PhineasSwann said:
Does anyone use any of these other features, and if so, how?
- Accounts Payable (Entering Bills/Bills To Pay/Checks To Print)
Yes, although we are still writing our checks out by hand rather than printing them (thinking about moving to printing checks), but we do keep track of some (but not all) of our accounts payable. For example, our Laundry Service comes a couple times a week, invoicing us for each delivery, and I record each invoice as a bill in QB, and then every two or three weeks pay the accumulated bills with one check..
- Accounts Receivable
- Invoices
Yes to both, our guests pay a deposit of 25% months and months in advance, and we invoice them for the balance due upon arrival, so we definitely do keep track of A/R.
Not really applicable in our business....
I am not sure what this means other than being able to look up what we have paid to different vendors at different times in the past, which can be quite useful.
No, we don't use this
We have used this once or twice for a special project, but otherwise don't really use it. Thinking about it now, it might be good for our wedding business, though.....
Yes, see above regarding A/R and Invoices.
No, our business is so seasonal, that month-to-month budgeting would be very hard; rather we try to project everything out to an annual basis.
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The usefulness of some of the features (A/P, A/R, Inventory) probably depends on whether you are using accrual-basis accounting rather than cash-basis.
For payroll, we roll our own. Since we only have employees for 4 to 6 months out of the year, I just can't get my head around continuing to pay a subscription to a payroll service for the the other 6 to 8 months of the year....
You didn't mention Customer Management -- our QB database goes back about 15 years, longer than any other records we have really, so the Customer List is often where we look for information about our returning guests....
We don't really look at monthly P&L statements so much as our annual projections, but we do find the current year to previous year YTD comparison report useful to see how revenues and expenses are running. Of course, the end-of-fiscal-year P&L is the basis for our tax return.... Our fiscal year ends about a month-and-a-half after our guest season ends, so we look carefully at the P&L during that last month to see how close we are to making a profit and whether there are any additional expenditures we want to make before the year's end in order to reduce the tax hit..
