QuickBooks 2010 and Enterprise Solutions 10.0 offer enhanced support for custom fields. Check out the details in our KnowledgeBase article.
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Custom Fields In QuickBooks 2010
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QB 2010 Is Here
On Monday, September 28th Intuit started shipping QuickBooks 2010 and Enterprise Solutions 10.0. When you’re ready to upgrade, get the latest discounts on our Buy QuickBooks page.
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QuickBooks Online Edition Meets Its Desktop Relatives
Small business accounting is full of the challenges that make SaaS a perfect fit. In the QuickBooks world, a small business needs to plan for software upgrades every 3 years at a minimum, and probably much more frequently. Beyond the cost of the software upgrades themselves, there’s typically additional cost to install and configure them properly. Next comes the ongoing cost of getting fast and reliable accounting software support. For many small businesses, simply finding qualified people to perform these tasks can be a challenge. With QuickBooks Online Edition, a small business is outsourcing all of the regular upgrade and support costs to Intuit, a company with the scale and technical resources to handle them. And it’s doing so by trading bigger up-front purchase costs for much lower monthly costs. As Wikipedia notes:
Computing and application licenses are cost centers, and as such, they’re suitable for cost reduction and outsourcing.
QuickBooks Online Edition offers 3 powerful advantages:
- lower up-front software costs resulting from less expensive, on-demand pricing
- reduced burden for installation, maintenance, and support
- rapidly scalable access to your accounting data when and where you need it
Online Edition virtually eliminates the need to upgrade accounting software on a regular basis. Intuit itself takes care of that hassle. A subscription to Online Edition also solves the problem of getting fast support to accounting software issues. Support is included in all versions of Online Edition, and the more advanced version provides call back support with an expected response time of 30 minutes. ((For Online Edition Basic, email support is available with an expected response within 24 hours. For Online Edition Plus, chat and email support are available, in addition to call back support with an expected response within 30 minutes.)) By comparison, Intuit charges $299 per year for a support plan for the desktop QuickBooks Pro. Note that for QBGarage.com customers with Pro, Premier, or Enterprise solutions, email support is free. We also have our own dedicated QuickBooks KnowledgeBase which includes answers to questions on how to use QuickBooks in specific situations.
However, Online Edition isn’t suitable for every business. While Online Edition is a robust program, it lacks many of the features of the advanced desktop versions of QuickBooks. For example, QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise Solutions support multiple ship to addresses per customer; Online Edition doesn’t. A SaaS application like Online Edition that sets high standards for data reliability and integrity will typically not perform as fast as a comparable desktop version running on reasonably current hardware. That performance penalty is not a factor for most tasks, but companies facing a need to enter large volumes of transactions will observe that Online Edition is slower than its desktop counterpart.
Online Edition is available in 2 versions, Basic and Plus. Basic is designed as an introductory program for businesses automating their accounting for the first time. Therefore, there are no tools to import data to Online Edition Basic. Basic supports 1 user and the company’s accountant – for a total of 2 users. Because Basic is targeting users with simpler accounting needs, it doesn’t include some of the more powerful features of Plus. Among the omitted features are: estimates, invoice customization, employee time-tracking by customer, online banking, and class tracking. There’s also no 30 day free trial available.
Plus supports up to 3 users and the company’s accountant, but there are additional cost options to bump the maximum number of users from 3 to 10 or 25. For both Basic and Plus, an unlimited number of users can be given access to view reports. Plus incorporates those features not included with Basic. To get a better understanding of the feature differences between Basic and Plus, have a look at Intuit’s more complete comparison.
For 2009, Online Edition got a few improvements, namely improved support for online banking in the Plus version, direct deposit for online payroll, accountant data interchange for online edition payroll, and iPhone support.
There are a few considerations to insure that Online Edition is the right accounting product for your business. First, Online Edition does not include the full feature set of Intuit’s desktop products, such as Pro or Premier. Intuit has a guide that compares Online Edition Plus to Pro as well as a QuickBooks Family Guide. We’ve also prepared our own QBGarage.com QuickBooks Product Comparison 2009 that includes all of the QuickBooks general ledger products, including both versions of Online Edition. Check it out to see how the different programs compare.
Second, an Online Edition subscription is for a single company with 1 tax identification number, while the desktop products can be used to manage the accounting needs of multiple businesses. And Online Edition only works with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. ((It requires IE 6 or newer with active scripting enabled.)) Users of other popular browsers, such as Firefox or Safari, are out of luck.
To find the size of your current QuickBooks company file, press F2 while you’re running QuickBooks to display the Product Information screen. You’ll see a screen similar to the one displayed nearby that shows a company file of 14924K, or about 14.6 Mb. (As with most of the images on our site, click on the image for a better view.) In other words, this company file is well below 70 Mb, so we’re good to go!
There are a number of differences in the way information is presented onscreen in Online Edition compared to the desktop versions of QuickBooks. We’ve prepared a side-by-side comparison of QuickBooks Premier 2009 and Online Edition Plus for several common business tasks to highlight what a user of each program will see. In all of the comparison panels that follow, QuickBooks Premier 2009 is on the left and Online Edition Plus is on the right.
Here’s our comparison panel to add a new customer:
In addition to the Address Info screen, the QuickBooks desktop version has 3 additional input screens: Additional Info, Payment Info, and Job Info. Information on these screens isn’t stored by Online Edition.
Here’s our comparison panel to add a new AP vendor:
The desktop version of QuickBooks offers 2 additional vendor information screens: Additional Info and Account Prefill.
Here’s our comparison panel to create a customer invoice:
And lastly, here’s our comparison panel to enter a vendor AP bill:
The Online Edition screens are simpler than their desktop counterparts and also include helpful links to related tasks. However, some of that simplicity is achieved by excluding information, such as data fields that are otherwise available in the desktop editions of QuickBooks. Because the desktop editions of QuickBooks are designed for a very broad range of businesses, you may find that the excluded information isn’t vital to your business or can be maintained with other software tools.
To help you learn more about QuickBooks Online Edition, Intuit offers several online videos. There’s an interactive tour and a presentation on the optional Time Tracker feature. The interactive tour is on the left; the Time Tracker presentation is on the right. Just click the image to play the respective video. ((Note that as of this writing, the videos appear to contain a Flash version check which will fail to recognize that you have Flash installed if you are running the latest version of Flash, which is 10. See our Site Help page for more info on checking your Flash version.))
Intuit also offers an Online Edition Learning Center where you’ll find a number of useful guides, from Tips & Tricks to a Year End planning guide.
In the final analysis, Online Edition’s biggest strengths are its cost savings, providing “anytime, anywhere” access to accounting information in a rapidly scalable model, availability of support, and elimination of ongoing software maintenance. For many businesses, it’s a worthwhile trade-off to give up some speed or detail information to obtain those benefits. If that describes your business, Online Edition is the right choice. To get started with either a live installation of Online Edition or your free trial, just let us know. We’ll get you up and running very quickly.
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Bogged Down By Accounting Work? Hand It Over To the Pros…
The real solution to accounting problems goes beyond just working through that paperwork stack, because it’s only a matter of time before a new stack of papers replaces the old one. Instead, the solution is to cost-effectively add skills to your team by outsourcing some or all of your bookkeeping functions. That allows you to immediately re-focus on using accounting information to control and manage the direction of your business.
Owners and managers that can immediately benefit from outsourcing often find themselves:
- spending so much time on data entry that there’s too little time left to manage and improve their business
- ignoring financial reports because they know what’s being reported isn’t accurate
- incurring interest and late fees because transactions aren’t being processed in a timely manner
- having to frequently recruit and train new accounting staff to the point that record keeping suffers
We offer both on-site and remote bookkeeping at both hourly and fixed-rate prices. Our bookkeeping services cover everything from basic transaction entry and reconciliations to payroll setup and processing.
Contact us today to take advantage of our free consultation. We’ll help you select the right set of bookkeeping services for your business. You’ll save money. You’ll have more time to manage your business. And the paperwork stack will disappear.
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QuickBooks Multi-Currency Features
First, QuickBooks multi-currency support is off by default. It’s a company preference on the Edit->Preferences->Multiple Currencies menu. Once support for this feature is turned on for a particular company file, it can’t be turned off. When you track multiple currencies, you need to specify the home currency, which for US-based businesses is the US dollar. At the end of our review, we’ll see that one impact of tracking multiple currency transactions is that QuickBooks will automatically create an Other Expense account named Exchange Gain or Loss to record unrealized foreign exchange-related gains and losses.
To get oriented, access to multi-currency features are on the Company->Manage Currency menu.
QuickBooks 2009 offers the ability to download the latest exchange rates. As you can see from the Currency List captured after completing the download, exchange rates for only 12 of the most actively traded currencies were available. If you’re using a currency for which exchange rates aren’t readily available, you’ll have to enter that rate manually.
There’s also a Currency Calculator that can calculate the home amount, foreign amount, or exchange rate. The home amount (e. g. US dollars) is the product of the exchange rate and the amount of the foreign currency. The foreign amount is the result of dividing the home amount by the exchange rate. The exchange rate is the result of dividing the foreign amount by the home amount.
Home Currency Adjustment is used at the end of an accounting period to adjust your balance sheet accounts to reflect exchange rates on the balance sheet date. Balance sheet accounts are adjusted up or down by the amount of the unrealized gain or loss and posting the offsetting debit or credit to an Other Expense account. By default, the Other Expense account is named Exchange Gain or Loss. Until a home currency adjustment is recorded, balance sheet accounts represent the value in the home currency at the exchange rates used at the time each transaction was recorded. If the exchange rate has increased, your home currency buys more of the foreign currency, so the home currency adjustment will result in an unrealized gain. Home currency adjustments are calculated based on unrealized gains and losses. For example, for a customer invoice, gains or losses are unrealized until payment is received; after that, they’re realized and a currency adjustment is no longer applicable. QuickBooks 2009 provides reports for both unrealized and realized gains/losses, so we’ll see this in greater detail when we review these reports and the impact of entering a transaction that originated in a foreign currency.
Rounding out the Multiple Currency menu are 2 help tools. There’s a link to a multicurrency overview in the QuickBooks help file. There’s also a link to the Multicurrency Resource Center. Unfortunately, at this writing, this link just opens the QuickBooks integrated web browser and navigates to a general link that doesn’t contain information on using multiple currencies. Since foreign exchange is a new topic for QuickBooks users, hopefully Intuit gets a specific link up soon.
Let’s see how QuickBooks multi-currency accounting affects some typical transactions. Before we can enter transactions in a foreign currency for a customer or a vendor, we have to specify the currency in which all transactions for that customer or vendor will be recorded. If there are no transactions, we can edit an existing customer or vendor; otherwise, we’ll have to create a new record. We’ll start by creating a new customer and specifying that this customer will be accounted for using the €, or Euro. Next, we’ll produce a customer invoice but we’ll change the exchange rate to 1 Euro (€) = 1.5 US dollars.
At this point, because the customer invoice has not been paid, any foreign exchange-related gains or losses are unrealized. So let’s generate the Unrealized Gains & Losses Report by first entering the exchange rates for those currencies for which there are outstanding transactions.
Next, let’s record receipt of the customer’s payment in full. Both the invoice and the payment will be recorded in the same currency, the Euro (€). We’ll change the exchange rate to 1 Euro (€) = 1.25 US dollars to reflect a change in the exchange rate. Because this invoice has been paid, any foreign exchange related gains or losses have now been realized, so they’ll show up on the Realized Gains & Losses Report.
We’ll wrap up our review of this simple multicurrency transaction by looking at the impact on the company’s records. Press the 
Journal button (or alternately, Ctrl Y) while viewing either the customer invoice or payment to see the specific entries QuickBooks made. The Journal for our Invoice transaction shows the debits and credits for that transaction. Next, let’s go back in time to before we entered the customer payment to review the unrealized gain or loss that would be recorded by entering the home currency adjustment described above. That’s the adjustment at the end of an accounting period to reflect exchange rates on the financial statement date rather than the original transaction date.
Let’s start with the Profit & Loss by running the Profit and Loss Standard report from the Reports->Company & Financial menu and pressing the 
collapse button. Here we’ll see the default account Exchange Gain or Loss created by QuickBooks when we enabled multi-currency tracking in our company file.
Finally, let’s review the Balance Sheet. Note that in order to demonstrate another aspect of multi-currency, this balance sheet was prepared as if the customer payment had not been received. It’s also based on recording a home currency adjustment as depicted above, where we changed the exchange rate to 1 Euro (€) = 1.75 US dollars. We’ll see that our customer receivable has been adjusted up by $250 because of the change to the exchange rate between the date we billed the customer and the date we entered the balance sheet. The upward adjustment matches gain reported as an Exchange Gain or Loss. Since our Exchange Gain or Loss account was an Other Expense account, the gain is shown as a negative expense. Once multi-currency tracking is enabled, balance sheet subaccounts will be created automatically for every currency with transactions.
Multi-currency tracking is one of the most powerful new features of QuickBooks 2009. Now it’s time to generate more foreign business!
