QuickBooks Online can enhance your company’s bottom line by improving your cash flow, customer relationships, inventory balance, and your future.
QuickBooks Online is excellent at a lot of things. It helps you create and manage contact records and sales forms. It can keep you informed of your online account transactions and balances and help you pay your bills. It simplifies customer payments and provides easy-to-use templates for reports.
But it’s much more than just an online bookkeeper. It can get the numbers right, but it can also help get them headed in the right direction by providing tools in several areas. When you take advantage of them, you’ll see the positive impact they can have on your company’s financial health.
Improve your cash flow.
Every business owner knows that profitability is achieved by maximizing income and minimizing expenses. Before looking for more ways to bring in new revenue, make sure you've caught up on billing your customers for the work completed. Click Get paid & pay, then Customers. The colored bars at the top show you unfinished business: unresolved estimates, unbilled activity, and overdue and open invoices. Related transactions appear when you click on one. Send your customers reminders and statements.
The Customers page displays transactions that need additional attention to bring in the money you’re owed.
Next, go to Bookkeeping | Transactions | Expenses. Filter your account register so you only see Expenses, then do the same for Bills. Assign the relevant Category to any transactions that don't have one. Now when you run reports, your data will be more helpful. You’ll be able to see where spending needs to be reined in.
Keep smart inventory levels.
Does your business sell products? It's a balancing act maintaining a stable level of inventory. On the one hand, if you carry too much stock that isn't selling, you're tying up your money unnecessarily. On the other, unexpectedly running out of a product could mean losing a sale and possibly even a customer.
QuickBooks Online allows you to create detailed inventory records that include the number of items you have on hand initially and your self-imposed reorder point (learn more about that here). When you look at an item record, you’ll see how many are currently in your possession and when you need to reorder based on how sales have reduced inventory. Reports that might be helpful here include Physical Inventory Worksheet and Sales by Product/Service Detail.
You may need an add-on application to manage your inventory most effectively in QuickBooks Online. Contact us to review your specific needs, and we'll provide you with the best add-on for your business.
Receive customer payments faster.
In addition to the action described above, there are several reports you can run to see whether customers are late with invoice payments. These include Open Invoices, Unbilled Time, and Accounts Receivable Aging Detail. You’ll find these under Who owes you. If you learn that some customers are paying late, check out this helpful article. You may also want to consider setting up a merchant account through QuickBooks Payments so you can accept credit and debit cards and ACH payments. (Remember: we can help you secure lower processing fees if you set up QuickBooks Payments through us first). You may find that customers pay faster when doing so is more convenient.
Your customers will likely pay faster if you make it easier for them to do so.
Improve your customer relationships.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your company. Are you going beyond simply filling their orders? It's a good practice to keep an eye on your top customers' buying habits and initiate some contact with them between purchases – especially if there’s a lengthy gap between orders. QuickBooks Online’s Customer pages provide relevant information, including a real-time status update on your customers' estimates, invoices, sales receipts, and payments. Keep in mind that frequent customers are worthy of this attention, too! Sales by Customer Summary can be a helpful report here.
Make sure you're running reports.
QuickBooks Online is very good at providing reports that help you make short-term decisions. But to truly understand your company’s financial health and make longer-term plans, you need to see and understand your financial statements, like Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss, and Statement of Cash Flows. You’ll find these under For my accountant. They’re easy to create, but analyzing and interpreting them requires a trained eye.
Set a clearer path forward.
You may already be familiar with some of these tools but have yet to incorporate them into your workflow. The good news is that most are actions you can take on your own. However, if you want our guidance on any of the strategies we listed above, reach out to us. We'd be happy to schedule training for you and your team.