QuickBooks, from Intuit, is a comprehensive accounting and business management suite designed for small- and medium-sized businesses. Intuit also offers a dedicated accounting package, QuickBooks Accountant, that includes specialized features for accountants. The QuickBooks Accountant 2013 package is designed to simplify workflow and communication between accountants and multiple clients, in addition to offering the core QuickBooks functionality for registering financial transactions and generating several types of reports.
Core Functionality
At its heart, QuickBooks Accountant is a simplified bookkeeping interface, helping you record financial transactions like expenses, sales, income and payroll. For budgeting purposes, QuickBooks allows you to enter recurring expenses like payroll and rent, as well as project your future income. For financial records, you can also connect QuickBooks Accountant to online banking software to automatically reflect actual balance changes and transfers — all through preloaded templates like double-entry ledgers or profit and loss spreadsheets.
Reporting
One of the great advantages of QuickBooks Accountant over solutions like common spreadsheets is the ease with which you can generate reports and graphs. Using the data you enter, QuickBooks Accountant can automatically generate reports like balance sheets, profit and loss sheets, or cash flow statements — which you can further divide and supplement with graphs to identify items like your biggest expenses. All of these features are available under a convenient Reports menu, and you can generate them at any time to reflect your business’s most recent data.
Usability
Some of the biggest changes in Accountant 2013 over previous versions are in the area of usability — these changes generally simplify the interface and increase transaction speeds. QuickBooks Accountant 2013 allows you to enter or reclassify data in batches, meaning you can import numbers both from other QuickBooks files and Excel spreadsheets. You can quickly set up new accounting customers by importing data into templates, and can also work on two company files simultaneously in different windows. Accountant 2013 also makes menus and toolbars more customizable, allowing you to make the tools you use most often more accessible.
Communication
QuickBooks Accountant allows you to send journal entries to clients directly from the program, without having to print documents or export them as PDFs. The program sends journal entries as email attachments to the email address listed under company information. The package also displays all of your clients in a sortable main menu to make locating files easier. If you’re in a hurry to send client files, the program includes tools and widgets to catch common errors and alert you to reconciliation problems between accounts.
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