Quickbooks

Businesses grapple with many challenges, and managing finances is one of the toughest. Many businesses start with spreadsheets for their accounting needs. While this may work initially, as the business grows, it can quickly become a problem. 

Specialized accounting software like QuickBooks are designed to help small business owners address these challenges. It streamlines accounting tasks, reduces errors through automation, and helps you keep up with the financial demands of a growing business.

QuickBooks supports a variety of use cases for small to medium-sized businesses. For example: 

• Invoicing: With QuickBooks, you can create customized professional invoices quickly, track payments, and send automated reminders to your clients.
• Tracking income and expenses: You can link your bank account with QuickBooks to import and categorize all your transactions. The bills dashboard provides a clear view of all your payables, along with fully and partially paid bills. This provides you with the insights you need to predict and manage your cash flow. 
• Managing inventory: As your business grows, manual monitoring of inventory can quickly become very challenging. Using QuickBooks, you can keep an eye on stock levels, set reorder points, and track the cost of sold goods to ensure that you never run out of essential items, or risk too much overstock.
• Organizing expenses and tax: QuickBooks’ automatic organization and categorization of expenses make tax filing less hectic for SMBs. You can also snap photos and save receipts directly within the app, which reduces paperwork and manual reconciliation.
• Tracking employee time: If you work with freelancers or have part-time employees on a time-based payroll, you can easily manage multiple timesheets, use the mobile app to submit or approve time, calculate payroll, and record overtime.
• Automating recurring transactions and bills: QuickBooks enables your SMB to set up recurring invoices, bills, and payments in a few quick and easy steps. These features can significantly reduce your workload and the risk of missing crucial payments.
• Budgeting: QuickBooks lets you create different kinds of budgets – including profit and loss budgets, balance sheet budgets, and custom budgets. You also have the option to import budget data via a spreadsheet.
• Creating accounting reports: QuickBooks offers a variety of customizable reports, including profit and loss statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, overdue invoices, and sales reports. You can filter data by product, customer, and location.

Even though QuickBooks is a viable choice for many small businesses, some alternatives may be better suited to specific needs or preferences. Let’s discuss some of them:

• Wave: Wave is a good option for small businesses or sole proprietors who need basic accounting features for free. Its starter package, which is free of cost, includes essential features like creating estimates, bills, and invoicing. However, if you want to also accept online payments, you may have to pay a certain amount for each transaction.
• Zoho Books: If your business is already using other Zoho products, Zoho Books may be a better option for you. Expectedly, it integrates well with the Zoho ecosystem, allowing you to create a unified platform for managing different aspects of your business, like marketing, e-commerce, and analytics.
• Kashoo: Kashoo is designed for simplicity, making it a good alternative for small business owners who find QuickBooks too complicated. If you want a straightforward solution for income and expense tracking, without the bells and whistles, do check it out.
• Xero: Like QuickBooks, Xero has an extensive feature set that includes invoicing, bank integrations, expense claims, bill payments, payroll, and integrations. If you can’t decide between Xero and QuickBooks, we recommend trying both out for free since free trials are available.

QuickBooks offers a free 30-day trial period that you can avail to see if the tool is a good fit for you. Additionally, it has four paid plans with annual and monthly payment options. You can visit here to choose the right plan according to your budget and preferences. 

Sign Up with Your Email

Visit QuickBooks to sign up using your email. You will be asked to enter your business name, address, industry, etc. After this, you can select your preferred plan or avail a free trial. 

Set Up Your Company Account/Profile

After you have signed up, you can submit basic details about your business to complete the onboarding. You can then proceed to configure the fiscal year of your business and connect your bank account. 

If you are using another accounting software, you can migrate your financial data and history to QuickBooks in a few easy steps.

Start by exporting all your data from your current tool as CSV files. Set your CSV files in the required format for QuickBooks. You can download a sample file with the right format, from “Import data” in the Settings of your account. You can then simply upload the files as an import on QuickBooks.

Importing Data to QuickBooks

• Log in to your QuickBooks dashboard to import data.
• Go to the settings options and click Import Data.
• Select Products and Services.
• Click Browse and then select the relevant file.
• Follow on-screen instructions to map the imported fields with the fields in QuickBooks.
• Once you are happy with everything, select Import.

QuickBooks has a well-developed marketplace that offers integrations with tools across several categories, including payments, capital management, compliance, security, and sales. 

• Paypal: QuickBooks can integrate seamlessly with PayPal to automate transactions and manage cash flows. This integration is beneficial for e-commerce and retail businesses, as they can easily track all their payments and streamline financial processes.
• Shopify: Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform that works well with QuickBooks. Businesses can automatically sync their sales data and keep track of customer transactions.
• Hubspot: QuickBooks can be synchronized with Hubspot CRM to effortlessly manage sales and invoicing.
• Expensify: Expensify integrates with QuickBooks to simplify expense management and reimbursement processes. This integration can help your business track expenses, manage receipts, and reconcile accounts with minimal manual effort.

You can also explore the QuickBooks app store to discover more integration opportunities, including Amazon Business, eBay, Gusto, etc.

Finally, here are some SMB tools for which native integrations with QuickBooks aren’t available:

• Trello: Trello is a popular project management tool among SMBs. It doesn’t integrate with QuickBooks, which means that any financial data and project expenses tracked in Trello won’t automatically sync to your accounting dashboard.
• Slack: Slack is widely used for team communication and collaboration. Although it integrates with many tools, it doesn’t have a direct integration with QuickBooks. So, if you are receiving or sending invoices or financial data via Slack, you’ll need to rely on manual entry or custom connectors.
• Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM is a widely used customer relationship management tool among SMBs. It doesn’t have a native integration with QuickBooks. So, if you decide to use both platforms, you will need to manually sync sales data, customer details, and invoices between them.

These are just a few examples of tools that aren’t compatible with QuickBooks. If you're unsure whether a tool is compatible, visit the QuickBooks app store and search for it. If a native integration for your desired tool isn’t available, you can create one yourself using the QuickBooks API.