No matter what your small business is selling, accounting is essential to keeping your company running efficiently and effectively. It’s well-established that QuickBooks Online is a go-to platform for tracking income and expenses (and automatically dropping them into the right categories for tax purposes), but you can do way more than the double-entry basics of balancing your books.
This digital accounting platform offers one of the most comprehensive, easy-to-learn, and flexible tools for staying on top of all facets of your cashflow, even potentially confusing areas like sales tax. Depending on the size of your business and complexity of your transactions, there are four scalable plans—Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced.
One major benefit of QuickBooks Online is how intuitive it is overall. Even when you’re entering unfamiliar territory, it’s simple to understand.
Some small businesses may not even realize the full potential, from tracking miles to managing time. To take advantage of everything QuickBook Online can enable your small business to do, here is a look at some of its most handy—and sometimes under-utilized—features.
Track Deductible Miles From Your Smartphone
For staying on top of expenses and filing tax returns, capturing and organizing receipts is a must-have tool you expect from all levels of QuickBooks Online. But they take it a step further with mile tracking as well. You can automatically track miles using your smartphone’s GPS, and with a few quick swipes, categorize business and personal trips or add trips manually. There are also shareable reports breaking down miles driven and potential deductions.
In 2021, miles driven for business can be deducted at 56 cents per mile, according to the IRS, and 14 cents for charity. If you’re hitting the road for meetings or deliveries, that adds up.
Payments Made Easy
Sending customized invoices and getting paid quickly are two reasons many small businesses start using QuickBooks Online. All plans track the status of invoices, send reminders, and match payments to invoices, but you can also track sales and automatically calculate sales tax on your invoices. Added to that, you can accept credit cards using the program’s mobile card reader or sync with other popular e-commerce tools and apps. For customers who prefer ACH or eChecks, QuickBooks Online enables simple digital payments, too.
In fact, whether your customers prefer to pay via credit, debit, Apple Pay, or ACH bank transfers, QuickBooks Payments allows you to add an easy Pay Now button to your online invoices that accepts all of your preferred payment methods. These payments are then deposited automatically, and QuickBooks automatically updates your books.
Clock In and Clock Out
You’re able to manage 1099 contractors with all plans, but with Essentials, Plus, and Advanced, you can clock your own team’s time and billable hours for invoices as well. With these plans, you can increase the number of users to three, five, and 25, respectively, and give users protected access to enter their own time. There’s also the option to add on QuickBooks Time for advanced time-tracking features to save on payroll costs and improve team management.
Determine Project Profitability
When your small business hits its stride and you’ve got a steady hum of clients or customers, you start looking beyond the general ledger side of bookkeeping. Accounting provides important data for determining the cost of your products or services, as well as profitability of work done. Both Plus and Advanced allow you track project profitability. You can view all your projects on a clear dashboard and generate reports to look at labor costs, payroll, and expenses.
Take Action with Business Analytics and Insight
When you’re growing a business, analyzing past performance drives smart planning for the future. With the Advanced plan, you get business analytics and insight with smart reporting by Fathom (which is an attractive perk considering it’s valued at $468/year). The analysis tools track financial and non-financial key performance indicators (KPIs), which you can use to create customized reports, including impactful visuals for presentations, and outline a plan of action.
Clean Up and Manage Your Books with Live Expert Help
For serious help with managing your books, QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping virtually partners you with a certified bookkeeping expert, who will collaborate with you and answer questions through video chat. First, your expert will clean up your books and bring them up to date. Then, every month, your bookkeeper will make sure your transactions are properly categorized, reconciling your accounts and providing you with a detailed monthly report. QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping is available to QuickBooks Online subscribers — just check out pricing details here.
Try QuickBooks OnlineTry QuickBooks Online for free for 30 days, or get 50% off your first three months—see for yourself how these tools can help streamline your business management.
