Question: My accountant says that I should switch to QuickBooks for my accounting system. She said that QuickBooks Pro should work just fine for my business. Is that what I should use?
Answer: I agree with the “QuickBooks” half of her answer, but suggest “Premier” be the other half.
Using QuickBooks, because it is the No. 1 accounting software for small-to-medium-sized businesses, makes it easier to find CPAs and bookkeepers who know the software. It’s helpful.
Premier, because it has sales order,s which are pivotal in managing an ad specialty order, is the best for our industry. Once you create a sales order or order acknowledgement in Premier, you can create a supplier purchase order with the click of a button. All the line items from the sales order will auto-populate into the supplier purchase order, waiting only for you to add the net prices. Once the order is complete and you have adjusted the sales order and supplier purchase orders with information from the supplier invoice, a customer invoice can be created with a click of the mouse from the sales order.
QB Pro does not have this sales order function, which requires data to be re-entered repeatedly—costing time and creating opportunities for error.
Your accountant is like others who suggest QB Pro or QB Online because these versions work just fine for their current clients. But ours is a complex business to account for. Ours is neither common nor typical. Even the QuickBooks help desk will suggest Pro or Online. They too do not know the details involved in an ad specialty order.
I recommend QB Premier for 90 percent of ad specialty distributors, and for very large distributors, there is Enterprise, Premier’s big brother.
Please email your questions to Harriet at Ask The Accountant.
QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise can be modified to better serve ad specialty distributors. Harriet Gatter is a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, a former accounting professor and a former ad specialty distributor. She advises ad specialty distributors to use QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise, often in conjunction with other industry-specific software, to manage the complexities of the ad specialty business, with the results being time saved, errors eliminated and an overall accurate accounting of your business. Contact her at [email protected].
