Is QuickBooks Right For Your Business?

April 25, 2012 by Ed Becker

If you ask business owners why they chose QuickBooks for their bookkeeping needs, you get several basic responses.

1.  Some who say “I didn’t give it much thought but I have a friend who uses it.”
2. Others will say “my CPA uses it”
3. A  very select group will who rationalized their decision: talk about features, ease of use, affordability, “links with my bank,” available training programs, etc.

Any entrepreneur with ambitions might start running QuickBooks by themselves but eventually get to a point when the task needs to be delegated to someone with more expertise (and time) for dealing with day-to-day bookkeeping tasks.  This might be an employee or an outside bookkeeping service.   Hiring Aunt Sally or making the receptionist your primary financial person can be very harmful to your company.

QuickBooks is a popular software package and you will find a large labor pool of applicants claiming to know the software very well.  The key word here is “claiming.” Outsource Your Books, LLC has been brought in hundreds of times, after the fact, to clean up the mess for the bookkeeper who “claimed” to have experience.

But selecting something other than QuickBooks isn’t necessarily the answer either.  By selecting another software, you cut down on the labor pool who you can hire, including the real experts and those claiming to be.  Some alternatives are more advanced, but less user friendly.  As a result, they may make running your business even harder, making your accounting functions more expensive.

If you hire a bookkeeper off the street, are you qualified to determine if what they tell you during the interview is accurate? Have you thought about which version of QuickBooks you are using? Windows vs Mac? Pro, Premier, Enterprise? Which year?  Unless you are working with a professional QuickBooks advisor, the bookkeeper off the street is likely to have one version installed on his/her PC: QuickBooks Pro for Windows. However, they should be using QuickBooks Premier Accountant Edition, which is a more robust than all the other versions. The main reason they are not using the best software available is that they just don’t know any better.

As you begin your new venture, making the right decision on bookkeeping software and personnel is critical to your short and long term success.  Conduct a detailed review of your needs to determine which software package (and which version of that package) fits your business the best.  And even more importantly, hire a real expert, not a “claimed” one, to handle your bookkeeping and accounting functions.