Regardless of your skill level in accounting in general or Quickbooks in particular, people are often looking for a Quickbooks tutorial to help them master a certain task in Quickbooks.
The advantage of using Quickbooks is it allows you, the small business owner, to manage your company’s finances, even if you are not an accounting expert. When your transactions are entered into Quickbooks properly, the program provides reports that are helpful for tracking performance and for effective decision-making.
Day-to-day use of Quickbooks
If you are a QuickBooks user, here’s what you should do to get the most out of the program.
The most obvious activity is to perform bank reconciliations for every company bank account. It’s easy to put off doing bank reconciliations, but don’t overlook this vital step for it give you a higher level of confidence that the reported bank balances actually represent of the cash which can be used paying expenses or making investments.
Quickbooks also contains reports for comparing budgeted results with actual results. This can be useful on several levels depending on the structure of your business and whether employee or manager pay is directly tied to meeting budgetary goals.
Some users find it helpful to download transactions into the program. This can save time but you must take care to avoid duplicate transactions. Of course, if you are doing monthly bank reconciliations, you would notice the duplicate transactions at that time.
Using Quickbooks for Payroll
Payroll can be difficult to manage, due to multiple requirements. Employees need to be paid everything they have coming to them, and there are multiple government jurisdictions that either take a piece of the employee’s paycheck and in many cases add additional amounts that the employer must pay. In addition there are often applicable child support or alimony payments and other garnishments that must be properly computed and withheld from paychecks. On top of this, payroll must often be completed quickly.
There is also an optional payroll outsourcing service available for an additional fee.
Governmental Reporting and Paying Taxes
A good software package like Quickbooks should make it easier for you to submit required reports and pay your taxes on time. This is important in order to avoid penalties and unnecessary staff time dealing with government agencies over disputes with your tax returns.
Summary
Although QuickBooks is intended to be easy to use, at times one may have difficulties operating the program. I hope this Quickbooks tutorial has been useful to you and will encourage you to either pick up a copy of Quickbooks or expand your knowledge and skill of the program.