Which QuickBooks Should I Choose?

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. This week is all about how do you know which QuickBooks Online product to choose for your business? So as you know, I work primarily with attorneys, but this actually, this week's post is applicable to pretty much anybody. And I wanted to be able to share with you what would help you in the decision-making on selecting the right product because it's a little bit confusing. There's several SKUs or products that Intuit provides for QuickBooks. And knowing the right one can save you money. It can also help you with time if you pick a lesser product, but there's features in the higher level product that will give you more of what you're looking for, you might want to spend that little bit of extra cash to save time in your business. We're all about saving time, right? So I'm gonna take you to a page that I think is gonna be really helpful. That will help you— it outlines really, it's a graphic that will outline what each product does and help you choose the one that will work for your, your law firm or your business itself. So let me share my screen. So here we are on Intuit's pricing page. And this is a beautiful graphic that will help you decide or determine which product will work for you. Simple Start's their bare bones product. And typically I have never really ever told a client to use this product. It's more to use for personal use. It's very stripped down, not a lot of reports. I like it for someone wants to track their business, their personal financial things, their checking account, their savings account, their credit cards. If you have a lot of credit cards, it's a great place to hook up the bank feeds and just monitor your, your money coming in, money going out. That's usually what I would typically tell a client to go to. You have a client that owns some real estate that is using this. And what he's doing is he's made like a hierarchical chart of accounts. So he'll have income and he'll have Building A, Building B, Building C as subaccounts. And then every expense account, same thing. He's got the, you know, rent, repairs and maintenance, Building A, Building B, Building C. It makes it time consuming to do the accounting. I don't do the accounting. He does his own. But it makes it time consuming to go through and make this, this do the work in his file, because he's got a pretty lengthy chart of accounts. He doesn't hit the max yet. But he's got a lot of data in there in a form that's difficult to manipulate. So when it comes to year end, we just did the year end review, and he's got to take it and push it into— because he doesn't have all of them broken out that way. So he has to push it into into Excel and we make a spreadsheet and kind of work around it. Now in that case, he's not saving time. He's actually making more time. So maybe he could go to— he'd have to go to Plus. So it would be a big leap from 25 to 70 to go to the Plus version. But he'll probably be able to use classes and it'll give him better reporting. So it's really, you know, when you're looking at the revenue numbers, is it really worth it to save? The difference, it's really the difference in the pricing when he's wasting a lot of time with all this chart of accounts. So it's really up to the person. They have to make the decision. But for me, I would just go right into the product that works the best for my firm. Essentials is great for the smaller law practice that is a solo or solo plus one maybe. And if you layer it with LeanLaw, you get all the functionality and all the reports for tracking the revenue side of your, your company or your business, your practice. And then of course, QuickBooks will give you the whole picture. It is lacking, you can't use projects, there's no projects in there, there's no inventory. So there are some, there's no business analytics and insights. But you do have the ability to, to track your income and your expenses. And if you put LeanLaw on top of that, you get the functionality of time and billing. It's a, it makes a great product for pretty inexpensive. It's only $40 a month. Despite the teaser rates that are on here, the teaser rates are only good for 3 months. If you need to buy QuickBooks, reach out to somebody like me who works with a reseller. We can usually get you the best pricing above and beyond what you get with QuickBooks. You get great pricing here, but it really, 3 months goes by fast, right? So we're already into our 3rd month coming up by the time this video comes out, it'll be March and we'll be into the 3rd month already of 2020. So you really look at what will work for your business, but you can, I have smaller practices that I work with that are in Essentials, it works perfectly well, especially when you add the app LeanLaw. The third product, QuickBooks Plus, I've used that forever. It's a great product, a great product for if you've got a firm that's maybe 5, 5 people, maybe, you know, 3 attorneys, 2 partners or something like that. It works really well. It has the class features so you can start to classify the data. And by classifying, you can start to put— you could use it for the attorneys' names and put the income and expenses by attorneys and really see who's really spending more money and who's bringing in more revenue for, for your firm. It's the same thing that we could use with that, that gentleman that had the business where he was using it for his real estate because go by property. So you can do the classifications by property. Advanced is my sweet spot. It's this place that I work in the most, I live in the most, and it has all the bells and whistles. It's the product. If you get into a firm that has matters in it, you might not get past a few attorneys where you've got the matters will increase and inflate your chart of accounts past the 250, and then you need to go into Advanced. When you start to get into a firm that's that big, that's not a big issue to go from $70 to $150 when you're looking at the revenue and the numbers that you see in attorneys and law— with attorneys and law firms. If you need the bells and whistles, because you are forced into it with the limitation of the chart of accounts, It's really putting you in a place where you're going to get streamlined user roles. So I can put it— put somebody in there that's just working accounts receivables or just sales. And I can give that person the role that fits their position in the firm. And they can't see the payroll. They can't see the bank accounts. So that's really why you would want to move to Advanced, even if Plus works for your firm. Advanced also has the Business Insights, which I'm going to take you to now and show you in my demo file what the features are there. and how we can track segments of the business with Business Insights. And it's only going to get better because Intuit's really starting to add a lot of features to this program and really make it a one-stop shop for a lot of things that we would normally layer other apps onto. It's all built in. It's baked into the product. So let me take you to that place. So here we are in my demo law firm file. So it's just called Demo. And as you see right away on the dashboard, I've already got a couple of these metrics that I'm tracking for revenue streams. I can track different segments of the business. Where they're— what parts or areas that they're maybe having more revenue come in. Got a cash flow report here. And it's basically under Reports, we've got a Performance Center. Now you can see that we've got year-to-date net income. I've got an expense chart here by attorney. I've got a test chart that's just total gross profit. And you've got the ability to really manage these. Now one thing, one caveat here with this particular tool, As you start to build out a new chart, know that you need to put them in the order you want to see them for your client because we don't have the ability to move them around just yet. So make sure that you think it out, map it out, draw it out, whatever you need to do. When you come into this new chart, you can see that we've got expenses, cost of goods sold, net profit, gross profit, revenue stream. So you can basically come in here and just build out your chart. You have to give it a name so you can give it a name. I'm going to just do test chart again. And then you can pick your time period. I know this file is a demo file, so it doesn't have a lot of information in here. You can choose the type of display. You can go by what you are looking to display. So you can come in here and do, you know, I want to display the income. Maybe I want to display the time. Maybe I want to go by classes, whatever would feel good for you to track, and then you can filter it. If, if I had more data in here, I would be able to filter it. You can pick vertical bars or you can pick a trend line. But every time you come into this product, there's something new in here like workflows. I'll come over to this gear here. And you can come in here and take a look at Manage Workflows. And that's another one. And I will link back into my article because I did a whole article on this particular topic. But you can use this. And this has been one of the ones that's made me not have to add another app for accounts receivable. Because it's got this stuff baked in. I can track invoices, I can track when the invoices are— when I'm reminding somebody they haven't paid the invoice, maybe with a stronger reminder as the time goes on. I can also have an automatic email go out when a customer pays. So maybe that receptionist is receiving the payment, she puts the payment in and automatically it goes out. So it's a step that the receptionist doesn't need to do. Saves time, saves money. That's the point. So that is it on my little short tutorial on QuickBooks Online Advanced and different products with QuickBooks and deciding and determining which one works best for your client or for you itself. So I hope that was helpful. Of course, always here to help. Please feel free to join our Facebook group. We have a lot of small businesses in there as well as other accountants. It's called QB Community Live, and we would love to have you. We just hit a milestone of 1,000 members this week. So we're hoping to keep growing that organically and making it a space where everybody helps one another. We believe together we all succeed. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful week. Bye now. Bye.