QuickBooks 2010 document management and the Intuit Green Snapshot give you the fastest and easiest management and time and money savings. The free QuickBooks 2010 Pro, Premier and Enterprise document management can save you far more than a Toyota Prius. You easily clip PDF documents to QuickBooks entry or list items, with automatic optional web backup and secure sharing.
It was a shock to see this free document management in QuickBooks 2010. I paid hundreds of dollars more for it last year. I do not regret my prior purchase, as QuickBooks document management is one of the fastest and easiest ways to get better management, less stress and big savings. You automatically organize PDF copies of QuickBooks and tax reports, and semi-automatically organize other scanned files. You then find any document (no lost files) far faster than finding paper originals, with easy searches.
Document management is now universal among leading companies. We discard time / billing paper documents, scan / return client paper documents and rarely file anything. We stamp sequential numbers on each document we do not discard before scanning and file originals in a 31-pocket file jacket for each month. Can you imagine secretaries almost never going to file rooms?
QuickBooks 2010 document management causes no noticeable computer delay, but does not search on any word in any document. The free Google Desktop program (QuickBooks 2010 install disk or the web), scans each word and lets you optionally securely share documents between computers, but it slows computers. The fastest and easiest way around the slowness is to turn Desktop off occasionally, or to keep it on a spare computer and only index network data drive documents.
The Intuit Green Snapshot is a simple free program. You quickly and easily get a chart estimating big categories of carbon emissions, based on QuickBooks expenses. You can review Intuit Green Snapshot recommendations to go greener and often save money. You can even create a Green Profile to share.
These should be Intuit Green Snapshot improvements, but you can be even more green and more profitable once you read this short paragraph. The Intuit Green Snapshot ignores QuickBooks 2010 document management. The Intuit Green Snapshot also ignores easy bank reconciliation time and paper savers. A top-right reconciliation screen checkbox makes QuickBooks ignore entries after the bank statement date. You save time by concentrating on entries that matter, while printing less and go green. This should default to ON, but Intuit does not yet do that.
You can go green better by switching to the QuickBooks Accountant Edition and properly using it. The Accountant Edition has PDF copies of all bank reconciliations, not just the last one. You rarely need printed versions of bank reconciliations, if they are readily available in your QuickBooks file. so you can skip printing bank reconciliations almost completely. QuickBooks 2010 Accountant Edition also has a Client Data Review with a type of global search and replace, for correcting many mistakes fast. It even givse you a place for notes about each Review step done. This means still less paper, while saving up to four hours per client. QuickBooks CPAs, not documenting using the QuickBooks 2010 Client Data Review, may soon face billing disputes and malpractice claims.
Please be safe. Only skip QuickBooks printing after you properly automate backup. Many professional data centers do continuous backup, so they never lose an entry. Even small CPA firms like mine, however, can make QuickBooks automatically backup each time it exits without wasting time. Do this to a C:\zz folder and it is out of they way. Network users also get copies on different user drives, for extra safety. We do not make these backups to network drives (though a separate network drive would be a good alternate), since we backup our entire network drive daily to alternating backup drives. The one-time total cost of extra drives, instalation and the program program were well under $500. Yesterday alone they let me quickly and easily recover a deleted return, which saved $1,500 in billable time.
Finally, Intuit should use the simple word entry for transaction. Intuit properly ignored CPA conventions in simplifying Quicken and QuickBooks. This revolutionized accounting, by letting us all do professional accountant or bookkeeper work. I most respectfully submit, however, that Intuit should now further simplify, with the CPA respected word entry, Entry is widely understood to mean transaction, with less than half the letters. West’s Encyclopedia of American Law and many dictionaries define entry as the inclusion or insertion of an item, as in a record: made an entry in the ledger, and an item entered in this way. There is certainly no longer a reason for QuickBooks documents to sound slightly pompous, when Intuit can go green this way.
For much more on an exciting subject, see Going Green With QuickBooks from Joe Woodard, an outstanding QuickBooks writer and teacher of QuickBooks teachers, in AccountingWeb.
