QuickBooks “101”
When starting a business, it is essential to build a solid accounting foundation to stay organized, increase efficiency, obtain financing, control expenses and know your bottom line so you can quickly make adjustments if needed. Sometime though, hiring a bookkeeper isn’t in your budget when you are starting up, and that’s ok! We’re still here to help.
What We Do
We’ll work with you to setup your accounting systems and customize your chart of accounts, then train you how to do it yourself.
- We’ll discuss your revenue streams and how to best keep track of the money coming in. Our goal is that when you look at your profit and loss statement you’ll quickly be able to tell where you money is coming from, and perhaps what category isn’t doing as well as you hoped (and know that this could be the area to either focus on growing or move away from).
- Keeping track of expenses might be one of the largest concerns for new business owners. With expenses, we’ll discuss where your money is going and particular areas you want to track. Are there industry specific expenses you need to track? Do you have cost of goods sold (COGS) or cost of services to track? Do you have inventory? Do you have employees where you want to capture all expenses related to them (not just payroll). These are just some examples of discussion topics we use to customize your chart of account to you to make it easy to see where your money is going.
- The number one recommendation for starting a new business is to immediately open a business checking account. During the initial setup, we’ll work with you to get all your bank accounts and/or credit cards entered and linked to your accounting software.
- Did you purchase (or will you purchase) any assets to get up and running? A new computer? A sign for your building? Did you have to spend money making changes to your rented office space (aka leasehold improvements)? These are all examples of assets that should be recorded as such and not just as an expense.
- Did you have to take out a business loan to start your business? Many entrepreneurs do and almost all don’t know how to record them properly in their accounting system. Luckily we do, and we’ll get them entered for you during this setup.
But wait, there’s more!
After we’re all said and done with creating your chart of accounts, we’ll have a training session to teach you how to do the data entry and reconciliation yourself. And if you have questions when you’re out doing it on your own (because it is inevitable that something crystal clear when we work together will immediately turn into mud when you are set free to do it on your own), you’ll have the comfort in knowing that we are just a call or email away from helping you through.
We also offer training sessions for anyone having trouble or needing a refresher in QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Online is different than Desktop. The workflow is different and to make things more complicated things are called something different in QBO. If you are someone that has all the initial accounting work completed but just needs some assistance with QuickBooks Online, we can do individual training sessions to get all your questions answered and get you on the right QBO track.
