QuickBooks bookkeeping started a new era of business management . Prior to QuickBooks, accountants and CPAs used cumbersome bookkeeping software packages, often with no Wilmington NC support for them. With the advent of QuickBooks, local QuickBooks training became available. Good bookkeeping offers an owner or business manager a tremendous edge in the marketplace.
The potential of QuickBooks to help manage the business and give it a competitive edge was seldom actualized. It was possible to have QuickBooks setup properly by a CPA or accountant with QuickBooks expertise. It was possible to have a good QuickBooks bookkeeper that knew the business and captured all that good accounting data in QuickBooks in a timely manner. But in many cases, it wasn’t used for much of anything except interfacing with the IRS for tax preparation. More likely the QuickBooks bookkeeping was limited to accounts receivable and accounts payable management, two areas that most businesses already handled well.
In my opinion, as a long time CPA and tax accountant in Wilmington NC, QuickBooks is still often not exploited to its full managerial potential. QuickBooks has improved. The general quality of the QuickBooks bookkeeper has improved, although it is easier to remain a bad bookkeeper in QuickBooks, generally speaking, than in more traditional accounting software. Local QuickBooks expertise has improved, but some QuickBooks experts aren’t really bookkeepers and don’t understand accounting.
I think the role of CPA in a business using QuickBooks for its bookkeeping and accounting should transcend tax preparation for the IRS, state of NC, or other taxing agency. I am a QuickBooks instructor for Baker College. Baker College has 19 campuses in Michigan and a strong online component. I’ve seen them use two different texts. And I just don’t think a business owner is going to get the most and best use out of QuickBooks, even with good bookkeeping, because most of them are not trained in business.
You know that larger companies have trained CFOs. Brilliant minds have refined accounting and finance over the years to include powerful managerial tools. While QuickBooks and solid bookkeeping provide the basis of some of these tools, many managers just never make the leap that a little help from an interested CPA could provide. I try to produce customized tools for a particular manager running a particular business. QuickBooks is the stepping stone to trend analysis, cash flow management, budgeting and basically running a company “by the numbers”. While running a QuickBooks company by the numbers is not the entire solution, it does provide considerable help in understanding how a company operates financially, and good insights as to where it can go.
If you need a free initial consult with a CPA and tax accountant well experienced with QuickBooks, please call us at (910) 399-2705.