About QuickBooks Software

Everyone who owns a small business, whether it is a brick and mortar retail store, an online retailer or a service business, must handle the task of basic accounting. This includes writing checks, accounts payable, accounting receivable, billing, and sometimes payroll and inventory ordering. QuickBooks software has been around since personal computing became popular, with their goal to make accounting easy for average business owner.

General Accounting Tasks

All of the basic accounting tasks that need to be done for any business, regardless of what that business does, can be handled by QuickBooks. General accounting functions include a customer database, creating invoices and statements for billing, recording payments from customers, writing checks for accounts payable and keeping a database of vendor information, checkbook reconciliation and the ability to generate reports when tax time approaches.

Flexibility to Customize Forms and Reports

The ability to tailor invoices, reports and other forms as needed by an individual business makes QuickBooks very flexible and widely desirable. An interactive section to customize forms makes it easy to change forms at any time. Reports can also be exported to Microsoft Excel.

Quick Access to Data

QuickBooks allows business owners to instantly see information about their customers, including contact information, and all invoices and payments. It's easy to get the current balance of any customer, and customers who are no longer doing business with your firm can be made inactive and hidden from view, eliminating clutter and reducing the time to find active customer information. Inactive customer data can easily and quickly be restored with a click of the mouse.

Payroll

A payroll section can store employee information and track their paychecks. Past employees can be made inactive and hidden, but their historical data always remains available if needed.

Other Bookkeeping Functions

Purchase orders can be created and interfaced with vendor information to speed up inventory ordering. Shipping orders can be seamlessly created. Time can be calculated for determining job costs and preparing job estimates.

Versions Of QuickBooks

QuickBooks Pro handles all the functions discussed here, and retails for $199. A version for the MAC computer is also available at $199. A Premier version, listing at $399, includes more industry-specific reports and allows for installing industry-specific features, along with the ability to forecast sales and expenses and create business plans.

Resources

• QuickBooks Detailed Information