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When Quickbooks May Not Be the Answer

Posted: Wednesday, July 15, 2009

by Sandra Klocinski
Bookkeeping & More

When you run a business (or a nonprofit), you track company finances for two reasons: to keep your business running smoothly and to generate the reports required by the IRS and anyone else you have to answer to. Quickbooks helps you perform basic financial tasks and manage your business to make it even better. Here are a few things you shouldn't try to do with Quickbooks:

Work with more than 14,500 unique inventory items or 14,500 contact names. Quickbooks Pro and Premier company files can contain up to 14,500 inventory items and a combined total of up to 14,500 Company:Job, Vendor, Employee and Other names. (The Enterprise Edition increases these limits to 100,000.)
Track prsonal finances. Even if you're a company of one, keeping your personal finances separate from your business finances is a good move. In addition to opening a separate checking account for your business, track your personal finances somewhere else (like Quicken). If that somewhere else is Quickbooks, at least create a separate company file for your personal financial information.
Track the performance of stocks and bonds. Quickbooks isn't meant to keep track of capital gains and dividends you earn from investments such as stocks and bonds. But companies have investments. A machine that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars is an investment that you hope will generate lots of income and you should track it in Quickbooks. However, in Quickbooks, these types of investments show up as assets of the company.
Manage customer relationships. Lots of information goes into keeping customers happy. With Quickbooks, you can stay on top of customer activities with features like To Do items and Memorized Transactions. But for tracking details like membership, project progress and scheduled events, another program like Microsoft Excel or Access would be a better solution. Note: Intuit sells an add-on product called Customer Manager. Also, some third-party customer management prodicts integrate with Quickbooks

Sandy Klocinski has 25 years of practical experience dealing with small businesses: this is the foundation of her exceptional bookkeeping and administrative expertise. Sandy provides professional service while offering competitive rates and personal attention. She is the owner of Bookkeeping & More, a remote bookkeeping service for small businesses.

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