June 9, 2015
Many years ago, when I was teaching a course on Quickbooks, one of my students started talking to me after class. She had opened a hair and nail salon on the west side of downtown Chicago, and now had the last three years of her returns being audited. I scheduled an appointment for her to come in for a complimentary consultation and asked her to bring in the returns being examined.
She came in the following Monday, and it took about thirty seconds for me to realize that she had a problem. At first glance there just wasn’t any way that her financial statements could be correct. No way at all. She said that she had faithfully put everything into Quickbooks, and then hired a CPA to do the tax returns. The CPA did nothing to verify her accounting work whatsoever. He took her numbers, put them on a tax return, and had her sign a liability waiver protecting his license from any and all potential problems.
I showed her what was wrong with the accounting, and her response was one that I have heard dozens of times over the past several years. Her response was, “I had no idea that anything was wrong. I thought that it was right.”
Quickbooks Myth #1
Quickbooks is a great program. I have used it and taught business owners how to use it for over a decade. But it is just a program. If you don’t know what you are doing, anything that comes out of a great program will potentially get you into trouble.
Here’s the point. It’s the operator, not the software, that does good accounting.
Quickbooks Myth #2
So you have had Quickbooks at your company for a couple of years, and your Financial Statements don’t make any sense. You hire a Quickbooks Consulting – Common Mistakes of a Quickbooks Consultant Tax Preparation Chicago Illinois to teach you how to use the program. The Consultant promptly sells you another Quickbooks package, installs your existing Financial Statements into the new program, and shows you how to navigate the system. A month later you pull up your Financial Statements, and they are just as bad if not worse than they were before you spent all of this money and wasted all of this time.
Here’s the point. It’s the operator, not the software, that does good accounting.
What you needed was a good Small Business Accountant. The only thing a programmer is going to do is to set up a system. Unless you go to Accounting School to learn how to properly do bookkeeping and accounting, your books aren’t going to be correct and auditable. Quickbooks a great program. But if you don’t know what you are doing, Its not going to do it for you.
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