What is QuickBooks? – A Comprehensive Guide – Accountant Squad

Published by John Smith at April 25, 2019

QuickBooks handles every business whether it is:

Small size business
Medium size business
Large business

Even though, every business has its own challenges and intricacies. QuickBooks helps in relieving the “tension of numbers” for the business.

History of QuickBooks

Initially, two people developed QuickBooks under the leadership of Scott Cook and Tom Proulx, based in Mountain View, California, USA. QuickBooks has surely made its presence after Quicken got its successful presence in the financial management world.
In particular, the first version of QuickBooks was on DOS, majorly based on the Quicken software’s code. Surprisingly, many accounting pundits were not satisfied with early QuickBooks version, as they were happy with the Quicken software. Upon research by the company, the three reasons especially started to float up, which were:

No proper security controls
Not any audit trail
Sidelined the old-school accounting standards

Present of QuickBooks

Although QuickBooks has gone through various transformations from its development day. From the year 2000 to 2017: in these 17 years, QuickBooks has surely come from DOS to a full-fledged operating system-oriented software application.

Inuit Inc has indeed researched well and polished QuickBooks for the operations. As a matter of fact, you can witness that QuickBooks’ journey initiated from a “double side entry” to “fully automated” accounting software – the journey has been successful for QuickBooks without any doubt.

Features of QuickBooks

QuickBooks is a small software, it is important to realize that the kind of finesse it holds to accurate record keeping of financials is tremendous. Comparatively, QuickBooks holds the best features any accounting software can offers.

User-friendly: Inuit Inc, indeed, made QuickBooks an easy task to handle by the user. You can surely easily sail through QuickBooks surface. Generally speaking, QuickBooks comes under the hood of “user-friendly”.
Plain sailing process: However, your QuickBooks is not bound to any rocket science to work. Yes, the software requires immense attention to learn it, but this is not the case with QuickBooks. You can surely easily work on it, without any hindrance.
Data Migration: After all, the data you make in QuickBooks can be easily imported to your spreadsheet. This is relevant where one requires financial data on the spreadsheet.
Business Projections: QuickBooks can generate future projections for a business for the purpose of business decisions. Moreover, the projection is made from the historical data stored by QuickBooks. Therefore, it solely depends on the user on which phenomena one wants to generate reports – sales, expenses, profits, etc.
Invoices Generation: Although, the key feature of QuickBooks that it holds its title for best accounting software is for invoice generation. Additionally, you can easily generate invoices instantly using QuickBooks.
Bank Transactions: Equally, a number of transactions take place in a business environment, which is cumbersome to remember or note it down. Most importantly, this cumbersome is deleted by QuickBooks, as all the transactions related to banks are done by QuickBooks. Every Bank Transactions is noted whether related to salary, wages, commissions, profits, expenses etc.
Tax Calculations: For a business, it is very important to calculate accurate taxes and pay it on the time. If one remains to refrain from it, then, it will be called to a federal penalty. What does QuickBooks do? It submits the calculated taxes for business on time to the federal and law authorities.

Why business use QuickBooks software?

As gradually we are discussing “what is QuickBooks?”, now we can discuss the usage of the software in the below points:

Sales and Income Management

In general, you can easily manage sales and income in QuickBooks. Basically, this work is done by generating invoices to see and analyze sales by customer. You will able to manage both of your accounts – accounts receivable and accounts payable. As both of the aforementioned accounts require income in and out of the business.

Eye on Bills and Expenses

QuickBooks surely manage to keep an eye on business expenses and bills with you. It won’t let slip any transaction out of its eyes, due to its finesse. QuickBooks connects your bank with your credit card and starts keeping a check, as all the transactions are downloaded and categorized.

QuickBooks also lends its helping hand when your bill is due for a period. For an instance, you can pay bills by creating an Accounts Payable account in QuickBooks. This account will generate reports which will tell you about your paid bills and any past due bills.

Financial Reports Generation for Business

The number of transactions that takes place in a day in business. For that, a number of reports should be generated so that every data is recorded correctly. With QuickBooks, you can access a number of daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly reports; all these reports are generated on real-time basis.

Flow of cash whether it is – inflow or outflow – can be easily managed. This phenomenon provides an insight to the business where the business is going? Whether the business is in profit or loss? How are their sales? Etc.

These reports are beneficial for business stakeholders. QuickBooks mainly print 3 pertinent business reports:

Profit and Loss Report: The profit and loss report depict you how profitable to you is your business. It is done by summarizing your income minus your expenses. It represents you your net income or loss for a specific time period.
Balance Sheet Report: The purpose of balance sheet report is to highlight the Assets, Liabilities, and Equity for a business at a particular point in time.
Statement of Cash Flows: This report highlights all of the business activities (cash inflow and outflow) which are related to the operating, investing, and financing of the business.

Payroll Management

Suppose, one mistake in salary calculations, made manually, and it will leave all of your employees unhappy. QuickBooks Payroll sees that all of the employees are paid according to the set parameter. The advantages of Payroll are:

You can directly pay to your employees by direct deposit
All the taxes are calculated automatically as per precision of federal and state
QuickBooks can fill payroll tax for business
E-pay is made to pay directly from QuickBooks

Inventory Management

With QuickBooks, the inventory management is done on the surface of real time basis. You will get to know how much inventory is stored in your godowns or business premises. All inventory will be managed at a click of a button.

Easy Tax Process

How life become easy when your taxes are paid automatically. Basically, QuickBooks does this for you. It relieves you from the tax burden, by paying the tax on dedicate date and according to the federal and state laws. You can put all the financial data on the excel sheets and analyze.

Make Online Payments

If you want to flourish cash into your business, then, QuickBooks allows you, to offer your customers to pay or deposit online their invoices. An option named as Inuit GoPayment is there for to collect online deposits from your customers. Make this available to your customers, and you see, gradually, uprising of cash into the business system. Allow your customers to make them payment by any debit or credit cards.

Inspect Receipts

It is better to keep all of your receipt data at one place. They are required during tax season; during tax filing and submission. All of the business-related receipts are stored by QuickBooks. You can upload and download the receipts from the QuickBooks Mobile APP for free, anytime, anywhere.

Variants of QuickBooks

The blog is indeed progressing in a soft flow; till now you have got the answer to the question – what is QuickBooks?

Every business is bounded by different requirements. Basically, Inuit Inc has developed various variants of QuickBooks, as per the needs and wants of the business.

QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online is accounting software, which is a cloud-based product; the main thing is that installation is not mandatory for it. This product has further 3 more classifications:

Simple Start: A basic version of QuickBooks which has only 1 user license.You can easily migrate data from Excel files; access is only for 2 accounting professionals i.e. accountant and book-keeper.
Essentials Version: A rudimentary QuickBooks Online version. In this version, more features are added than Simple Start. There are features which Simple Start deprives of.You can have 3 user licenses at a time. You can grant permission to set users as accountant or book-keeper; you can have the ability to make bill and payments in the backdate.
Plus Version: The most upgraded QuickBooks version. The benefits it assigns to its users are far more than both combined – Simple Start &Essentials. You can have 5 user licenses in this version; it will get your inventory tracked on real-time basis; and will easily generate purchase orders.

QuickBooks Online provides business solutions to any service-based business, where there is less or no invoicing requirements to the business. As a QuickBooks user, you have the privilege to access your business data from any internet connected computer system.

QuickBooks Products
Developed for
Money worth for
QuickBooks Online

Especially developed to assist Small and medium-sized businesses whose primary function is to sell services. It ranges between $20 – $60 per month
QuickBooks Desktop Mainly designed to guide Small and medium-sized enterprises dealing in any industry. It ranges between $299 – $1,500. It has one-time fee.
QuickBooks Self-Employed Usually made for Independent contractors, realtors, Uber/Lyft drivers. It ranges from $10 to $17 per month.
QuickBooks Mac Developed for Mac Users – who are in small and medium business. Ranges from $299 and above. It comes with one-time fee.
QuickBooks Mobile APP Designed and developed to have access from anywhere and anytime. The price changes as increases the add-ons. More the add-ons, more the price.

QuickBooks Desktop

QuickBooks Desktop undergoes trifurcation, as

·Pro Version:

A rudimentary product in QuickBooks Desktop line. It places well itself with non-manufacturing products. This version has:

Bill Tracker: You can see all the unpaid bills and purchase orders here.
Tracker: You can use tracker to track the sales and expenses. You can have this in multiple currencies.
Import Data: You can easily import data from various sources, like, Excel, Quicken and even older QuickBooks versions.

·Premier Version:

A par product to be called off. This version attracts the manufacturing, contractor, retail and nonprofit industries. QuickBooks Premier version has:

Job Costing: You can surely dive into the cost of every material which is going to be consumed in the business process.
Budget Formation: This version comes with the formation of budgets (sales& purchase, etc.) for various departments.
Specific Reports: You can have or generate industry-specific reports from this version.

·Enterprise Version:

This version is classic, as it mainly handles the work-load of the big businesses. The basket of this version has:

User roles: You can add up to 14 users. Those users can be admin or accountant etc.
File Accessibility: In one go, the number of users can go for one file.
Expanded List: There is a feature in Enterprise version known as Expanded List. With this feature, you can track down 100,000 business employees and inventory at one time.

A major point is that all three QuickBooks versions require you to install software on your computer.

QuickBooks Self-Employed

The best product to be handed to the team of freelancers, realtors and Uber/Lyft drivers. It has a tendency to look alike QuickBooks Online: a cloud-based accounting software, which can be accessed from any internet connected computer.

Its features are power packed with: personal expenses, track miles and transfer data to TurboTax (will let you know when your taxes are due). All these features are only found in QuickBooks Self-Employed and not mentioned above.

QuickBooks Self-Employed offers a bundle of features to its users:

You can connect your bank accounts with your credit card/s.
You can easily track your business income and expenses through QuickBooks Self-Employed.
It will calculate your quarterly taxes for you.

QuickBooks Mac

QuickBooks for Mac is the financial product from Inuit Inc only for Mac users. If you have a Mac computer system, then, you must go with QuickBooks Mac version. The similarity it holds with QuickBooks Pro version, on the basis that it is a well product for small non-manufacturing units.

QuickBooks Mac contains ample of features for you:

Income Tracker: The Income Tracker dashboard especially portends the unpaid or outstanding invoices.
Project Accounting: You have this option is this version where you can easily project accounting invoices in phases.
Budget Management: Budget management supports to generate budgets as per business requirement and make timely financial reports.

A negative point of QuickBooks Mac version is that Inuit Inc has made it available only in the United States, till now. The users of QuickBooks are all over the world, so, Inuit Inc must operate in such a way to make QuickBooks Mac version available worldwide.

QuickBooks Apps

Generally speaking, Inuit has made worldwide access to your financial records from your mobile phone. Just download QuickBooks App from the recommended digital store prescribed by Inuit and you can have access to your financials from anywhere and anytime.

Although, the mobile application is not free; it is paid one, but you can surely view all the business financial transactions from anywhere.

Business can go for more add-ons in the mobile app as per their preferences:

QuickBooks Payments:

The feature of this version provides the advantage to businesses to send invoices on email and moreover, to accept payments online via credit card.

QuickBooks Point of Sale:

This version is mainly developed for you in the cloud-based application; an iPad – QuickBooks Point of Sale. It makes the business to make sales; firmly go for credit cards payments; and most importantly, keep an eye on inventory management.

QuickBooks Payroll:

This feature is payroll related. You can make payment to 50 employees, as per your choice, it can be by check or direct deposit. It has an option to automatically calculates state and federal tax and submit it to the concerned authority on behalf of the business.

Services Provided by Inuit QuickBooks

Inuit QuickBooks has, certainly, a house of the ample number of services for its users. Inuit Inc has the credibility to provide world-class services to its users in the accounting world. The old users of QuickBooks know about the fact that the QuickBooks services are exemplary, and they can go for with again and again.

We will discuss one-by-one services of QuickBooks.

1) Book-keeping Services

The popularity of QuickBooks has gone so high, that, Inuit Inc not only saw this opportunity but grabbed it as well. QuickBooks certainly provide book-keeping services to the business in terms of:

QB surely update every book of accounts of your business
You can easily maintain business ledgers by using QB
A proper trial balance generation by QuickBooks
QuickBooks surely looks into that the closing of the accounts
A proper report generation, like, Profit and Loss Statement, Statement of Cash Flows and Balance Sheet
Every transaction is properly synchronized with the bank by QuickBooks, thus, preparation of Bank Reconciliation Statements (BRS).

2) AP and AR

Accounts Payable (AP) is your business money which are owned by creditors. Accounts Receivable (AR) is the money owned by the business to its debtors. QuickBooks services provide:

A general expense accounting to maintain every large and sundry expense of the business
A proper way to maintain and update Miscellaneous Expenses
Proper lookout in cash disbursement records
Worldwide processing of letters of credits

3) Cost Accounting

In simple words, if we want to tell about cost accounting. Cost accounting is a platform which is used to look at the company’s costs of production (COP) – evaluated by the costs incurred (input and fixed) of each process.

You can easily keep a hawkeye on Inventory Management by QuickBooks
Gives out an alert on stock control (mainly depletion)
Cost Variance Analysis by know to let the user know how much deviation is there between the standard and actual cost.

4) Other Accounting Services

The boundary of QuickBooks is not only to maintain book-keeping services, accounts payable and accounts receivable but is open to other areas also. The other areas in which QuickBooks provides its commendable services are:

Basically, you can use Payroll Accounting to calculate the salary, wages, taxes, incentives, commissions, etc.
Fixed Assets Reconciliation is indeed a part of QuickBooks working in which it analyzes that the fixed assets of the company are fully utilized.
QuickBooks can draft your purchase reports by judging how much business is spending on purchases of raw material, fixed assets or any other category.
That is to say if you are working on an account and forget to update in QuickBooks. In that case, QuickBooks will automatically update work under progress (WUP)accounts.
With QuickBooks, you can significantly single-handily maintain write-offs accounts.

Key benefits of QuickBooks:

QuickBooks is certainly a house of many key benefits. From learning the benefits, we can literally answer the question that, what is QuickBooks? We will discuss key benefits with you one-by-one.

Money Administration

QuickBooks is loaded with features which aims to assist small and mid-sized companies in managing their finance. It enables users to key in the due dates and transaction details for all recurring invoices.

Expense Billing

Whenever carrying out business, experts usually rack up a number of expenditures which are later on billed to clients. These may perhaps be small expenses, like mileage and dinners, or even huge expenses, like prolonged global traveling.

Sales Invoicing

QuickBooks Accounting Software presents the time-saving feature of keeping track of sales and instantly generating receipts and invoices at the single click of a mouse. Invoices may then be electronically delivered to customers by means of email.

Financial Reporting

Customers of QuickBooks Pro can potentially generate a number of financial reports. These comprise of year-over-year income, expenditure, trends and forecasting documents. Moreover, each and every report can be exported into a spreadsheet layout and delivered electronically by means of email.

Easy to Use

The creators of QuickBooks accounting software developed it in such a way that it is user-friendly and uncomplicated. A new user setup function offers users with a virtual orientation practice.

Conclusion:

Although, there are numerous competitors of QuickBooks in the market, to name a few are Mint, Xero, FreshBooks and TurboTax. But the fact which we have to go by is that QuickBooks has 80% market share in the financial software world. So, the question of “what is QuickBooks?” certainly dissolves. On the whole, it is not easy to capture this large chunk of the market easily.

Another key point is that, Inuit Inc knew that QuickBooks will become a golden product of theirs in the future if they focus rightly on it. As we have significantly mentioned in the beginning of the article that QuickBooks was on the verge of failure. But the correct focus and planning from Inuit Inc has made it to the top of the world.

QuickBooks is a first choice of financial software for small and medium-sized businesses and, then, large enterprises go for it. The different versions of QuickBooks are made available for different countries, for example, Canadian version is different from British and Australian. This is because of different taxonomy in different countries, such as, Canada has GST (goods and service tax); HST (Harmonized Sales Tax); PST (sales tax). European countries have GST (goods and service tax); and both of the countries – United Kingdom & Australia – have GST.
The QuickBooks United Kingdom version is also consisting of Irish & South African VAT. Above all, after the failure of QuickBooks Enterprise version, Inuit UK division made QuickBooks Desktop version only on rental basis in United Kingdom and its nearby countries, i.e., Ireland.

In the end, go for QuickBooks if you want accurate and precise calculations for your business. If you have any Query regarding QuickBooks, can consult on our Toll Free number 1-888-502-0363.