QuickBooks Tip: Stay Up to Date with Our Help!

We all know QuickBooks is a powerful, cost effective business management tool.  But staying up to date on the never-ending list of updates and new features can be a full time job.  Here’s how we’re supporting our clients to help you get the most bang for your QuickBooks buck.

Kicking off the New QuickBooks Lunch and Learn Series

Meredith’s daughter, Tallulah, getting ready for the trip to Las Vegas.

We were proud to launch our free QuickBooks Lunch and Learn series (OK, breakfast, too) aimed at enhancing the knowledge and workflow of our current clients. Our Miami office kicked off these events by hosting two days of hands-on training. The first classes, taught by Lisa Grossman, CPA, and Lori Bucci, CPA, gave our clients training in analyzing financial data through the use of customized reports. The next sessions, which I led along with my colleague Terri Richards, CPA, showed users how to embrace automatic bank and credit card feeds and eliminate the need for manual data input.

If you were unable to join us, please stay tuned for the next invitation and tell us what topics you’re hoping to see on the class schedule via the comment section below.  We also invite you to download the free QuickBooks training guides developed for these classes.

Visiting with Intuit for the inside scoop on QuickBooks

In addition to these new in-house sessions, the Kaufman Rossin QuickBooks team also took to the road this fall! First, we had a great time attending the 2014 QuickBooks Connect conference in Silicon Valley as a special guest of Intuit.  This invitation meant we had the opportunity to meet with QuickBooks executives and product development engineers to collaborate on future product features and hear the inside scoop on how the QuickBooks landscape is changing.  Plus, with speakers like Magic Johnson, Arianna Huffington, and Martha Stewart, we were treated to some great stories about what makes successful entrepreneurs tick.

What happens in Vegas…

Next, we packed up our adding machines for The Sleeter Group Accounting Solutions 14 Conference in Las Vegas.  The Sleeter Group is a professional association of accountants focused on using innovative and tested tools to generate greater efficiencies and higher profits for the entrepreneurs we serve.  The 2014 conference brought great updates on QuickBooks, Sage, Xero, and other up-and-coming competitors – plus information on an array of add-on applications.

The following are the biggest takeaways from these two conferences. You’ll be hearing us talk more about them in future blog articles:

• Moving on up … to the cloud! – Whether it’s through QuickBooks Online or Hosted QuickBooks Desktop, business owners are making the switch to the cloud by housing their financial data online. Having easily accessible shared data means the days of sending backup files are over. Now everyone works from the same, constantly updated set of clean data.
• Chunk-ifi-what? – “Chunkification” is what Doug Sleeter, founder and president of The Sleeter Group, calls the increasingly common practice of using industry-specific, customizable add-ons to supplement an accounting system such as QuickBooks or Sage. With thousands of powerful applications created by independent, niche software developers, you no longer have to settle for a “one-size-fits-all” accounting package. You can find applications to tackle customer management, billing, time sheets, and other essential business processes.
• Business metrics – With all the data we can extract from QuickBooks, it can be easy to get lost in a sea of numbers. The trick is to use QuickBooks features and key financial analysis add-ons to put these  figures into easily interpreted, visual reports that allow a company to react quickly and make the necessary course corrections. If you’re not looking at a set of meaningful management dashboards on a regular basis, reach out to your team and ask for recommendations.

If you have questions about how you can better use QuickBooks for your business needs, contact me or another member of Kaufman Rossin’s QuickBooks ProAdvisors team. Stay tuned for more developments in the future, and please keep your questions, comments, and ideas coming!