Today on Scale Your Small Business Podcast we have with us Sarah Quiggle, an advanced certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and a very detail oriented bookkeeper. Her love for numbers led her to pursue a degree in mathematics. She’s great at problem solving and loves helping her clients find solutions to what is troubling them most in their business.
There is so much mystery around finances and many small business owners don’t know what they’re doing and find it hard to admit they need some help. We’re really gonna dive into QuickBooks on this episode. People don’t realize that QuickBooks is really easy to use!
Quickbooks is very user friendly. It can get overwhelming to new users, but it’s got everything at your fingertips. You can find almost anything in QuickBooks, four different ways. It’s a good program to help small businesses just get a grasp on their finances.
One of the best things about QuickBooks is that you can share it with your bookkeeper and your accountant, which makes it so easy from both a business owner standpoint. QuickBooks online is all cloud based. You can access it from your phone, your tablet, or your laptop. This makes it a great solution for the business owners of today.
Sarah works a 100% virtually from central Florida. She has clients all over the United States. She has access to her client’s books, but most importantly they have access to their books. There have been many stories of small business owners who’ve had their books being handled by a CPA who then ghosts them and literally has all of their books on a desktop somewhere and they have no access to them.
One of the benefits of Quickbooks is that its really easy to import your bank transactions or your bank statements into. This is one of the biggest benefits for people who are starting a small business and have been doing all their books on an Excel spreadsheet. You may be able to do that for a while, but once you start getting busy you won’t have time to go through and remember all of the transactions. QuickBooks can directly link to your bank accounts and your credit cards, and it pulls all those transactions in.
What are the chart of accounts that are most important and which ones that a small business start with? It’s different for every business, but a lot of it is very similar across businesses. People may not know what the chart of accounts refers means. They can just think of it as putting money in different buckets, like spending money on advertising or paying for contractors. Your chart of accounts is just a list of all those different accounts. QuickBooks does start you out with a basic set of charted accounts, so you’re not starting totally fresh.
Sarah confirmed that when a business is ready to move from a Google sheet or a spreadsheet any longer, a bookkeeper can help them work through all those chart of accounts and everything needed to make sure that their business is running to its full potential.
The beauty of Quickbooks is it takes the stress of like managing your finances and passed it on to somebody else, but you still have control and visibility over it.
According to Sarah, when you’re working with a bookkeeper they should be giving you monthly reports. You can then double check their work by looking at your profit and loss statements and your balance sheet. She stated that your bookkeeper should also be reconciling your accounts because it is really important that what’s in QuickBooks matches what’s in your bank account and your credit cards.
It can be confusing for people who are just new to QuickBooks to understand credits and debits. Thankfully, if you choose to use QuickBooks you don’t have to know debits and credits.
Is there like a typical kind of business that is best suited for QuickBooks or can really anybody use it because it’s just a massive program with so many different aspects?
Sarah’s answer to this was that she feels it works best probably for service based business. If you’re selling a lot of products, you can definitely use QuickBooks. The desktop version used to be suggested for doing heavy inventory tracking, but they’re trying to phase that out and push everyone towards using the online version now.
QuickBooks has an enormous amount of features. You can pick and choose which ones you want to use. There are some features larger businesses will want to take advantage of like job costing and budgeting. Those are available features in the higher level subscriptions of QuickBooks. It is subscription based and you can go to different levels of how many features that you need. A lot of people come to Sarah asking her to help them make the most out of the application. Her advice is, if it will help you run your business then yes use it. Don’t feel like you need to overcomplicate your finances just because they have options to do so. Don’t make more work for yourself, if it really doesn’t affect any part of your decision making when it comes to leading and growing your business then don’t use it. Keep it simple!
Using Quickbooks can feel intimidating and in those cases Sarah offers training. This is beneficial for new business owners who aren’t ready to outsource their bookkeeping, but are just feeling overwhelmed by QuickBooks in general. She walks them through, does screen shares, and record videos to help them.
She also has clients who come to her and don’t even wanna look at their numbers. They’re scared, but know it has to be done. In many cases, Sarah can go in there and clean everything up. Often they’re pleasantly surprised, but sometimes it starts that new conversation of determining where they should be and how they should get there. A bookkeeper and Quickbooks can take a weight off your shoulders. It’s probably not as bad as you think it is, and it might actually be even better than you think it is!
The best way for people to connect with Sarah Quiggle is:
Website Links:
- horizonwestbookkeeping.com (Schedule a free 15 min consult right here)
Show Notes
