Quickbooks is an accounting software package developed and marketed by intuit. It was first introduced in 1992. It lets you invoice customers, pay bills, generate reports, and print reports to be used to prepare taxes. The QuickBooks product line includes several solutions to support different business needs, including QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Payroll, QuickBooks Time, QuickBooks Payments, and QuickBooks Checking.
QuickBooks Products
Not only is QuickBooks the dominant small business accounting software on the market today, but it also offers supplementary products to augment your overall QuickBooks experience. In addition to its accounting products—QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop—these are the other solutions that can help you manage the other aspects of your business.
QuickBooks Checking: You can open a business checking account for free and enjoy no monthly fees or account minimums. Instant deposit is also available at no extra cost. You can apply for free via QuickBooks Online or sign up through QuickBooks Money, which doesn’t have the excellent features of QuickBooks Online.
QuickBooks Payroll: With this, you can manage payroll easily. What’s more, you can track employee hours and billable time effortlessly with QuickBooks Payroll and QuickBooks Online.
QuickBooks Payments: Formerly known as Intuit Merchant Services, this product lets you integrate payments seamlessly on QuickBooks Online. Get paid easily and process online payments effortlessly.
QuickBooks Bill Pay: This new solution allows you to automate your accounts payable (A/P) workflows in QuickBooks Online.
QuickBooks Live: This is an online bookkeeping service wherein you can get a ProAdvisor to work with your bookkeeping needs.
QuickBooks Capital: You can get additional financing options up to $150,000 with this product.
What Does QuickBooks Do in Terms of Bookkeeping?
Invoicing
QuickBooks Online allows you to create invoices and either print them or email them to customers. You can create a new invoice from scratch or by converting an existing estimate into an invoice. The program is known for its customizable invoices—making it our overall best invoicing software. You can upload your company logo, select from different templates, change the invoice colors, edit invoice fields, and add personalized messages for customers.
Bill and expense management
QuickBooks allows you to enter new bills and expenses and keep track of them automatically by connecting your bank and credit card accounts to the platform. By doing so, all your expenses are downloaded and categorized automatically.
If you need to track a check or cash transaction manually, you can record it directly in QuickBooks in a few minutes. You can also add bills in QuickBooks when you receive them so that QuickBooks can help you track upcoming payments.
What’s more, you can set up scheduled bill payments in QuickBooks using QuickBooks Bill Pay, a new built-in feature that replaced the Bill Pay powered by Melio integration. Available in QuickBooks Online Essentials and higher plans, QuickBooks Bill Pay allows you to pay bills via bank transfer or check directly from QuickBooks in a few seconds and pay several bills at once.
Online payments
You can add QuickBooks Payments so that customers can pay online directly from their emailed invoice. It is similar to other merchant services. However, because it’s integrated completely within QuickBooks, the sale, credit card fee, and cash deposit are all recorded automatically as they occur.
Time tracking and billing
Employees or subcontractors can enter their own time as they progress through the day, or a bookkeeper can enter their weekly time if the employee submits a manual timesheet. Time entered and assigned to a customer will be available to add to the customer’s next invoice.
Also, any expense entered can be marked as billable and assigned to a customer. As with time, these billable expenses will be available to add to the customer’s next invoice. You don’t need the payroll add-on to track employee time for billing purposes—you need at least the QuickBooks Online Essentials plan to track billable hours and the Plus subscription to track billable expenses.
Reporting
By managing all of your cash inflow and outflow activities in QuickBooks, you can print financial statements that provide useful information about how your business is performing. Lenders often require financial statements when you apply for a small business loan or line of credit.
You can run basic reports, like profit and loss, balance sheets, and statements of cash flows, and more advanced reports, such as A/P and A/R aging reports and profit and loss by class.
Project management
You can use QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced to create and manage projects, assign income and wages to a project, and track expenses associated with labor and materials. QuickBooks Online’s project accounting module also allows you to generate project estimates and include inventories, labor, and sales taxes. You can monitor the profitability of each project you’re working on by generating a project profitability summary report.
Payroll management
Payroll is an area that you don’t want to skimp on and try to do manually. Mistakes made in calculating paychecks can result in steep penalties and unhappy employees.
QuickBooks has its own payroll function that can automatically calculate and run payroll as often as you need. The best thing about using it is that it’s integrated with QuickBooks, so your financial statements are always up to date as of the latest payroll run.
Inventory management
Available in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced plans, the inventory management feature helps you track the quantity and cost of your inventory. As you sell inventory, QuickBooks will allocate a portion of your inventory to the cost of goods sold (COGS) automatically, which is an expense account that reduces your income.
This allocation is a requirement for calculating taxable income and is very cumbersome to do by hand. QuickBooks can also remind you to order inventory automatically when quantities are low.
Tax preparation
By far, the largest headache in preparing a tax return is compiling your income and expenses. If you use QuickBooks during the year, all you need to do at tax time is print your financial statements. Better yet, with QuickBooks Online, you can invite your tax preparer to access your account directly so that they can review your numbers and print whatever information they need to prepare your return.
If you’re using QuickBooks Online, you or your accountant can easily transfer all the needed tax information through a tax preparation program like TurboTax. Bookkeepers and accounting professionals using QuickBooks Accountant can simplify tax preparation through ProConnect, a professional tax management solution.
Conclusion
QuickBooks is the most popular small business accounting software suite. It comes in a variety of editions and has web-based and desktop programs. QuickBooks includes features that allow you to keep track of your income and expenses, pay your employees, track your inventory, and simplify your taxes.