QuickBooks Online is more than an online accounting tool. It’s a gold mine of information that can shape your company’s future success.
What are your business goals for this year? If you’re like many small business owners, your list of goals likely includes at least one of the following:
- Improve cash flow, and end the feast-or-famine cycle
- Strengthen your company’s relationships with its customers
- Get better at inventory management
- Be ready for growth opportunities
If you’re already using QuickBooks Online (QBO), you know how much impact its bookkeeping abilities have had on your company’s accounting operations. But did you know that QBO can help your company achieve far-reaching financial goals as well?
Take a look at how QBO can hep your company achieve its financial goals this year.
- Improved cash flow
The first step toward improving your company’s cash flow is understanding where the financial bottlenecks are. QuickBooks Online provides that information for both income and expenses in a variety of ways, starting with your QBO dashboard. You can automatically send reminders, and QBO also automates the process of sending statements.
You can also run accounts receivable and accounts payable reports that will show where you stand with customers and vendors, like Open Invoices, Uninvoiced Time, Unpaid Bills, and Accounts Payable Aging Detail. If you determine that one of your consistent problems with cash flow is late customer payments, you can set up a merchant account through QBO to support credit card payments and bank transfers.
- Stronger customer relationships
Your customers are like gold. To build the best relationships possible with them, you need a clear, updated picture of their transactions, their payment details and history, and your interaction with them. QuickBooks Online provides templates for Customer Information records that provide all of that, along with their contact information and a real-time update of the status of their invoices and payments, estimates, and time activities, all in the form of an interactive list with links to immediate actions you can take.
- Better inventory control
If your business sells products, you know that you have to be smart about inventory levels. Stock too much and you have too much money tied up unnecessarily. Too little, and you’ll be turning customers away and possibly losing their future business. QuickBooks Online’s inventory-tracking tools help you achieve and maintain that balance, so you know both when and how much to reorder. QuickBooks Online also offers multiple inventory reports, like Inventory Valuation Detail, Physical Inventory Worksheet, and Sales by Product/Service Detail.
Read part 1 and part 2 of our series on using QBO’s inventory tools.
- Ready to grow
Maybe scaling your business isn’t in this year’s plan, but it’s smart to be ready for growth opportunities.
If you’ve never applied for a business loan or tried to attract investors, you don’t know how much financial information you’ll need to provide, or in what format. There are very specific reports your potential lenders or investors will want to see, standard financial statements. QuickBooks Online includes templates for these, which include a Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss, and Statement of Cash Flows. Like the reports we mentioned earlier, they’re easy to generate on the site, thanks to intelligent, customizable templates.
We can help you set up QBO to work for your company – and help you analyze the data QBO provides to chart a course for success. Contact us to set up an initial consultation.
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Joe Gibbons, CPA is managing partner of Gibbons & Gibbons, P.C., a Northern Virginia-based accounting and business advisory firm that specializes in working with law firms and other professional service providers.
Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash
