Quickbooks bookkeeping software

Intuit's Quickbooks is a very useful accounting and bookkeeping software for small and medium-sized companies. Intuit has been very innovative with Quickbooks, with new versions releasing every year, enhancing usability, inventory management and performance significantly. Different versions of Quickbooks software is

• Quickbooks Simple Start
• Quickbooks online
• Quickbooks Pro
• Quickbooks Premier
• Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions

Quickbooks Simple Start 2008 version comes with high-end features for both Pro and Premier options. Here are some of the features in the latest Quickbooks bookkeeping software.

1. Customizing made easy - The forms on the software can be customized adding company logos, changing layouts and previewing them.

2. Auto-remember for frequent transactions - In accounting, most of the payee names and transactions would repeat month after month. This feature of Quickbooks 2007 and 2008 automatically remembers names that you use regularly making it easy to enter transactions.

3. Dividing date in accountants review copy - You can fix all transactions before a dividing date, and keep entering transactions after the dividing date. This makes it easier while sending the forms to accountants for review.

4. Audit trail function - Audit trail function is available for troubleshooting and error correction.

5. Mailing function - You can send email your accounts directly from Quickbooks using Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

Quickbooks 2008 also has add-ons which can be used along with the Quickbooks accounting software for more functions and more efficiency. One of them is the Payroll Processing software. This software offers Paycheck processing in minutes including calculation of paychecks, tax deductions for all employees. The tax forms and tables are also available for download. This is sold separately starting at about $9 per month.

Source: This blog summarizes data from Intuit's site on Quickbooks and reviews from different users on different blogs.

Make your tax season less taxing, maintain books with discipline!!

Small businesses with few employees suffer quite a bit during tax season, not because the tax laws are too complicated or because there is a lack of professionals to help them with tax issues. It’s mainly the lack of discipline in filling the income and expenses regularly into the accounting programs available. This brings in the dire consequence of being forced to pay more money to the government than they actually should.

There are many financial bookkeeping software available in the market, and can be used by a person with some rudimentary accounting knowledge. But most of the times, people concentrate more on their business, getting customers and building new products and forget to update accounting information.

Is there a solution to this? Yes, Outsource your bookkeeping.

Why do it?

1. The headache of updating your income and expenses regularly is handed over to somebody else. So you can focus more on building your business and getting more customers.
2. Companies who are specializing on accounting and bookkeeping services have a better understanding of tax laws and standards. So your accounting would be done more efficiently.
3. You would not miss out on important deductions, tax credits etc that are due to you and thus end up paying more tax than you should.
4. The cost of hiring an accountant and getting the software is more than you would be paying to the accounting company. You get the work done at a lesser cost and more efficiently.

All you have to do is to be careful while selecting the accounting firm. Check credentials, check existing customers. Ask the right questions to know that they understand your business and your accounting needs. And there, you are ready to go….

Financial and Accounting Services Outsourcing industry on the path of exponential growth

According to the latest report from KPMG, a global consultancy firm, the financial and accounting services outsourcing industry going to be worth $ 5 billion by the year 2010. The entire Knowledge process outsourcing industry is expected to be worth between $10 billion to $17 billion, by 2010.

There are different reasons for this huge growth in the Financial and Accounting Services outsourcing. Few of them being… the availability of talent of high quality in offshore locations, businesses overcoming their fear of outsourcing, global standards to check quality of workforce available and above everything, the inclination of lots of countries to move into knowledge process outsourcing arena. India would be a preferred destination for sure, but India is also facing stiff competition from other countries around the world.

Edge Zarella of KPMG stated that they aim to show that KPO is not just an extension of BPO, but a business phenomenon in its own right. Though Financial and Accounting outsourcing represents only a fraction of the entire BPO market, it is all set of take over a major share of the pie in the coming years.

The more the number of companies joining the financial services outsourcing bandwagon, the more difficult it would become for existing companies to find high quality talent to work at rates that would justify the cost of doing the work offshore.