QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Choosing the Right Edition of QuickBooks

QuickBooks comes in a gamut of editions, offering options for organizations at both ends of the small-business spectrum. QuickBooks Simple Start and Online Edition cover the basic needs of very small operations. Enterprise Solutions, on the other hand, are the most robust and powerful editions of QuickBooks, boasting enhanced features and speed for the biggest of small businesses.

Warning

QuickBooks for Mac differs significantly from the Windows version, and unfortunately you won’t find help with the Mac version of the program in this book.

This book focuses on QuickBooks Pro because its balance of features and price make it the most popular edition. Throughout this book, you’ll also find notes about features offered in the Premier edition, which is one step up from Pro. (Whether you’re willing to pay for these advanced features is up to you.) Here’s an overview of what each edition does:

• QuickBooks Simple Start is mainly a marketing tool, because you’ll quickly outgrow its limitations. (At that point, you can move your data to QuickBooks Pro or QuickBooks Online.) But it’s a low-cost option for small businesses with simple accounting needs and only one person running QuickBooks at a time. It’s easy to set up and use, but it doesn’t handle features like inventory, downloading transactions from your bank, tracking time, or sharing your company file with your accountant.

• QuickBooks Online Edition has most of the features of QuickBooks Pro, but you access it via the Web instead of running it on your PC. It lets you use QuickBooks anywhere, on any computer, so it’s ideal for consultants who are always on the go.

• QuickBooks Pro is the workhorse edition. It lets up to five people work in a company file at a time; you can purchase licenses in single-or five-user packs. QuickBooks Pro includes features for tasks such as invoicing; entering and paying bills; job costing; creating estimates; saving and distributing reports and forms as email attachments; creating budgets automatically; projecting cash flow; tracking mileage; customizing forms; customizing prices with price levels; printing shipping labels for FedEx and UPS; and integrating with Word, Excel, and hundreds of other programs. QuickBooks Pro’s name lists—customers, vendors, employees, and so on—can include up to a combined total of 14,500 entries. Other lists like the Chart of Accounts can have up to 10,000 entries.

• QuickBooks Premier is another multi-user edition. For business owners, its big claim to fame is handling inventory items assembled from other items and components. In addition, Premier can generate purchase orders from sales orders and estimates, and apply price levels to individual items. You can also track employee info and get to your data remotely. This edition also includes a few extra features that typically interest only accountants, like reversing general journal entries. When you purchase QuickBooks Premier, you can choose from six different industry-specific flavors (see the next section). Like the Pro edition, Premier can handle a combined total of up to 14,500 list entries.

• Enterprise Solutions 10.0 is the edition for larger operations. It’s faster, bigger, and more robust than its siblings. Up to 30 people can access a company file at the same time, and this simultaneous access is at least twice as fast as in the Pro or Premier edition. The database can handle lots more names in its customer, vendor, employee, and other name lists (1,000,000 versus 14,500 for Pro and Premier). You can have multiple company files, work in several locations, and produce combined reports for those companies and locations. And because more people can be in your company file, this edition has features such as an enhanced audit trail, more options for assigning or limiting user permissions, and the ability to delegate administrative functions to the other people using the program.

The QuickBooks Premier Choices

If you work in one of the industries covered by QuickBooks Premier, you can get additional features unique to your industry—for about $150 more than QuickBooks Pro. (When you install QuickBooks Premier, you choose the industry version you want to run. If your business is in an industry other than one of the five industry-specific versions, choose General Business.) Some people swear that these customizations are worth every extra penny. Others say the additional features don’t warrant the Premier price. On the QuickBooks website (http://quickbooks.intuit.com), you can tour the Premier features to decide for yourself. Or, you can purchase the Accountant edition, which can run any QuickBooks edition, from QuickBooks Pro to the gamut of Premier’s industry-specific versions. Here are the industries that have their own Premier editions:

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Nonprofit Dilemma

I’m doing the books for a tiny nonprofit corporation. I’d really like to avoid spending any of our hard-raised funds on a special edition of QuickBooks. Can’t I just use QuickBooks Pro?

You may be tempted to save some money by using QuickBooks Pro instead of the more expensive QuickBooks Nonprofit Edition, and you can—if you’re willing to live with some limitations. As long as funding comes primarily from unrestricted sources, the Pro edition will work reasonably well. Your biggest annoyance will be using the term “customer” when you mean donor or member, or the term “job” for grants you receive. Throughout this book, you’ll find notes and tips about tracking nonprofit finances with QuickBooks Pro (or plain QuickBooks Premier).

However, if you receive restricted funds or track funds by program, you have to manually post them to equity accounts and allocate them to accounts in your chart of accounts, since QuickBooks Pro doesn’t automatically perform these staples of nonprofit accounting. Likewise, the program doesn’t generate all the reports you need to satisfy your grant providers or the government, although you can export reports (Exporting addresses) and then modify them as necessary in a spreadsheet program.

Note

Accountant Edition is designed to help professional accountants and bookkeepers deliver services to their clients. It lets you run any QuickBooks edition (that is, Pro, or any of the Premier versions). In addition to being compatible with all other editions of QuickBooks, it lets you design financial statements and other documents, process payroll for clients, reconcile clients’ bank accounts, calculate depreciation, and prepare clients’ tax returns.

• The General Business version has all the goodies of the Premier Edition like per-item price levels, sales orders, and so on. It also has more built-in reports than QuickBooks Pro, sales and expense forecasting, and a business plan feature (although, if you’re using QuickBooks to keep your books, you may already have a business plan).

• The Contractor version includes special features near and dear to construction contractors’ hearts: job-cost and other contractor-specific reports, the ability to set different billing rates by employee, and tools for managing change orders.

• Manufacturing & Wholesale is targeted to companies that manufacture products. It includes a chart of accounts and menus customized for manufacturing and wholesale operations. You can manage inventory assembled from components and track customer return materials authorizations (RMAs) and damaged goods.

• If you run a nonprofit organization, you know that several things work differently in the nonprofit world, as the box above details. The Nonprofit version of QuickBooks includes features such as a chart of accounts customized for nonprofits, forms and letters targeted to donors and pledges, info about using QuickBooks for a nonprofit, and the ability to generate the “Statement of Functional Expenses 990” form.

• The Professional Services version (not to be confused with QuickBooks Pro) is designed for companies that deliver services to their clients. Unique features include project-costing reports, templates for proposals and invoices, billing rates that you can customize by client or employee, and professional service–specific reports and help.

• The Retail version customizes much of QuickBooks to work for retail operations. It includes a specialized chart of accounts, menus, reports, forms, and help. Intuit offers companion products that you can integrate with this edition to support all aspects of your retail operation. For example, QuickBooks Point of Sale tracks sales, customers, and inventory as you ring up sales, and it shoots the information over to your QuickBooks company file.

UP TO SPEED: Learning More About Accounting

If you need to learn a lot about QuickBooks and a little something about accounting, you’re holding the right book. But if bookkeeping and accounting are unfamiliar territory, some background training (QuickBooks Training) may help you use QuickBooks better and more easily (without calling your accountant for help five times a day).

The Accounting and Business School of the Rockies offers an accounting and bookkeeping self-study course that you can play on a VCR or DVD player. The course presents real-life accounting situations, so you’ll learn to solve common small-business accounting challenges, and it includes hands-on exercises to help you master the material. It doesn’t take long to complete, so you’ll be up and accounting in no time. To contact the school, visit www.usefultraining.com or call 1-303-755-6885.