Account 4It Canada Inc.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada - Everything you need to confidently manage, track, and understand your finances.

QuickBooks

Small business Big Bookkeeping Solution

By

For any Entrepreneur or Small business owner the ease of your bookkeeping system is essential in allowing you to attend to the tasks of operating your business, without getting bogged down in data entry and document management.

Having tested many of the desktop and cloud based bookkeeping solutions available on the market, I recommend my clients use QuickBooks Online (QBO). QBO is an excellent solution to manage the bookkeeping and cash-flow of your small business, and is even a great solution for those looking to manage your household finances.

QBO is easy to use, flexible and once set-up correctly can be an integral part of an automated bookkeeping solution.  Use QBO with Hubdoc and thousands of other apps to streamline your bookkeeping system.

For those clients who currently use QuickBooks desktop, I like to caution that QuickBooks Online (QBO) is NOT THE SAME PROGRAM as QuickBooks desktop.  Both programs have their strengths, and share similar names; however, they are very different.  The greatest opportunity to using QBO is its ability to automate the bookkeeping process and decrease or eliminate a bookkeepers data entry – where many mistakes are made.

Whatever solution you decide on to manage your finances, be sure you invest to have it set-up correctly and in a way that you can easily extract the information required for year-end tax filing and reporting.  And remember if it is not saving you time and giving you the information you require, it’s probably not the right system.

 

What Credit Card Processor Is Right for You – QuickBooks Payments?

By

Credit Card Pic
Credit Card Costs

I recently converted a QuickBooks desktop client to QuickBooks online. The client historically processed credit card transactions using Moneris. After conversion we set-up the QuickBooks credit card payment feature; with an introductory offer of 2.5% + $0.25 per transaction was rather competitive. I noted that another credit card processor (Stripe) is offering 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.

Finding out the credit card discount rate from many of the merchant providers is hard to determine, as the fee you are actually paying is dependant on everything from how you process the transaction (keyed or swiped), to the number of bells and whistles the customer has on that particular credit card. I like these new processors offering this straight forward pricing – easy to understand as well as anticipate costs for budgeting purposes.

In an effort to justify clients using the QuickBooks online processing feature, I analyzed a companies’ credit card transactions from October through December 2015. This particular company processed $31,812 in 47 transactions. This company was using Moneris and had paid $914 including all associated fees. Had this company used Stripe their costs would have been $937; and using QuickBooks online payment feature directly through their online platform, it would have cost $807, a significant savings.

Now it should be noted that many clients also pay for deposits made to their bank accounts, as such you have to understand their banking package. This company pays a flat fee per month and as such there is no additional costs to deposit these transactions; however, they could be charged for a fee transaction as QuickBooks discount may show separately in their bank.

QuickBooks accepts Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. Moneris and Stripe accept Visa, MasterCard and American Express.

I can now confidently recommend clients use the QuickBooks payment solution knowing the rate is competitive, the deposits show up within a few days and because its directly through QuickBooks, the information is automated, secure and backed-up in the cloud.