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Intuit Announces Quicken for the iPhone
Intuit recently announced that they will be offering an online version of Quicken for the iPhone and other mobile devices. Quicken for mobile devices will be released in January 2008 for the iPhone. It will be optimized for other mobile devices, including Blackberry devices, later on. The product is aimed at younger audiences and will cost $3/month. It is expected to be officially announced at Macworld Expo in January.
Let Your Employees Know What They Cost
Employees cost significantly more than what they receive in salary. If you offer generous benefits, then they probably cost much more. Making your employees aware of this is a simple way to make them feel more valuable. Consider an employee with an annual salary of $30,000 who receives full individual health insurance. After you add in health insurance (assume $300/month for 12 months), social security/FICA (6.2% of the first $97,500 in 2007), unemployment (6.2% of the first $7,000), medicare (1.45%) and worker's compensation (big range, but assume just 1%), the employee actually costs you approximately $36,629.� Most people don't think about what they cost their employers beyond their salary. When they find out, however, they tend to feel good about it. And since you are already spending the money, you might as well let your employees know about it. Of course, the greater the benefits you offer with respect to salaries, the more you have to gain from sharing this information.�For this reason, many not-for-profits should consider sharing this information with their employees. This information is mostly available (benefits may be the exception) from your payroll company and it can be shared via a simple spreadsheet. Therefore, making this information available is easy to do. I have recommended this to multiple companies in the past and those that have done it once have done it again every year thereafter.
Get QuickBooks in Order in December
Spending some time reviewing and correcting your books in December makes it a lot easier to close them in early January and helps insure you get off to a good start in the new year.�Here are some things to do:
- Reconcile bank accounts
- Make sure all bank statements are reconciled.�If there are old unreconciled items, look into them to see if they can be deleted.
- Review the trial balance
- Look for revenue that shows up in the debit column and expenses that show up in the credit column.
- Count inventory
- How closely you count your inventory depends on the type of business you have.�However, it is good practice to at least�make sure the numbers in QuickBooks approximate what you have on hand.�
- Examine accounts receivable
- Are there invoices out that you don't expect to receive payment on?�If so, you might want to write them off.
- Examine accounts payable
- Are there payables on the books that shouldn't be there?�If so, clean them up.
- Compare profit and loss statements to prior years
- QuickBooks makes comparing financial statements from consecutive years very easy. Take the time to do it and look at accounts that have changed significantly. Do the changes make sense or is something showing up in the wrong account?
- Make sure payroll ties out
- Does the total payroll on your books match the total on your payroll reports? If not, you may have accidentally recorded payroll taxes as payroll or vice versa.
- Inventory your assets
- Do you still use all the assets on your books? If not, write off those you no longer have or use.
- Get rid of any extra expense accounts
- Review your chart of accounts for unused or duplicate accounts.�Having too many accounts makes it hard to assign expenses to the right accounts in QuickBooks and to gather useful information from your financials. It is good practice to review your accounts annually and inactivate those accounts you aren't using.
- Assign temporary expenses
- If you don't currently�use a temporary expense account, I recommended starting to.�Set it up in QuickBooks as an "Other Expense" with account number 9999 so that it shows up all the way at the bottom and is hard to ignore. Use it throughout the year as a placeholder when you aren't sure what account to use for a specific item. At year end, go through the items still in this account and assign them to their proper accounts.
Evaluate Your Profitability By Client
We generally know who are biggest customers are and which customers pay us the most money. It is much more difficult, however, to know who our most profitable customers are. The end of the year is a good time to evaluate your customers and figure out which ones have earned you the most profit during the year. Because it is often difficult to break costs down on a customer-by-customer basis, using your financial data to determine which customers were the most profitable might be difficult or even futile. All the same, the financial data is the place to start. QuickBooks (and most other accounting software) allows you to assign costs to customers and even to specific customer jobs. If you are doing this, review the resulting data first. If not, consider whether you should start doing it so you will have better data next year. Another thing to do is to ask your employees. Consider putting together a simple survey of general questions about how they spent their time, whether or not some customers require more time than others, if so, which customers and types of customers take the most and least time, etc. This will help you ascertain which customers took the most time and caused the most headaches and also which took the least time and were the most pleasurable to work with. Since employees are a major expense, this will also help you figure out which customers generated the most profit. Next, look at your top five expense accounts and think about how they relate to your products and services and whether or not some customers drive more of these expenses than others. Finally, think about the costs associated with acquiring customers. Do certain types of customers cost more to acquire than others?� If so, does the business you are getting from these customers justify the added expense? A thorough understanding of how much it costs to acquire different types of customers is certainly a part of measuring the real lifetime profit from a specific customer. Going through these exercises is likely to result in some useful information. Equally important, it should give you some great ideas as to things you should measure in the coming year. If you do this annually, you will eventually know exactly which customers you want and which you don�t.
QuickBooks Classes
QuickBooks classes enable you to essentially break your business down into a number of smaller businesses and look at complete profit & loss statements for each business. For example, you could break your business down by industry, location, product or service, or anything else that is meaningful for your particular business. This is a powerful feature of QuickBooks and one that I often recommend clients use. An Example of a Good Use of QuickBooks Classes A business with multiple locations could set up a separate class for each location, enabling the business to evaluate each location as a separate business. This is a great use of QuickBooks classes because revenue and most expenses would probably be fairly easy to associate with a specific location, meaning that the numbers would be very meaningful. Expenses that aren�t associated with a specific location, such as management salaries and benefits, could either be split out between the different locations or left unassigned. An Example of a Bad Use of QuickBooks Classes A restaurant owner curious to compare profits resulting from appetizers vs. dinners could create classes for each. While they might be able to develop a simple system to track revenue from each, it would probably be very hard to break out expenses (ingredients, rent, employee time) between the two, and therefore to obtain a meaningful profit & loss for each class.� Choosing what to Use QuickBooks Classes for It is not easy to change your classes, so I recommend thinking carefully about how you would like to break down your business before beginning to use QuickBooks classes. The first thing to think about is how you would like to break your business down. Ask yourself what you get from breaking your business down in this way and make sure it is something you will use. Second, think about whether or not revenue and expense transactions can easily be broken down in this way. How to Set Up and Use QuickBooks Classes: Select "Use class tracking" in the Accounting Preferences window to add a class field to invoices, bills and other transactions. Go to the Lists menu, choose Class List and then New to add classes. Then simply fill out the class field when entering transactions in QuickBooks. Conclusion I consider classes to be one of the greatest features of QuickBooks. However, they don�t apply to every business and should not be used haphazardly. Finally, if you can�t think of what to use them for, then you probably don�t need to use them. And truly finally, if you don�t need the Class feature to break your business down along certain lines, then there are some other cool things you can do it. A topic for another blog�
Intuit Buys Homestead for $170 Million
Intuit Inc. said Monday that it's buying Homestead Technologies Inc. for $170 million in a deal that will provide the financial management software maker with more online tools to sell to small businesses. via Forbes
Most CFOs predict short-term stability
A national survey of 221 chief financial officers and senior comptrollers conducted by Grant Thornton LLP shows two-thirds said the U.S. economy will remain the same or improve for the remainder of 2007, while ... via Bizjournals
Intuit Senior Vice President Exercises Options for 30,000 Shares, Sells Stock
A senior vice president of financial software company Intuit Inc. exercised options for 30,000 shares of common stock, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. via Canadian Business Magazine
Eighty-six percent of companies say an increased tax incentive would...
"Canadian companies are telling us they think the R&D tax incentive program is a positive one for R&D in Canada"
[4/5] Intuit Products AnswerWorks ActiveX Control Buffer Overflow
Description : Parvez Anwar has discovered a vulnerability in various Intuit products, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system. via Secunia
