Everybody talks about how companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have fundamentally changed the way the economy operates. In the world of small businesses, which drives an enormous part of our economy, I would still put Microsoft at the top of the list of game changers simply because of Windows and Office, but this is changing fast. The company that doesn’t immediately make the list is Intuit, but the reality is that QuickBooks has become a formidable engine of growth.

If I look at ProLedge’s own client base, a significant portion of our clients are in QuickBooks at least four hours a day. Many of them have QuickBooks running all day. In the morning, they open email AND QuickBooks. All day long, they produce invoices, estimates, make collection calls, pay bills, etc… For many businesses, QuickBooks has become their nerve center, their dashboard. They could do without Word or Excel for one day, but they couldn’t do without QuickBooks. For some small businesses, QuickBooks has become as vital as email. This is remarkable.

The most stunning part is that Intuit has done this by flying under the radar screen. Sure, if you are an investor, a CPA or a bookkeeper, you can’t miss a company worth $18 billion with 8,000 employees, but most small business owners know a lot less about Intuit, the company, than the more glamorous tech companies out there. However, Intuit’s grip on its market is as strong if not stronger than any tech company. Intuit is as close to a monopoly in small business accounting as you can get and they’ve done this without alienating their customers, which is quite a feat. There is no doubt that there are plenty of people complaining about Intuit’s tech support, but at least they provide tech support. When was the last time that you were able to call Microsoft for a problem with Excel or Google for a problem with Gmail?

Intuit has grown by remaining truthful to his founder’s values. Like most high tech billionaires, Scott Cook is smart as a whip, analytical and aggressive, but unlike many of his peers, he is not arrogant and he is very patient. You can see this in how QuickBooks was built: one improvement at a time, no glamour,  but a lot of common sense. It works and it has changed how small businesses are run. Well done and thank you.

There is no doubt that large banks have recently done everything they could to scare clients away. However, when it comes to small businesses, large banks still offer assets that make it harder for smaller banks to compete. No, it’s not just about the number of branches. There are also very significant differences in terms of online banking capabilities which can materially impact your day-to-day  operations.

It is a well-accepted fact that the main advantage of small banks is their level of customer service. The difference is not just on the margin. It is staggering. You can develop personal contacts with your banker at a small bank that you will never be able to match in a large bank. You’ll be lucky to have the same contact in a large bank for 12 month in a row. That personal touch becomes very handy when it comes to getting a loan. Very often, in a small bank, you’ll be able to talk directly to the decision maker, whereas, in a large bank, the decision is made several layers of management away from you.

However, if you are willing to accept the impersonal nature of the large bank, these monster institutions offer very significant advantages.

The advantage most commonly discussed is the number of branches, of course. For an expanding small business, it might give you greater chances of having branches closer to  your multiple offices. If your business is heavy on cash, the closer the branch, the safer it is for your employees to go make deposits. If your business needs to relocate, the odds are that you won’t have to change bank. The list of benefits of multiple branches goes on and on.

However, in my view, the single greatest advantage of large banks from the perspective of the small business owner is online banking. “Online banking” is not just about the bank’s website. It includes all the other electronic interactions that you have with the bank: downloading transactions into QuickBooks, online bill payment, check deposits through a scanner, etc… If you think of the number of times you touch your bank electronically vs walking into a branch, it’s pretty clear that an efficient and flexible online banking experience is becoming an increasingly important parameter to consider when selecting a bank.

Unfortunately, most small banks can’t compete on online banking. The investments required to develop and integrate an efficient online banking system are enormous and only the large banks such as Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America can afford these R&D  costs in-house. As a result, smaller banks turn to 3rd party providers who can supply them with turnkey solutions for online banking and white label them. In general, these turn-key systems are not as feature rich and the integration with the bank’s back-end is not as seamless.

Here are some example of online banking features that you are guaranteed to find in a large bank and that many small banks might be lacking:

• DirectConnect, which is the more advanced protocol to interface QuickBooks to your bank. Most small banks only offer WebConnect with is the older, much more limited protocol. DirectConnect is more convenient, faster, less prone to duplicated entries and it allows you to upload fund transfers and online bill payment instructions from QuickBooks to the bank.
• Read-Only access to allow your employees or bookkeeper to get to your banking information without running the risk of money being incorrectly moved around. Some small banks simply don’t offer this at all. Some will make you jumps through painful hoops to get it setup.
• High quality images of the checks and deposits slips (critical for bookkeeping)
• 24/7 phone support.

 If you can find a small bank that offers these services, you’ve got the best of both worlds, but make sure not to discount online banking in your evaluation process.

Online banking for small businesses has long been mainstream . Small business owners who don’t use a browser to check on their bank accounts will soon be put on the endangered species list. However, the percentage of small business owners who interface their QuickBooks file with online banking is still surprisingly small. The technology has existed for over twenty years and by all accounts (no pun intended) is working reasonably well. So why aren’t all QuickBooks files out there connected to their bank? The blame falls for the most part on the banks.

Once upon a time (in the nineties), the few banks who allowed you to interface Quicken and QuickBooks with your accounts were bragging about it and using it as a marketing differentiation. Nowadays, every bank offers it, so interfacing with QuickBooks online banking has become more of a cost center to them. Why encourage their clients to connect and trigger more tech support calls? When was the last time you heard a bank advertise: “Switch your accounts to us. You can connect QuickBooks to them!”?

There are two technologies used to connect QuickBooks to your bank: WebConnect and DirectConnect.

• WebConnect is the old technique: it opens a browser within QuickBooks which logs you into your bank’s website and allows you to go grab the transactions and download them. It’s clunky and one-directional (transactions go from your bank to QuickBooks).
• DirectConnect is the “newer” technique with which QuickBooks interfaces seamlessly to the back end of your bank. It’s much more sophisticated. It decreases the risk of downloading duplicated transactions and it is by-directional. Not only can you download transactions, but you can also upload fund transfer instructions and bill payment from QuickBooks.

DirectConnect should have become the standard a long time ago and WebConnect should have been discontinued, but for some reasons, most banks have decided to keep WebConnect free and to charge a premium for DirectConnect (often $9.95 per month). As a result, WebConnect remains the predominant technique used to interface. Since it is so clunky, it is no surprise that adoption is lagging.

This is compounded by the recent growth of small community banks and credit unions. These banks are too small to afford the development of their own online banking technology. Instead they purchase their online banking systems turnkey from back-end providers and rebrand them. These turnkey solutions are often not very sophisticated and the banks who buy them don’t know how to support them too well. In many cases, they don’t even offer DirectConnect at all. As a result, we are seeing much greater adoption of WebConnect and DirectConnect with the larger banks than with the smaller banks and credit unions.

This being said, I am not advocating for the fact that every small business should jump onto the DirectConnect bandwagon. The misconception is that interfacing QuickBooks to online banking is a guaranty to save you time. It is true for most businesses, but not for all. Here are instances when you might want to think twice before connecting your QuickBooks file with online banking:

• If you have very few transactions, it is often faster to enter data by hand than having to deal with the overhead that comes with online banking (setup, passwords, risk of duplicated transactions, etc…).
• If you are using a 3rd party bookkeeper to keep your books, you should not give your online banking credentials to this 3rd party. There is too much risk. The safer way is to create a separate “read-only” account for that 3rd party which allows  just to see transactions and statements, but doesn’t allow to move money around and make payments. The problem with this setup is that you can’t give control of DirectConnect to your bookkeeper, because DirectConnect is wired to the full featured account. There are workarounds, but this goes beyond the scope of this blog.

However, if you have lots of transactions, connecting QuickBooks to online banking can save you time and money. When setup correctly, it is very efficient. Just make sure to be ready to fork out the small premium the bank will ask you for DirectConnect. WebConnect is a thing of the past. 

Whenever one of our bookkeepers has his/her initial meeting with a new client, the topic of how we will access the client’s QuickBooks file is on the agenda. There are many options depending on the client’s needs and setup, including:

• Having the bookkeeper working onsite at the client
• Hosting a QuickBooks desktop version on a remote server
• Leveraging the QuickBooks Online Edition
• Sending QuickBooks files back and forth
• Creating Accountant Copies
• Etc…

One option that is frequently on the table is to have our bookkeepers log remotely into the client’s PC or Mac using tools such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC. Those work great under certain circumstances, but they come with significant drawbacks and it is important to understand them.

But first, a quick primer on what these tools are. LogMeIn and GoToMyPC are only two of many such tools that allow Computer A to take control of another Computer B remotely. You install software on Computer B that will allow Computer A to log into Computer B and see an image of Computer B on Computer A’s screen. Computer A’s mouse and keyboard will now drive Computer B.

The advantage of these options for bookkeeping are clear. Your bookkeeper can now log into your computer remotely, open QuickBooks on your computer and perform the typical bookkeeping tasks. However, there are some very significant drawbacks.

Security

The risk is not that some evil individual will be able to sniff out the data that is being exchanged between the two computers. LogMeIn and GoToMyPC do a very good job at encrypting the data that flows between the two computers. The security issue is much more basic than that. Once you give LogMeIn or GotoMyPC access to the your bookkeeper, you’ve opened up your whole PC or Mac to the bookkeeper. Your bookkeeper might be the most honest person in the world, it is still not recommended to allow any 3rd party to be able to freely roam your computer. You might have sensitive HR information on this computer for which the mere fact of having opened access to it represents a legal problem.

There are ways around this, but they often get overlooked. For instance, you can create a specific login ID to your computer that restricts access to just QuickBooks and some folders. However, to make this work, you would need to be logged out of the admin login whenever the remote session is initiated. In most business settings, this is not a practical expectation. It is too easy to leave your computer logged in whenever you take a break.

One user at a time

Whenever a LogMeIn or GoToMyPC session starts, the remote computer takes over complete control of your PC. You cannot keep on working on that PC while the bookkeeper is working in QuickBooks. This implies that you either need to coordinate with the bookkeeper windows of time of when you will get off your computer or your need to dedicate a computer just for bookkeeping work (quite an expensive proposition in most cases).

The computer must be on

One very mundane issue that we often encounter when we try to connect to a client’s computer is that the computer is either turned off or has gone into sleep or hibernate mode. If this happens, you need someone who is physically close to the PC to turn it back on. If this is after hour, the window of opportunity for the bookkeeper to work in QuickBooks got wasted.

None of the issues listed above are insurmountable, but they often get overlooked. When it comes to bookkeeping, LogMeIn or GoToMyPC should not be at the top of your list when evaluating options. They are sometimes the only options left, but then, you need to carefully address the security and access issues.

The two most common causes of fraud in small businesses are when rogue employees or contractors write checks to themselves or deposit checks to their account instead of the company’s account. Those are very unsophisticated schemes and can easily be detected after the fact, but by the time you detect the fraud, the damage is already done. Very often these individuals go from paycheck to paycheck and spent your money in a hurry. You can’t get the money back. They are broke and you can only “punish” them through termination and prosecution. You get a sense of vindication, but the money is gone.

It is much better to prevent fraud in the first place and for such basic fraud, there are easy tricks. It all starts with what larger companies call “Internal Controls”. Essentially, any financial process that moves money around needs to involve at least 2 individuals checking on each other. When you apply this to a small business, it can be very basic, but still effective.

Guarding your stock of blank checks
Many small business owners feel that as long as they are the ones signing checks, all is safe. Not really. Banks do a very bad job at checking signatures. They can be easily forged. The signature is an effective tool to trace back the source of the fraud once the fraud has been detected, but by then, it’s already too late. The better approach is to control who has access to stocks of blank checks and how these blank checks are handed out.

The safest process is to have your bookkeeper prepare the checks in QuickBooks and mark them as “To be printed”. You, the owner, would then do the actual printing. In this scenario, you’re the only one with access to the stock of blank checks.

If you don’t have time to do the printing, you can delegate the printing to the bookkeeper as well, but you would hand-out only the extract number of blank checks needed and you would keep a log of the check numbers that you handed out. Essentially, avoid at all cost to have the blank check in a self-service mode. Checks need to be in a locked drawer with as few people having access to them as possible.

The panacea is to not have blank checks at all and to use online bill payment with rigorous approval workflows, but these techniques are a little bit more involved in term of setup.

Controlling the deposits
Let your bookkeeper or the individual acting as bookkeeper record the deposits in QuickBooks and prepare the deposit slips, but make sure that it is a different person who goes to the bank to make the deposits. Ideally it should be you, but if you don’t have time, separate the roles of preparing the deposits and making the deposits. Whomever makes the physical deposit needs to bring the deposit slip back and immediately hand it off to the person in charge of QuickBooks. This is of course not bullet proof, because the person making the actual deposit could still swap the accounts, but by enforcing the requirement of handing off the deposit slip on the way back to the office, you send a clear signal that this type of fraud will be caught almost in real time.

There are of course much more sophisticated ways of committing fraud, but by implementing the processes above, you will be preventing the two most basic and common fraud schemes. 

There are many options available for preparing, sending and filing 1099 forms. They range from Do-It-Yourself to complete outsourcing options. However, all options have a common starting point: your QuickBooks file needs to be up-to-date through the end of 2011 and you need to have the proper information about your vendors on file.

What is the deadline to submit 1099-MISC forms? Check with your CPA or the IRS for your specific case, but the published deadlines are that the 1099-MISC forms need to be sent to some of your vendors by January 31. They also need to be filed with the IRS by February 28 if you are filing by mail or April 2 if you are e-filing.

Of all tax forms, 1099s are among the easiest to prepare and file yourself (see 1099 instructions from the IRS), but if you need help, here are some typical options:

• Ask your CPA, bookkeeper or tax preparer to do it for you.
• Outsource to your payroll provider. Nowadays, most payroll companies offer this service.
• Leverage the 1099 vendor center within QuickBooks. Clicke here for more details on features and pricing.  
• Use an online service such as Track1099.com, Filetaxes.com or FileMyForms.com

Before you chose an option, make sure to take a serious look at these online services. They are not the right option for someone who wants zero involvement in the process, but if you are willing to roll up your sleeves a bit, they are an extremely convenient option, because they will take care of mailing the forms to the vendors and e-filing with the IRS. It’s a competitive market, so the pricing is very reasonable: typically under $3 per 1099.

Remember that the 1099 process can only start once your QuickBooks file is ready for it. You won’t know how much you paid your various vendors until all the 2011 data is in QuickBooks. You don’t necessarily have to “close” your 2011 books to be ready, but at the very least, all accounts should be reconciled through the end of 2011.

Once your accounts have been reconciled, there are a few more steps required to make your QuickBooks file primed for 1099s:

• You will need to map the various accounts of the chart of account to the proper boxes of the 1099 form.
• Check that you don’t have duplicated vendor names. It often happens that you have the same vendor listed multiple times with different spelling. If you paid Joe Consultant $1,000 in 2011, he might need to receive a 1099, but if your QuickBooks file is showing “Joe Consultant” as having been paid $550 and “Joe Consult” (different spelling) $450, neither will make the threshold and Joe Consultant won’t show up in your 1099 report.
•  Check that you don’t have vendors hidden outside of the Vendor Center. Sometimes vendors can be recorded by mistake as “Other Names” or “Customer”. Sometimes, a vendor might just be listed in the memo field of a transaction, but not as the beneficiary of the payment. In all these cases, the vendor won’t come up in a 1099 report. It needs to be adjusted.

Once this QuickBooks cleanup has been completed, you need to make an inventory of the information that you have for each of the vendors that should receive a 1099. Do you have a W9? Do you have the correct social security number or EIN? Is the address current? Even if you want to delegate the 1099 work, the responsibility of having the proper records for the vendors remain yours.

At that point, you are ready to prepare the 1099s and all the options listed above become available to you, ranging from filling in, mailing and filing the forms yourself to delegating the whole process.

The debate between Mac and Windows is getting almost as polarized as our beloved Congress. Until recently, the bookkeeping world had managed to remain relatively immune to this debate, but with the increased market share of the Mac in the small business space, the question of QuickBooks for Windows vs QuickBooks for Mac has started taking more prominence.

At first glance, it should not be an issue: “If you are a Windows person, get QuickBooks for Windows. If you are a Mac person, get QuickBooks for Mac”. Unfortunately, it is more complicated than this. For the foreseeable future, selecting QuickBooks for Mac will handcuff you in several ways:

• QuickBooks for Mac has fewer features than the Windows versions
• The vast majority of CPAs and bookkeepers do not support QuickBooks for Mac
• Converting QuickBooks file back and forth between Mac and Windows doesn’t work well and can corrupt the data.
• QuickBooks for Mac doesn’t interface with as many 3rd party applications

I’ll expand a little bit on these items below, but if you own a Mac, your logical next question would be: “I am stuck then?”. Of course not. You have a number of options that will keep you in the QuickBooks world without having to switch to a PC:

• Accept the limitations of QuickBooks for Mac and stick with it. This is a very viable solution if you are a very small business, you don’t need 3rd party help and you have limited need for integration with 3rd party applications.
• Switch to QuickBooks Online, the web based version of QuickBooks
• Work with a QuickBooks hosting provider. From your Mac, you will get access to the full featured QuickBooks for Windows.

Fewer features
Intuit is traditionally a Windows shop. They have had Mac developers for a long time, but the Mac development group is not tasked with feature innovation. Their charter is to “keep up” with QuickBooks for Windows. I am sure that many people with Intuit would violently disagree with this, but it is the unfortunate reality. Some examples:

• QuickBooks for Mac doesn’t have Premier and Enterprise versions. It has fewer features than even the Pro version of Windows.
• Fewer reports
• Fewer payroll options
• Limited inventory capabilities
• Online banking not as well integrated

Bookkeeping support
CPAs and bookkeepers need to maintain their own licenses of QuickBooks to support their clients. The whole accounting profession is pretty much standardized on the Windows platform. It would be too expensive for them to maintain a park of Mac hardware and QuickBooks for Mac licenses (across multiple years) to support Mac files.

Converting files between Mac and PC
Both the Windows and Mac versions of QuickBooks have the capability to convert the company file to the other OS. However, since the feature set is different, the converted file needs to restrict itself to the common denominator. As a result, some data doesn’t transfer from one version to the other. Also, to Intuit’s own admission, the conversion is not dependable. For instance, if you convert more than a couple of times back and forth, reconciliations of the bank accounts tend to disappear. Essentially, this conversion tool should be used only if you decide to migrate from one OS to the other for good, but it should not be used as a protocol to work with your bookkeeper or CPA on an on-going basis.

Integration with 3rd party application
In the last 5 years, the power of QuickBooks (and its dominance) has increased dramatically thanks to the myriad of 3rd party developers who have developed applications and services that integrate with QuickBooks. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this development effort has been done exclusively for the Windows version of QuickBooks. If you are on the QuickBooks for Mac, you only have access to a small subset of these developers. 5 to 10 years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasa bit more equality, assuming of course that the desktop version of QuickBooks hasn’t been supplanted by the cloud versions by then. However, as of today, QuickBooks for Mac is more “insulated”.

In summary, QuickBooks for Mac can be a very good option for you if your needs are relatively simple and you don’t need as much integration with the outside world (professionals and applications). The good news is that QuickBooks for Mac is not a dead-end. If QuickBooks for Mac becomes too restrictive for you down the road, there are multiple options for migrating to alternative solutions.

Let’s assume that you decided to hire an independent bookkeeper as opposed to a bookkeeping firm like ProLedge (the arguments for such a decision can be hotly debated of course!). How should you interview and select such a bookkeeper?

Recruiting in general, whether it is for a bookkeeper or any position, is more of an art than a science, so there is no simple recipe that will ensure that you get the best bookkeeper in the door, but there are criteria that will enable you to mitigate risks. Here’s a short checklist and I’ll cover each item in more details below:

• Professionalism
• QuickBooks knowledge
• Accounting knowledge
• Price
• Availability
• Reference and background checks

Professionalism
Why do I start with this criteria? Because it is the single most efficient factor to trim your list of candidates down. If you are reviewing a long list candidates and you test them first on their QuickBooks knowledge, you’ll shrink your list by 50% pretty quickly. If you test them on professionalism first, you’ll shrink the list by 80% right from the get go and you’ll save yourself a lot of time. What do I mean by “professionalism”? That’s the whole package of people skills that the bookkeepers expose to you. How crisp and well written are their emails? How friendly are they on the phone and in-person? How punctual are they to the interview? How well dressed are they? How well do they listen? Did they prepare for the interview by researching your company? A bookkeeper who doesn’t score high on this dimension will cause you problems down the road, because good bookkeeping is not only about the accuracy of the data that you get into QuickBooks. A bookkeeper is a consultant and as such, the bookkeeper needs to know how to interface with you, understand your needs and adapt his/her work to your needs.

QuickBooks knowledge
There is an enormous difference between being knowledgeable in QuickBooks and knowledgeable in accounting. QuickBooks appears simple to use if all you need to do is reconcile bank accounts, but as soon as you start pushing the envelope (job costing, sales tax, inventory management, integration with 3rd party apps, etc…), it’s a whole new ball game. Having majored in accounting in college won’t help at all. Case in point: most CPAs cannot be called QuickBooks experts. They know how to pull reports out of QuickBooks to prepare your taxes, but the number of CPAs out there who would be able to fix a “broken” QuickBooks file is very small. That’s not their area of expertise.

Accounting knowledge
This one is a no-brainer and you have to test for it. However, you’ll be surprised how few candidates will fail on this dimension, because the accounting knowledge required to keep clean books is actually easy to acquire. This being said, let me stress that this holds true only if all you are looking for is a bookkeeper. If you are expecting your candidate to play a controller or CFO role, it’s a very different story, but then, the job description should not be “bookkeeper”.

Price
Like in any market, you get what you pay for. The lower the cost, the lower the expertise. If you plan on giving your bookkeeper primarily data entry tasks and you will be verifying every detail of his/her work on an on-going basis, you can afford to go lower on the price scale. However, if you expect your bookkeeper to be self-sufficient and you won’t have time to quality control the work, you will be forced to pay more. Keep in mind that the hourly rate is not necessarily a good representation of cost. Jane might charge twice the hourly rate as Joe, but if Jane works twice as fast as Joe and she provides higher quality work, you will end paying Jane less than Joe at the end of the month.

Availability
Supply and demand doesn’t only affect price. It affects availability as well. The better bookkeepers are busier. Make sure that the bookkeeper you hire still has available bandwidth for you and will be able to turn your work around quickly and be responsive to your questions during the week. That’s one of the key differences between independent bookkeepers and firms. When an independent bookkeeper is maxed out, there is no safety valve. You can’t move work around or assign different resources. You just have to wait for your turn.

Check references and perform background checks
Last but not the least, don’t skip on the reference checks and criminal background checks. You’re about to give this bookkeeper a lot of sensitive financial information. Better be safe than sorry!

Over the years, QuickBooks has matured and the rate of innovation in the product itself has been decreasing significantly. The real innovation is now in the breadth of third party services and applications that interface with QuickBooks. If you have a financial need that QuickBooks cannot fulfill, the odds are that there is a third party application that can. In most cases,  you will be able to exchange data back and forth between this application and QuickBooks very easily.

A few years ago, Intuit realized that QuickBooks could not be everything for everybody and decided to open up QuickBooks to third party developers. They offered development tools and certification processes to these third parties. Developers don’t need a stamp of approval from Intuit to interface with QuickBooks, but it is generally safe to select applications that have been reviewed by Intuit.

You wish that there was a single location where you could find a catalog of these applications, but for historical reasons that are more technically driven than consumer oriented, you actually have to go to two separate places to browse:

• marketplace.intuit.com is what Intuit calls the “Marketplace” and is focused on the software applications that you need to install on your PC, Mac or server (as opposed to running them remotely).
• appcenter.intuit.com is the App Center and is focused on web services  (or “cloud services”). Those are pure online applications, but they still have the capability to interface with your local QuickBooks or with QuickBooks Online Edition.

The Marketplace (client software) started a lot earlier than the App Center (web applications), so you still have many more options and solutions in the Marketplace, but the future is with the cloud applications. One would expect the App Center to become the main attraction very soon. If you find two comparable applications in the Marketplace and the App Center, I would recommend to opt for the App Center version (in the cloud). Web applications don’t need to be installed, are easier to maintain, get upgraded seamlessly over time, can be accessed from anywhere and don’t need to be backed up.

A key challenge with add-ons is to figure out what is available. Too many times do I see small business owners going to extraordinary length trying to bend QuickBooks to do things it is not designed to do, when there is a 3rd party application out there specifically designed for this.

Here is a sample of categories of applications that QuickBooks add-ons cover. In some of these categories, you may have only one provider, in others, dozens of competitors. The goal here is not be to be exhaustive, but to give you a flavor of what’s available:

• Inventory management, warehouse management: for more complex inventories than what QuickBooks can handle.
• Timesheets. Employees submit their time on a web interface. Worflows for approvals.
• Expense reports. Employees submit their expense reports online. Workflows for approval and getting reimbursed.
• Payroll. When QuickBooks payroll is too limited or presents too much liability.
• Business Analytics. For more sophisticated and customized reports. Financial dashboards.
• Accounts Receivable. Create invoices, receive payments, facilitate collections.
• Accounts Payable. Track bills. Workflows for payment approvals. Online payments.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Track sales leads and customers. Self service portals for customers.
• Payments. Credit cards, ACH, eChecks.
• Document management. Filing and indexing of key documents.
• Project management. Track and assign tasks. Manage resources.
• Shipping. Interfaces to the main carriers.
• Point of Sale solutions for retail.
• Tax tools. Federal, state and sales tax.

Many of these add-ons offer free trials, so do not hesitate to try multiple solutions before selecting the final one. Also, before you interface any application with QuickBooks, make sure to backup your QuickBooks data. Sometimes, the first synchronization between QuickBooks and a third party application can go wrong and corrupt your QuickBooks data. Creating a snapshot of your data before the first sync (or any sync for that matter) is always a good idea.

QuickBooks files tend to be very large. If you need to send a copy of your QuickBooks file to someone such as your CPA, attaching the file to an email is typically a bad idea because the email service provider on the recipient’s side will often block such a large attachment. Even if it goes through, email has a nasty tendency of corrupting QuickBooks files. There are better approaches and they are free.

If you create a brand new company file in QuickBooks, the file will start at about 9MB even before you start entering any transaction in it. This is, by most standards, a large file already. If you have been using the QuickBooks file for a few years, you file could easily grow to 20MB or even 100MB. This gets you in the range in which many email providers will start blocking your messages. For instance, Gmail doesn’t allow emails larger than 25MB. For Hotmail, the limit is at 10MB. Even if you manage to squeak under the size limit, QuickBooks and emails don’t appear to be good friends. Very often, the QuickBooks file will arrive corrupted on the other end and the recipient won’t be able to open the file.

The best way to send a QuickBooks file is to use file sharing services such as www.yousendit.com or www.sendthisfile.com. Both services have free options that are sufficiently powerful to send QuickBooks files around. Here’s how it works.

• Go to one of these file sharing websites and setup a free account if you don’t have one yet.
• Select the option to send a file. It will ask you toselect the file on your PC or Mac.
• Once you’ve selected the file, enter the email address of the recipient and a short message.

The file will be uploaded to a server. An email will then be sent to the recipient. But that’s where the elegant trick happens: instead of having the QuickBooks file attached to the email, there will be a link in the email saying something like “Download Now”. If the recipient clicks on this link, it will link the recipient to the file sharing service and allow you to download the file.

The beauty of this process is that the email is very small. It just includes a link to the QuickBooks file instead of the file itself. No risk of your email being blocked because of the size of your email.

The other benefit is security. You can setup a password to download the file. Emails travel the web in clear and can easily be read by other people. However, if your recipient has a password to unlock the link, you can ensure that she will be the only one allowed to download the file. With most of these file sharing services, you can also set an expiration date on the link. It reduces the amount of time the link is available to the outside world.

Give it a try. Once upon a time, if the QuickBooks file was too large for email, you had to burn a CD or DVD and snail mail it. Not anymore.