1.  Job Costing

"The non-accounting features of QuickBooks that I've found most useful are the job-costing and/or class features. Many of my clients have been amazed at how easy it is to 'slice and dice' their business information into a variety of different ways that allow them to determine the profitability of various departments, product lines, customers/jobs, etc. The terms 'job-costing' and 'tracking information by departments' can intimidate a lot of small business owners, but QuickBooks makes the whole process easy and relatively painless.

"To learn more about how to capture and use job-costing information using QuickBooks, type Job Costing into your QuickBooks Help.

"Once you've started collecting job costing information into QuickBooks, you'll find the fruits of your labor under Reports > Jobs & Time, where you'll be able to assess each job's profitability."

— Inga Arendt

2.  Timesheets

"Timesheets have also been very helpful for many of my clients. When you enter your and your employees' time into QuickBooks timesheets, you get two things: an easy-to-use data entry screen for employee hours, plus the ability to link those hours with specific jobs, service codes, and paychecks.

"I've amazed more than one client by getting them to use this feature. They find it hard to believe that just using the timesheet screen properly provides the opportunity to include the time details on a customer invoice as well as include the hours on employee paychecks.

"Additionally, you can run a wide variety of reports based on timesheet data. The Time by Job reports will reveal on which jobs and tasks your employees spend their time, and Job Profitability reports will be able to include payroll costs and revenues."

— Inga Arendt

3.  Write Letters using QuickBooks and Word

"The Write Letters feature (in QuickBooks 2005 and 2006) allows you to merge information from within QuickBooks into an unlimited variety of letters. It recently helped me provide extra customer service to a few of my best clients — in about five minutes.

" 'Curing a New Tax Headache,' an article in the December issue of the Intuit ProConnection® newsletter for accountants, pointed out the nuances of the Section 199 Production Deduction (has a nice ring if you enunciate).

"The authors, Terry Myers and Dee DeScherer, also attached a Microsoft Word document with a great client letter, which introduced this new deduction for producers of finished goods.

"As I read the article, I realized the deduction could apply to several of my clients. So, I highlighted and copied the text of the letter, and opened up QuickBooks.

"I went to the customer navigator (OK so I was still using 2005), selected Letters to customers, and selected Customize letter templates. I pulled the template for a thank you note, highlighted the body of the letter, and pasted in Terry and Dee's text (hope this ain't a copyright violation).

"I saved the letter as "199 Deduction" and closed it. QuickBooks queried 'Use Template?' 'Why sure!' I said, and clicked Yes. I then selected the clients it applied to, and clicked the Next button a couple times. Finally, QuickBooks prompted me to print envelopes and letters, and voila. I had letters to all my clients who might benefit from the 199 production deduction.

"In the space of about 5 minutes, I had a handful of professional-looking letters to some of my best clients that said 'I care.'

"Thanks Terry and Dee, ProConnection — and QuickBooks."

— Bruce Downs

4.  Export Reports to Excel

"Exporting reports from QuickBooks into Microsoft Excel is a fantastic time-saver. There is a lot of flexibility within QuickBooks to customize reports but there are still often specific reports that my clients want that are not available within QuickBooks. I recommend that they take a report that's close to what they want, export it into Excel, and then customize it further. Doing this expands the range of available reports well beyond what is shown in QuickBooks."

— Inga Arendt

5.  File Documents Electronically

"I make many recommendations to clients about how to improve their efficiency and use of QuickBooks, but this year my partners and I had our own New Year's Resolution for managing our business. We now keep all of our accounting documents electronically, attached to the relevant transaction in QuickBooks using SourceLink®, a QuickBooks-Compatible application.

"The result: No more time wasted by filing paperwork, and no more time wasted looking for the document in the file cabinet (or worse yet the 'to be filed' pile).

"Plus, I now have more space since I gave away my huge metal 4-drawer lateral filing cabinet to another business owner!"

— Bonnie Nagayama

6.  Keep Contact Information in One Place

"Most of us have multiple places for keeping track of addresses, phone numbers, email address and other pertinent contact information for our business contacts. With QuickBooks, there are many ways to centralize all of this contact information and eliminate redundancies.

"QuickBooks vendor, employee, and customer lists will track all your basic contact and vital information. You can also synchronize QuickBooks lists with QuickBooks Customer Manager, Microsoft® Outlook®, ACT!, Legrand CRM, or GoldMine®. This is extremely helpful for keeping information accurate and up to date."

— Suzi Graden

7.  Enter Budget, Compare Budget vs. Actual Info

"Entering budgets and comparing budget versus actual information gives my clients the ability to compare where they hope to be with where they actually are.

"QuickBooks makes the process very easy. Once you enter the budget, you can 'slice and dice' it in the same way as financial information (by account, date, customer/job, and class).

To learn how more about entering budgets in QuickBooks, type 'budget' into your QuickBooks Help."

"Monitoring budgeted versus actual information allows my clients to become more pro-active and less reactive to their financial information. I find that to be extremely important for running a successful business."

— Inga Arendt