QuickBooks never calculates incorrectly, transposes numbers, or loses critical sales and purchase transaction forms. Its design helps prevent the kinds of mistakes that human accounting employees sometimes make.

But it goes further, offering numerous built-in tools that help improve accuracy and ensure that the financial insight it provides is valid. The software:

1. Provides a Chart of Accounts tailored to your business type

When you write checks or enter bills, you assign them to one of these accounts (insurance, office supplies, rent, etc.). You can know where your money is going, helping to ensure the accuracy of your budget, your reports, and your income taxes.

2. Reminds you when there is billable time that needs to be invoiced 

Time-tracking is a separate activity in QuickBooks. So, you could end up with a lot of billable time that never got invoiced – except that the software doesn’t let you. When you start to create an invoice for a customer with outstanding billable time, a window opens reminding you of this and offers to transfer the hours to the invoice.

3. Aids in applying customer payments correctly

When you select a customer in the payments window, you’ll see a summary of his or her open balance, active estimates, unbilled time/expenses, and a list of recent transactions. If there are outstanding invoices or statement charges, these will appear in a table.

4. Includes pre-built templates for a variety of reports

Compiling lists or tables of related data (like customers whose payments are late) is an organizational challenge. It’s time-consuming and not always comprehensive. QuickBooks comes with dozens of report frameworks that can automatically fill in your data in seconds. These reports will help you avoid making critical errors like:

• Damaging your company’s credit by paying bills late – or not at all.
• Spending too much in specific areas – or not bringing in enough revenue.
• Missing your budget numbers by way too much – while you can still take corrective action.
• Monitoring your customer receivables

There are standard financial reports that you should be seeing every month or quarter, like the Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss Statement. These are easy to create in QuickBooks, but difficult to analyze. We’d be happy to help you. Contact us if you want to discuss these or any other element of your accounting.