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A lot of small to medium sized businesses tend to have an issue with their accounting. These businesses use QuickBooks for their accounting software but unfortunately their accounting personnel are not fully trained on how to effectively use QuickBooks.  Without the proper QuickBooks training for a business’s accounting personnel, the risk that accounting errors will occur increases substantially. To combat these potential errors, here is a short list of issues that can be alleviated with proper QuickBooks training.

• If your company does not have an experienced accounting professional or an accounting employee with the proper training in QuickBooks, then there’s a strong possibility that you’ll need to hire an outside professional which will cost your business more money over time. This is because you’ll need a periodic check-up to help catch overall accounting errors.

• Bank reconciliations – these are sometimes performed by the same individual who manages the day-to-day cash transactions.  If this is the case for your company, then again, you’ll need to hire outside help from someone review the bank reconciliations for old outstanding items and investigate items as needed.

• Not many beginner QuickBooks users know the rules of the “closing date” for your books. Not knowing the full implications of this can be disastrous since once you have set a closing date, the program will not allow you to make changes for any date on or before that date without a password.  This will prevent someone from making changes to prior periods after they have been reviewed by your accounting professional.  For instance, someone may have meant to make an entry from 2007 but was entered as1907.  Entries like these will throw off beginning balances for tax or financial statement purposes and will make your current period financial statements unreliable.

• Without proper training, your accounting personnel will not understand how to build processes that use the QuickBooks functionality for entering bills and paying them.  Even though a check can be written directly from QuickBooks without entering a bill, the proper training ensures you will always have your accounting personnel enter a bill and then pay the bill using the “Pay Bills” function.  It is very common to see a bill entered and then a check written for the same bill using the check writing function.  This error will enter the same expense twice and leave an accounts payable balance on the books that has actually been paid.  By having your accounting personnel trained proficiently in QuickBooks, they will learn that if the same process is always followed for paying bills, then this problem will occur infrequently.

If you need assistance with using QuickBooks or want to learn more about our QuickBooks training for accounting personnel, then contact a Beaton Accounting professional today for a FREE consultation at: 631-921-6894.

Have a question or certain topic you’d like to see addressed in our next blog post? Just leave a comment, or e-mail us at info@beatonaccounting.com.