Small Business Conversations about QuickBooks Online

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Phyllis:                                 00:31                    Greetings and welcome to another episode of small business conversations with PKJ. I am your host, Phyllis Johnson of PKJ consulting, where we help companies follow their passion, understand their knowledge, and go along their journeys that they can grow and succeed. How many times have you heard as entrepreneur or small business owner that you need QuickBooks, that 50 percent of businesses fail in the first five years due to not tracking their finances or as an entrepreneur, you need to know where your money is being allocated to. Have you ever been turned away from a company loan because you couldn't produce your financials or how about that shocking tax bill you may have received because you weren't tracking your money, didn't know where it was going to and didn't understand the liability that you were going to have at the end of the year or maybe that time where you finally looked at your numbers that you put on a piece of paper and realize that you invoiced a client incorrectly or that you've been paying for a $49, 99 a month software program that you haven't even used in two years.
Phyllis:                                 01:35                    Therefore wasting over a thousand dollars or maybe you lost out on a sale because you couldn't send a potential client an invoice quickly. Do any of these resonate with you? I know they do with me as I've consulted on this topic quite a few times with clients and through training. So today I want to do a different type of episode that wasn't going to be an interview, but more of a discussion with my cohost, Shante Martin, bookkeeper and office manager at PKJ consulting to discuss the uses of QuickBooks online and how can ultimately make and save you money so you can focus on accomplishing all of your business goals. You see, we've all heard about QuickBooks and how it's the largest accounting software, but most of us who aren't accounting professionals aren't sure as to all the benefits and things that it can do. A lot of times people will call me and say, Hey, I've installed QuickBooks online, but I'm not quite sure how to set it up. Or maybe they've tried to set it up and everything is incorrect, or maybe they just have a question, you know. So what I want to discuss here today is what can QuickBooks online do that you may not have been aware of. So let's jump right on it.
Shante:                               02:46                    Accessibility. QuickBooks online is accessible everywhere. No matter where you are, your phone, your laptop, your desktop, tablet, your friend's house, you're on vacation, you're out of the country. No matter where you are, you can always access
Phyllis:                                 03:00                    QuickBooks to get your stuff done. Exactly, so I love QuickBooks online because literally you can be anywhere, anyplace, anytime. You know, a lot of times when we go on vacation as an entrepreneur, we all know we have to bring our computers or re stress about business or we're stressed about finances. The great thing about QuickBooks online is you can just hop on your phone real quick, send a client an invoice and then shut down and go back to enjoying your Mai Tai or even if you're all the way out of country. Last year I had the pleasure of going to South Africa with all of my friends, but as a business owner, business never stops. I was able to just go onto my laptop, sign onto QuickBooks online, even in another country, in a place that has secured Wi-Fi and still get my work done so that I can afford to go on more trips later on.
Phyllis:                                 03:50                    So the second topic that is going to discuss is sales. So sales at QuickBooks online can increase your sales and profits by immediate invoicing, ease of payments, recurring invoices, tracking your invoices, and auto follow ups. Great, so to enhance on that immediate invoicing, what that means is a lot of times when you're using other invoicing programs, do you have to log in there, type in the information, or maybe you've created something in word or something pretty inaccessible. Then you have to go and manipulate the information, go onto your phone and pull that client's contact information, pulled the information from the email to remember what you should build that person will QuickBooks online, all of that is in one place. You have your customer's name, their address, their phone number, their email, their tax id. It's all in one location and you can easily look at any past invoices and send it out to them with just the click of a button.
Phyllis:                                 04:50                    Ease of payment. So that's the big one. I know I like to get paid on time. Well, what happens when you have to print out your invoices, put them in an envelope, put them in the mail, wait for snail mail to get there, wait for the accounting department to open up that invoice way for them to then log into their accounting software way for them to print out a check and then give it to the owner of the company who may be super busy on vacation, running around, doesn't sign that check until another 15 to 20 days and now you're not getting paid for net 45 or sometimes net 60 or even worse, net 90. Well, with QuickBooks online, you click a button, you send the invoice. That person gets the invoice immediately in their email and here's a little secret. The second someone opens up an invoice, you can see that they opened it, so not only can you do that, you can also have it set so that you can have someone paid immediately.
Phyllis:                                 05:44                    You can also set up recurring invoices, meaning that you don't have to every single months and that $5,000 invoice to your biggest client. You can just set it up that every Tuesday at 4:00 it goes to them and then they can automatically pay you. And like I said before, you can track your invoices. Not only can you see if a client, you know, future invoice, you can have a conversation regarding that specific invoice. Maybe they want you to change the title. Maybe they want you to change the name of the project. Instead of going into your email, you can see what they put on that direct invoice. So you have a history of that. So six months from now, if you can't remember why you made that change, that invoice, you don't have to search through your text messages or your emails, you could just go directly to that invoice.
Phyllis:                                 06:31                    And lastly, most important is auto follow up. It is a pain to try to get payments. Sometimes QuickBooks takes the headache out of that where you can literally set it up so that, you know, maybe every couple of days you say, Hey, by the way, you know, just haven't checking on you because we haven't received payment. Um, it makes it a lot easier. So that you can increase yourselves and grow your profits. And the other thing that I wanted to talk about is if you have your phone and you are standing in front of a potential client who says, you know what, send me an invoice right now so I can pay you. Imagine if you call your accountant back at the office or she's gone for the day. Well, with QuickBooks online, you can pull up that invoice, send it to them immediately, and it's a one stop shop.
Phyllis:                                 07:15                    Don't lose out on hundreds of thousands of dollars for your business because you aren't able to take advantage of an opportunity when it's sitting right there. So now we're going to have Shante discuss the third benefit of QuickBooks Online that you may not have been aware of. Okay, so QBO obviously Phyllis thing going through all of the great things it offers. It saves you so time, which allows you to focus on more important things like growing your business and making more money. So, you know, really at the end of the day, we all have a passion for what we have a passion for, but we want to make money, we want to make money so we can take care of our kids so we can buy our dream home so we can retire. So we could do whatever it is that we want to do.

Phyllis:   08:00  And the only way to do that is to make money. Well, QuickBooks online actually makes you money, you know, people say, okay, well I have to pay for the software. So how does it make you money? Well, it saves you time so you can focus on your passion. So what it does is it removes a lot of the manual work and errors. It has auto features such as automatic matching. So if you know, every week you have a phone system like AT&T and you buy calling cards, for example, once you keep doing that, AT&T QuickBooks online, not AT&T of course, because they're always going to recognize your payments. But QuickBooks online has the information come in there and it's automatically going to say AT&T and cell phone. Um, it also has a feature where your baking transactions can pull into your system automatically, so your accountant or your bookkeeper can then decode that information for you.
Phyllis:                                 08:55                    You don't no longer have to pull the information into an excel spreadsheet, manipulate that data, try to create a report from it. You don't have to do any of that. It just pulls it in. And so maybe you don't have time to do it every single day. You set a timer, you know, once every two weeks for 30 minutes and you can record your transactions or you have your accountant, bookkeeper who can log in anywhere, anytime, take care of that information for you. Another way that it saves you money and also saves you time. Is there a lot of auto features? So for example, we have clients that like to see their transactions on a weekly basis. They don't want to do the recording, but they still want to be aware of how they're spending their money. You can set up auto reports and QuickBooks and so I'm going to have shantay talk a little bit more about the auto report feature in QuickBooks. So auto reports is, is an awesome thing in QuickBooks
Shante:                               09:50                    every week or every month, you know, clients want to see their financial standings so you can set up their financial statements at however they however they need it and like it and you can and you can set it on a schedule. So say they want it at every week on Friday so you can set it up where every week this certain report is going to go to to them at a certain time. And then you could do that monthly, you can do it on daily, whatever. Whatever it is that the client needs, it's definitely available to them and taxes. Everyone's favorite subjects. I'll hand it back to phyllis.
Phyllis:                                 10:31                    So taxes, we hate that word, but it's a necessary evil. So every single year I have a new client that walks in shaking with items on a piece of paper, rip, receipts, sweating and mumbling because another year has passed and they have no clue what they owed. Uncle Sam and they don't even know if they owe it all. They may be able to get a refund, but they haven't done a tax return in years. They want to purchase something so they want to get a business loan or they're ready to buy a house and we all know in order for you to do that, you have to have financials do you have to file your tax returns, and so they come in here and they're nervous and then what happens is they may end up getting a refund, but here's the caveat. You waited so long to do your taxes and now that lovely irs is yanking away all or some of your refund due to late fees and penalties for not filing your taxes on time.
Phyllis:                                 11:32                    So now it's chiseling away at the money that you have saved up to purchase that loan or the money that you saved up to put a down payment on that house or to open up your dream business so we can't avoid taxes. What we can do is ease our mind and QuickBooks online helps with that. And the way it does it is if you're tracking your and income all year round and you're working with the proper accountant, you know how much you owe, you have an estimated tax payment, you're making those tax payments online if you're profitable, and you also understand that you may be setting yourself up for a refund every year. I work with my clients and I say, what is your ultimate goal for the year? Is it to get a loan? Is it to grow your business? And so QuickBooks online helps you to accomplish those goals.
Phyllis:                                 12:19                    So with clients that I work with year round, when tax season comes, they send me a couple of documents, they don't worry about it, they say take care of it. And then they go about their day as if it's just another Tuesday. Wouldn't that be such an amazing feeling for you not to be dreading tax season. Let your accountant and your CPA and your bookkeeper dread tax season and you shouldn't have to. So some of the ways that QuickBooks online helps besides keeping track all year is let's say you have a bookkeeper. Well, you could have that bookkeeper keep track and then they can simply send that profit and loss statement, their details and that balance sheet to your CPA. Your CPA isn't charging you one hundreds and thousands of dollars to do something that your bookkeeper can do because here's a little secret that you may not know if you're working with a CPA to do your taxes.
Phyllis:                                 13:08                    A lot of times they are having another bookkeeper compile your information and paying them a lot less than what you are paying them. The other thing QuickBooks can do is a mileage tracker. Now, as a small business owner like myself who does consulting and goes around town and meet with people, it is impossible for me to keep track of how many miles I drove to north Las Vegas and then maybe back to take a client to lunch and then maybe back to my house and then maybe back to my Home Office. It is impossible to do all of that. So there's apps that you can use such as Mile Iq and feel free to contact me for a discount, but you can keep track of that. So it keeps track of your mileage and then every week or every month you can just make sure that you know what your business mileage is.
Phyllis:                                 13:51                    The other thing that QuickBooks online does it snap receipts so you can just automatically send those receipts to your tax person. And another thing that you can do is if you're using the same tax software as QuickBooks, it can pull into your tax software. So let's just take taxes, not something that's a horrible thing, just make it as a day to day process. Now the last thing that I wanted to talk about is the software. There are a lot of different software programs for QuickBooks online that people aren't aware of and people think that QuickBooks online is just an accounting program, but it does so much more. You can do things like inventory management, you can do expense tracking with things like expensify that will pull into your software. Of course you could have payroll. So not only can you do payroll through QuickBooks, but you also have other outside companies such as Gusto that you can utilize.
Phyllis:                                 14:49                    It also is a point of sale solution. If you are an inventory company, has inventory management software so you can keep track of your projects so you can see which ones are profitable and unprofitable and you can have it as a human resource program and a marketing program. So it does a lot of amazing things. A lot of my clients have ecommerce businesses where they sell products online and people want to be able to track not only what their cells are because if we're using something such a stripe or something to keep track of your ecommerce, you still want to keep track of your operating expenses in QuickBooks online can help with that. So I'm going to hand it back over to Sean Tay, who is our ecommerce inhouse guru and I want her to talk about how QuickBooks online helps her to the financials for ecommerce
Shante:                               15:38                    business. So quick books online is, is super helpful with ecommerce businesses, like Phyllis said. Um, a lot of them use stripe or shopify or any of those sorts of software to or paypal. Even actually a lot of paperwork to get the income from the sales and that all of that information can be directly imported into QuickBooks online. So you use the two, the two programs to figure out where exactly the purchase was made and uh, you can book that accordingly so that all the software works really, really well together. Makes it really easy. So.
Phyllis:                                 16:23                    Exactly. So it's, you know, when you have an ecommerce type of program or ecommerce business, ultimately you want to be able to see, okay, let's say you sell tee shirts and that's great. You're making $500,000 in tee shirts, you're killing it, but you also want to know what the costs of selling that tee shirt is. You also want to know what the marketing allocation for that is. You also want to know what software are you using? So your income may be $500,000, but if it's costing you 450,000 to sell that shirt, you're really, Eh, 50,000. And then you have to cover your marketing and your contractors in any legal fees. And of course, shipping, which can be expensive, even if you're using drop shipping, they allocate those charges to you, so you may be making 500 that Paypal or stripe says, but ultimately you're really only making, let's say $25,000 because of all the other items that will pull into QuickBooks.
Phyllis:                                 17:19                    So those are just some of the few amazing things that QuickBooks online can do. I'm hopefully you guys have learned something today. So I just want to go over once again, just the quick overview. It's assessable. You can get on anytime, anywhere there is Wifi or even if you have four g on your phone, uh, cells increase your sales and profit. It saves you time, which ultimately allows you to focus on your passion and make more money. It removes that headache of tax season. And lastly, it's more than just an accounting software program. It is everything that you needed to be. So do you have questions about QuickBooks online and you really want to have a consultation? Will feel free to go to PKJ podcast is schedule a free 15 minute consultation to discuss your accounting needs and learn how you can also get a QuickBooks discount online through PKJ consulting today. Thank you very much for listening and I hope you have an amazing day.