QuickBooks

Not finding quite everything you need in QuickBooks Online? Here are some handy add-on QuickBooks Online apps available.

QuickBooks Online may work for you just fine as is. After all, it was designed to meet the needs of the millions of small businesses that want to manage and track their income and expenses, create records and transactions, and run reports to gauge their financial health. QuickBooks Online was also designed to grow along with your business. But there’s no need for Intuit to add internal features to do so. In fact, that would make it too expensive and unwieldy for many companies.

Instead, Intuit has partnered with other small business websites to provides add-ons–applications that extend the usefulness of QuickBooks Online in one or more areas, like accounts receivable and payable, inventory, and expense-tracking. They integrate easily to share data and do the extra work you need. Here are some of them to consider:

Bill.com

Bill.com automates your accounts receivable and payable processes. It supports electronic billing and payment, as well as multiple approval levels. You can certainly enter and pay bills using QuickBooks Online. And you can send invoices to customers and receive payments. But adding a connection to Bill.com gives you more advanced options for accounts receivable and payable. Simply send your bills to Bill.com by scanning, emailing, faxing, or taking a picture with your smartphone. The site’s automation tools turn them into digital records and route them through your specified approvers. Once approved, they’re paid electronically or by paper check. Invoices are just as easy to process; customers can pay by using PayPal, credit card, or ACH. Bill.com’s mobile app makes it possible to keep up with invoices and bills while you’re out of the office.

Expensify

Are your employees still paper-clipping receipts to handwritten expense reports? This method is unnecessarily time-consuming – and often inaccurate. Expensify solves both problems. Your staff can take photos of receipts with their smartphones. Expensify then converts the expense information into coded digital records and submits them for approval based on your company’s policies. Credit card purchases can be automatically imported, too. All data is synchronized with QuickBooks Online in real-time and coded to reflect your preference of QBO’s expense accounts, customers/jobs, etc. Once you’ve approved a report, you can have the money deposited in the employee’s bank account the next day.

TSheets Time Tracking

TSheets employee scheduling software automates tasks that QuickBooks Online doesn’t do: scheduling and remote time-tracking for your hourly employees. Your staff no longer has to fill in paper timesheets. Instead, they can use their smartphones to track their hours and GPS location points. And while Excel is certainly better for creating schedules than paper, TSheets takes over that task, too. After you’ve approved timesheets, that information is sent over to QuickBooks, ready for use in your payroll processing.

SOS Inventory

QuickBooks Online performs some basic inventory management tasks. You can create records for items and use them in transactions, and keep track of the number of items in stock so you know when to reorder (or have a sale). SOS Inventory goes well beyond those capabilities. You can create sales orders, track cost history and serial numbers, and document work-in-progress (WIP). SOS Inventory supports multiple locations and the entire pick/pack/ship process.

Insightly CRM

You can create thorough customer records in QuickBooks Online and document some of your interaction. But it doesn’t facilitate true Customer Relationship Management (CRM) nor project management. Insightly CRM does both. It lets you build exceptionally thorough customer profiles so that you can view social streams, email history, and any events, opportunities, or events related to them. Its project management features include the ability to track by pipelines or milestones, define contact roles and custom fields, and generate advanced project reporting.

 

All of these Quickbooks Online apps can work in standalone settings, but their integration with QBO and their mobile capabilities can help you enhance your processes in ways that QuickBooks Online alone can’t.

Give us a call if you need help with your QuickBooks Online. We’re always happy to work with you on getting to know QuickBooks Online better and matching its capabilities to your company’s needs.

You work hard to make sure your QuickBooks data is accurate. Make sure it’s safe, too.

Your QuickBooks company file contains some of the most sensitive information on your computer. You may have customers’ credit card numbers and employees’ Social Security numbers. An intruder who captured all that data could create tremendous problems for you and a lot of other people.

That’s probably the worst-case scenario. But other situations could also spell disaster for your business, which involves losing your company data through fraud, hacking, or simple technical failures.

We can’t overstate the vital importance of protecting your QuickBooks data, especially your customer and payroll information. Whether someone steals it or it’s inaccessible for another reason, it’s gone. Keeping your business going after such a loss would be very difficult – maybe even impossible.

Here’s what we suggest to prevent that.

Internal Safeguards

No business owner wants to believe that his or her employees could use their QuickBooks access to commit fraud. But it happens. Your company file contains credit card and checking account data that could be used for nefarious purposes.

That is why you should restrict user access to specific areas and actions of QuickBooks. You can limit your employees who have QuickBooks access to certain areas and activities, by definimg an employee’s access permissions in areas like Sales and Accounts Receivable, Inventory, and Payroll and Employees.

You can—and should—take numerous other steps to keep your QuickBooks data safe. If your company is big enough to have a dedicated IT expert, he or she will handle most of this. But there’s a lot you can do on your own to prevent data loss and theft.

Keep Your Operating System and Applications Updated

Don’t ignore this dialog box.

Software companies’ occasional updates offer more than just adding new features and fixing bugs. They sometimes refresh your software to ensure greater security based on new threats. Don’t forget about those all-important antivirus and anti-malware applications, as well as QuickBooks itself.

Keep Your Networks Safe

Just as a cold virus spreads around your office, so, too, can unwanted intrusions like computer viruses. Don’t allow an electronic epidemic to get started; take steps ahead of time to prevent it:

• Discourage employees from excessive web browsing. This can be a hard rule to enforce, as some employees probably need internet access for research, timecard entry, and other work-related tasks. Create a firm policy legislating what workers can and can’t do on company-issued equipment (including tablets and smartphones) or any personal devices that use your wireless network.
• Ask employees to refrain from using public networks on work equipment. Enforce the rules vigorously, and make compliance an element of performance evaluations.
• Minimize app installations on business smartphones. Employees should ask for approval. Viruses and malware get in that way, as well as through some websites and email attachments.
• Use monitoring software. If you can’t afford to pay for “managed IT” (a la carte, third-party IT services), install an application that alerts you to problems.

Use Common Sense

You can fight data loss and theft by being cautious. Be diligent about backups, and if you create them on a local, portable device, don’t leave them in the office. Cloud-based solutions are better. Shred papers that have sensitive information on them. Log out of QuickBooks when you’re not using it or when you leave your office. Be aware of who may be around you, looking over your shoulder.

We take data security very seriously in our own office, and we strongly encourage you to do the same. Contact us if you’re at all concerned with your own data safety, and we’ll come up with a plan together.

Your company’s brand

Your company’s “brand” can be composed of many things (and has many definitions), but it’s really about what pops into your customers’ minds when they think of you. Key components include your logo, your color scheme, and any other identifying visual element that people associate with your business.

A good way to reinforce this image is by making sure that a unifying graphic theme runs through every piece of print or web-based customer content you create, like your website, brochures, blog, and ebooks. Your brand should also be visible on all sales forms you dispatch, like invoices and receipts.

QuickBooks Online comes with its own default sales form style; this is the layout and content that will automatically display when you start a new transaction. You can easily change this and have it apply to all transactions.

Your logo and style

Here’s how it works. Click on the gear icon in the upper right of the screen, select Custom Form Styles under Settings and open the table of existing styles. There should be one labeled Standard. You can make either the default by clicking Make Default or Remove as default using the down arrows and links under ACTION at the far right of each row.

Click the edit link for the default style. This screen contains many of QuickBooks Online’s customization tools. Under the Design tab click Change up the template and go through the five design options available and leave the desired one selected. Then click on Make logo edits and add a logo. Browse for your logo file when the directory opens and double-click on it to add it to the top of your sales forms You can specify your logo placement and the size of it. Choose the color scheme you want by clicking on the Try other colors and the desired fonts by clicking Select a different font.

You can decide which fields should and shouldn’t appear on your sales forms

You won’t necessarily need to make every data field available on your sales forms. But you want to include every field you might possibly need without displaying extraneous content areas. QuickBooks Online lets you turn fields on and off and change their labels easily by checking and unchecking boxes.

Click the Content tab to start this process. Click the pencils on the right to edit each section. Among your options here are:

• Form names. Do you want invoices to say “Invoice,” for example? Do you want to use form numbers and allow custom transaction numbers?
• Company. How much of your company’s contact information should appear?
• Customer. Do you want fields for Terms, Due date, etc?
• Custom. Do you need to define custom fields?
• Footer. Add or edit the text that should be displayed at the bottom of your sales forms.

You can customize the email your customers get with every sent form

Click on the Emails tab and write the message you want your customers to receive when you send them their invoice. You can include a thank you message and even payment instructions for your customers.

Click here for QuickBooks Online Getting Started Guide if you are interested in more information on how to use QuickBooks Online.

Consistent, well-designed sales forms will help promote your brand and present a polished, professional image to your customers.

We’re available to help with your QuickBooks. Give us a call today!