Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Quickbooks: A Love-Hate Relationship




One stereotype that I know I defy is this one: "Hey, you went to business school? You must be great crunching those numbers and a whiz in finance!" It's true that a lot of business school students end up in careers in accounting or finance, but I focused more on the marketing and sales aspect of business, which led to my foray into advertising in New York.

But it goes without saying that you can't have a successful business without keeping a strong pulse on the financial side of a company. Which brings me to my love-hate relationship with Quickbooks. Does anyone else feel the same way about this accounting software as I do?

Quickbooks is definitely a great tool for us to keep track of our sales and expenses since we don't have a CFO or an accountant (soon, though, I hope!). I feel like Quickbooks has so many bells and whistles though, and I haven't had time to figure out how to use them. One thing I need to do is to take at least one or two of the Quickbooks classes that are offered by the Small Business Development Center here in Pittsburgh. I'm hoping the classes will give me a better grasp of the program.

One feature I do love about Quickbooks is that you can automatically import your credit card and bank statements into the program- GENIUS. I'll be honest and tell you that I didn't actually know this feature existed for quite some time (that's what I get for not reading the instruction manual at the beginning) and was manually entering each line item from my statements into Quickbooks- a long and arduous process that I'm fairly sure caused the current case of eye strain I'm suffering from.

Despite the issues I have with Quickbooks, it saves me an incredible amount of time and money and was I think it's an entrepreneur's best friend during tax season!

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