Will you teach me how to use all of the features in QuickBooks?
No. Not all of the features in QuickBooks ® will apply to your business. I will teach you how to use the features that do apply. I will also show you what features not to use.
I see my job as teaching you how to produce, in a simple and time-efficient manner, financial information that accurately reflects the financial reality of your business. Being an accountant, I know what a good set of books looks like. And I know that a well kept set of books cuts way down on year-end accounting time, and therefore accounting fees. I will teach you how to create a good set of books.
Assuming you were my accountant, why would you want to teach me how to reduce your fees?
To create a win-win situation and avoid a win-lose situation.
I've worked a long time with clients who use QuickBooks ®. Almost unfailingly, if they've learned how to use the software by themselves, their books will be a mess. It takes a lot of accounting time to clean the books up enough to be able to prepare and comfortably sign a year end tax return. In that situation I'm faced with either presenting the client with a huge accounting bill or discounting my time. The former makes the client unhappy (and unlikely to return). The latter makes me unhappy.
If you were my client and you learned how to keep a good set of books, I could bill out all of my time and feel fairly compensated, and you would likely find the fee reasonable. If fairness is experienced on both sides, that makes for a mutually satisfying, and hopefully long term, professional relationship.
How will using QuickBooks help me run my business?
In basically two ways. You can create the paperwork of your business on QuickBooks ®. You will also create financial reports that can help you manage your business.
I like to think of QuickBooks ® as having two parts, a front end and a back end. You would be working primarily with the front end. You could be doing such things as writing and printing checks, or creating sales invoices to give to your customers. This creates the paperwork of your business. But the information you enter into the front end also gets recorded in the back end - the books. Here, all that information is accumulated and categorized to produce financial reports that summarize how your business is doing.
My instruction focuses primarily on the back end of QuickBooks ®. That's where the information from all the transactions of your business gets organized into reports that are either meaningful or not. My job is to teach you how to produce meaningful reports. But to do that, we have to go through the front end. While working with you on the front end I will acquaint you with its features, but will leave learning much of the detail to you. Whether or not you will want to use that detail will depend on how you prefer to create the paperwork of your business. You can use QuickBooks ® to create the paperwork, or just use it to record the information on paperwork created outside of QuickBooks ®.