Businesses that grow beyond QuickBooks capabilities can suffer from inefficiencies, including data integrity issues. Using workarounds (exporting to spreadsheets or creating homegrown applications) can be expensive and time-consuming.
All Plus features, plus a dedicated account team, advanced business analytics, batch invoicing, and workflow automation. Includes tools for separating personal and business expenses and quarterly estimated taxes.
Pricing
Quickbooks offers robust features to help small businesses save time and money. These include recurring invoices, payment reminders, and automated bank and credit card transaction data sync. This eliminates manual data entry, which can be time-consuming and open the door to inaccuracies and redundancies.
The QuickBooks cost, or the pricing structure, features five plans, each offering additional facilities. Customers can choose the plan that fits their needs while saving on extras they don’t need. They can also easily elevate their project to a higher level without costly upgrades.
For example, the Plus plan provides inventory tracking and project management functions, allowing up to five users per account. This plan is ideal for retailers and wholesalers. It also includes unique reports for contractors that track costs and profitability on a per-project basis. This can be a massive benefit for growing companies.
Functionality
As a general accounting tool, QuickBooks allows small businesses to manage invoices, track expenses, and pay bills. It also helps them compile business tax data for annual filings. It also has features that help small businesses manage inventory. For example, it automatically allocates sales revenue to cost of goods sold (COGS) accounts. This reduces taxable income and saves valuable time when preparing taxes. It also alerts users when inventory levels are low and requires ordering.
However, the functionality of QuickBooks is limited and can become limiting as the business grows. Organizations that outgrow the tool often spend a lot of time managing workarounds. This can result in a wide array of errors and costly inefficiencies.
Fortunately, QuickBooks offers more than 650 integrations that allow you to connect the software to other applications and platforms that can streamline processes. For example, you can integrate PayPal to import payments and other services that make it easier to run a business.
Customization
QuickBooks offers several customizable capabilities to help you manage your finances. It can track inventory, integrate with merchant services, and automate sales tax calculations. It also allows you to track expenses and income from multiple accounts. The software includes balance sheets and profit and loss reports that provide a snapshot of your company’s financial status at any time.
Its multidimensional reporting helps accounting teams gain more visibility into revenue recognition and deferred costs. This can be very important for software and service companies with multiple deliverables in a bundle (such as upgrades, license counts, or additional features) requiring accounting to recognize revenue at different times.
QuickBooks helps enforce the segregation of duties by controlling data and functionality via role and user-based permissions. However, this doesn’t quite compare to the robust control environment. The latter allows you to limit access to specific transactions with transaction tracking tags.
Support
Intuit’s QuickBooks products include on-premises accounting applications and cloud-based versions that accept business payments, manage and pay bills and provide payroll functions. They are designed primarily for small and medium-sized businesses.
The platform offers comprehensive support services, including accountant help and online resources. Dedicated phone support is available Monday-Sunday, and online support is available around the clock. Customers can choose from various plans, from local access to annual pricing that rises with more users and cloud access.
In addition to basic features, QuickBooks offers industry-specific versions that reflect workflows and terminology for wholesalers, manufacturers, contractors, professional service firms, non-profit entities, and retail operations. The software also provides robust inventory management tools for capturing costs, tracking sales, and determining taxable income. This functionality enables companies to more accurately track the life cycle of fixed assets from creation, depreciation, and revaluation to disposal. This helps organizations reduce their tax liability and improve financial visibility.
