How QuickBooks Online Accountant Will Save Your Time in 3 Ways

Most small business owners are basically accountants themselves. They file their paperwork on time, they keep receipts meticulously, and they always remember to make sure that there’s money in the bank before they write a fat check for a new computer. Just kidding. Small business owners are like financial goldfish. That’s why they hire accountants like your beautiful, anal self. You remind them to do all the things that they would otherwise never remember – or even know – to do.

That’s where QuickBooks Online Accountant comes in, to help you keep a better eye on everything that’s going wrong.

It’s a free bit of software for anyone who signs up for the QuickBooks ProAdvisor program or who uses the software to manage at least one client with a QuickBooks Online account. More on the details and restrictions on QuickBook’s site.

Apart from having a clearer view of your goldfish tank, QuickBooks Online Accountant also gives you tools to help solve some of your clients’ most common problems. Here are three ways QuickBooks Online Accountant can make your life a little bit better.

Trial Balances for QuickBooks : 

Trial Balances for QuickBooks is the biggest bit of new fun for Accountant users. Last fall, Intuit rolled out a Trial Balance feature for QuickBooks Online Accountant (can we just call this QBOA?). As explained over on the Sleeter Report, Trial Balance means that you no longer need to export form QuickBooks to Excel, make your year-end adjustments, and then reimport into QuickBooks. Instead, you can manage the whole thing in QBOA. This used to be partially covered by the book-to-tax system, which moved data into Intuit Tax Online and let you map accounts to tax forms.

The underlying problem was one of access. Clients continued to make changes as year-end work was being done. Now, with Trial Balance, you can see what changes have been made by your meddling goldfish. You can still manage tax mappings and a whole host of other little details that make moving accounts into Tax Online simple and straightforward. If you’re already happy with the Intuit environment, the addition of Trial Balance into QBOA is going to be a huge time saver.

If you use another option – like Intuit’s Lacerte or ProSeries – you’ll still need to import/export to move your data.

Reporting tools in QBOA :

Basic reporting tools are the foundation of good financial understanding. While many businesses and accountants will be happy with profit and loss, cash flow, and income statements, QBOA gives you option to make more interesting reports. One of the nice, newer options is the ability to generate P&Ls that cover individual months or quarters. These are especially helpful for clients who have heavy seasonality in their revenues or expenses. Highlight the big pops and falls without getting clients bogged down in an overly large picture. With QBOA gives you the ability to add notes to charts and reports, which you can then export to PDF.

Value-add is the accounting buzzword for 2016 – and also for the rest of time. More and more automation gives accountants the freedom to focus on making the businesses they work with better at everything they do, not just in their financial management.

Give your clients something they can sink their teeth into. Goldfish don’t have teeth, but you get the idea.

Fix those pesky errors quickly :

There’s a long list of reasons accountants are valuable, but one of the big ones is that accountants understand all the bits of business finance that owners don’t. Inevitably, the month ends with a review of office supply purchases marked ‘uncategorized’ and 4AM takeout Chinese splurges marked ‘travel.’ In QBOA, you get a nice suite of tools to go through and make quick changes to miscategorized entries, view entries that clients have voided or deleted, and write-off past-their-collection-window invoices.

While I’m talking about this last thing, it’s the bread and butter of QBOA. It’s a tool you’ll use every day to manage your clients’ accounts more easily.

Drawbacks

You know that little plastic castle you dropped in your fish tank? The one that the fish loved and swam around and then got kinda trapped in and died? It would have been perfect for another fish, but maybe it wasn’t great for your fish.

QuickBooks wants to tighten the links between your accounting firm and their brand. QBOA gives you a great set of tools, but it wants you to massage your workflow into the Intuit mold. If you’re not effective in Inuit products, QBOA isn’t going to change that.

If you’re in a growing accounting firm and you’re not sure what kind of clients you’ll take on in the future, trying to shoehorn everyone into QuickBooks Online can be dangerous. Plenty of clients will get better support and management from another accounting package, so becoming dependent on QBOA will put future-you in a bind.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it twice – an accounting software system is an ecosystem. Building that system with the wrong pieces can bring the whole thing crashing down.

Check out QuickBooks Online Accountant, see if it mirrors your existing workflow – or the workflow you’d like to have – and sign up for an account. Even if you only have one client on QuickBooks Online, it’s free. Keep an eye on developments – 2015 brought a host of new functionality – and if it turns into something you love, make the switch.

Let me give one more shout-out to the Sleeter Report. If you’re an accountant who doesn’t follow it, I think you might be doing it wrong. And,always check out Quickadviserhelp.com for more tips and insights into the world of accounting software.

Source Url:  http://www.quickadvisor.net/blog