Our Favorite QuickBooks Features for Small Businesses
QuickBooks for small business is your small business’ secret weapon. No matter what industry you’re in, bookkeeping is part and parcel of keeping the lights on, satisfying customers, and ensuring paychecks get where they’re going—including to you. But proper bookkeeping is about more than just taking care of the basics. It means thinking long-term too, from budgeting for taxes, to contingency planning for unexpected ups and downs, to laying the foundation for future growth and expansion. These tasks can seem overwhelming, but with the proper QuickBooks training, you have everything you need to handle your bookkeeping right at your fingertips.
Here at Steiner Business Solutions, we train small businesses on how to get the most out of QuickBooks, from the basics of setting up to the more intricate ins and outs of what the program can do. But we don’t just train other businesses on how to use QuickBooks, we also use it ourselves. Steiner Business Solutions has been here in Richmond, VA since 2006 helping small business owners tackle the financial aspects of their business. And throughout that time, we’ve used QuickBooks to take care of our own finances. As we’ve helped other businesses find their footing and grow, QuickBooks has been an integral part of our own growth and success.
Our experience with QuickBooks is why we’re so passionate about helping other business owners add this powerful tool to their toolbox. Here are some of our favorite QuickBooks features for small businesses.
Connect Banking and Credit Accounts to QuickBooks
To manage your small business effectively, it’s imperative that you keep track of money going in and money going out. You also need to know what’s what so you can gain insight into the how and why behind your bottom line. To do that, it’s helpful to classify transactions, splitting them into categories like “Supplies,” “Transportation,” “Marketing,” and more. Looking through bank and credit card statements is time-consuming, and manual entry leaves the door wide open for errors. To skip the hassle and headache, you can connect QuickBooks to both your bank and credit card accounts. When a transaction is processed, it will show up in QuickBooks. You can even set up rules that allow QuickBooks to classify transactions appropriately. Less time, less error, and more insight are a few clicks away.
Email Client Invoices Directly from QuickBooks
As is the case with banking and credit card transactions, it’s important to have your invoices easily accessible in one place. Emailing invoices to clients directly from QuickBooks keeps those invoices with the rest of your small business’ financial information in QuickBooks.
Remember and Automate Recurring Transactions
There are regular transactions that come up for your business on a known, repeatable basis, such as monthly service fees charged to your customers. QuickBooks can memorize these in order to help streamline your operations. Whether you set up reminders to make sure you don’t forget about these transactions, or simply have QuickBooks create them automatically based off of a saved template, this is a great feature to have at your disposal. You can even set up QuickBooks to send out recurring invoices automatically.
Customize QuickBooks Reports
Pre-created reports are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the reporting capabilities of QuickBooks. You can customize these reports to see exactly what you want to see, exactly how you want to see it. Once you’ve saved a report, you can check into it whenever you want to see up-to-the-minute data, or even set up a recurring date to compile and email the report, such as the first of each month. If you need to work with the data in Microsoft Excel, simply export the data from the report straight into an Excel file.
Those are some of our favorite QuickBooks features here at Steiner Business Solutions. If you’d like to learn more about them, or discover a few of your own favorites, give us a call at 804.525.4259.