accountant User – When an Accountant user is designated, automatic permissions are set up that are similar to the Administrator's permissions. A couple of differences are that the Accountant does not have permission to view sensitive customer information such as credit card numbers and this user is the only one with access to the Client Data Review feature in the Pro, Premier, and Enterprise versions. I am really looking forward to using the Client Data Review because I think it will be a huge time saver and make it much easier to locate and correct errors in the books.

9) Intuit Statement Writer - Unfortunately this feature is only available in the Accountant's Premier edition and Enterprise edition. It links QuickBooks data with Excel so that us accountants can produce top notch customized financials for our clients. When the data in QuickBooks changes it automatically updates the linked financial statement in Excel.

I have to hand it to QuickBooks...they DO listen to feedback from accountants and customers and implement those suggestions into future program versions. For a one stop shop accounting program, it really is the best thing out there at a reasonable price.