New Business Direction LLCWe are pleased to announce that Rhonda Rosand, CPA has been recognized as one of Intuit’s Top 100 ProAdvisors of 2014!
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Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit; Joe Woodard, CEO of Woodard Consulting Group, and Intuitive Accountant with the Top 100 ProAdvisors of 2014
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When creating the Top 100 ProAdvisor Program, Intuit aimed to identify leading 
ProAdvisors who leverage the ProAdvisor Program to better serve their clients, grow their own business, deliver great client service, and increase their knowledge and understanding of the Intuit ecosystem. The competition included Top Trainers, Top Friends of Intuit and the Top Intuit Reseller Partners as part of the overall program as well. Recognition was awarded from Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, Luis Sanchez with the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program, and Joe Woodard, CEO of Woodard Consulting Group. The award ceremony took place at the Scaling New Heights conference in San Antonio, Texas last week.
As an entrepreneur, you are responsible for shaping your business success. Any habits that sabotage your success in your personal life can often carry over to your business. Becoming aware of these is the first step to success. Here are seven success-boosting habits to double-check against your own.
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1. Being Able to Say “No.”
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You may need to re-evaluate the value of your time and your priorities. Practice making smart decisions by having a structure and a higher purpose that helps you decide what you should and shouldn’t do with your time, money, and life. And if you tend to be one of those who says “yes” to everything, you may need to practice saying “no” in front of the mirror to break your habit. |
Do you say “yes” to too many things that don’t serve your life purpose, help your family, or move your business forward? If so, you’re not alone. Saying “yes” in a weak moment when you feel like you can do it all can be a downfall for many entrepreneurs. It can also distract you from success if you are not working on the right things for you. |
2. Hiring Fast and Early
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The best time to hire is just before you need your new team member. It can be easy to put off hiring if you fill with dread when you think about large stacks of resumes and endless phone calls. Not hiring soon enough can cost your business in reduced service and sales. The smartest entrepreneurs stay ahead of the game in this area. |
3. Strategizing Proactively
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How much time do you spend in reactive mode versus proactive mode in your business? Reactive mode includes answering emails, fighting fires, serving clients, and managing employees. Proactive mode includes developing new products and services, creating and implementing your revenue plan, and training employees.
Sometimes we have to really push ourselves to look beyond the daily fires. One way to do that is to plan time every day for proactive activities and be ruthless about keeping that time slot on the calendar. |
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4. Setting a Tight Scope and Polite Boundaries with Customers
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Successful entrepreneurs set clear boundaries when it comes to delivering their products and services to customers. Especially in service companies, it’s not always clear to the client what’s included in a fixed fee contract unless it’s clearly spelled out. If you are asked to do something that’s not included in the contract, you now have a choice. Do you give it away for free, or do you have a change order process where you can easily provide an estimate for that extra work? |
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5. Measuring Results
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 Only what can be measured can be improved, and smart entrepreneurs know this. Track — in real time, not a year later — what’s important to you. New customers, new leads, closed sales, revenue per day, sales per day, monthly net income, certain costs, profit margins, profit per customer, profit per job, and profit per location are just a few of the many metrics you can choose to track for your business.Once you measure it, you can now set goals to improve it. |
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6. Curbing Irrational Spending
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Invest in things that will last, such as your own education, great systems, team training, and assets that you really need. Avoid spending on items that are used up quickly, such as elaborate entertainment expenses that don’t generate significant revenue, excessive utilities, and stopgap equipment.
This area can be a tough one to evaluate objectively because there can be emotion and attachment involved in the spending. Let us know if you need help in this area; we can help you look at your spending with fresh eyes and provide a new perspective. |
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7. Maintaining Focus
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Great entrepreneurs have clear focus. If you have too many projects going on at once, you end up delaying all of your project completion dates, and nothing gets finished. Ask yourself, what’s the most important thing I can do today? And work on that until it’s done. Then ask yourself the same question again, and wash, rinse, repeat your way to success. |
Seven Habits
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Which of the seven habits are you best at? Celebrate your natural gifts while keeping an eye on the habits you need to work on. That will move you to the success you deserve. |
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QuickBooks provides dozens of customizable report templates. You know when you need some of them, but which are musts?
You send invoices because you sold products and/or services. Purchase orders go out when you’re running low on inventory, and there are always bills to pay, it seems like. All of this activity is, of course, important in itself, but all of your conscientious bookkeeping culminates in what’s probably the most critical element of QuickBooks: your reports.
Reports can tell you how many navy blue sweatshirts you sold in March, what you paid for health insurance premiums in the first quarter, and how much you bought from your favorite vendor last month. They’re very good at drilling down to get the precise set of numbers you need.
But reports – carefully customized and properly analyzed – can do more than tell you how many golf clubs to order and when it’s time to switch phone services. They can help you make the business decisions that will help you take your growing company to the next level. There are several that you should be looking at regularly, some of which you can interpret easily and use in your daily workflow. We’ll help you with the interpretation of the more complex financial reports. |
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Who Owes Money? |
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That’s probably a question you ask yourself every day. You don’t necessarily have to run the A/R Aging Detail report every day, but you’ll want to run it frequently. It tells you who owes you money and whether they’ve missed the due date (and by how many days).
Figure 1: By running the A/R Aging Detail report, you can see whether you need to follow up with customers who have past due invoices.
As with any report, you can modify it to include the columns, data set and date range you want by clicking the Customize button. When you create a report in a format that you think you might want to run again, click the Memorize button. Enter a name that you’ll remember, and assign it to a Memorized Report Group.
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Getting There
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There are two ways to find the reports you want to see. You can open the Reports menu and move your cursor down to the category you want, like Customers & Receivables, which will open a slide-out menu of options there.
Or you can open the Report Center, which lets you explore reports in more depth. Each is represented by a small graphic with four icons under it. You can:
Figure 2: If you access QuickBooks reports through the Report Center, you’ll have several related options.
Other accounts receivable reports that you should consult periodically include Open Invoices and Average Days to Pay. |
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Tracking What You Owe
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Reports can also keep you up-to-date on money that you owe to other people and companies. An important one is Unpaid Bills Detail, accessible through the Vendors & Payables menu item. Though you can modify its columns, this report basically tells you who is expecting money from you, the date the bill was issued and its due date, any number assigned to it, the balance due, and relevant aging information.
Vendor Balance Detail is critical, too. This report displays every transaction (invoices, payments, etc.) that contribute to the balance you have with each vendor.
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Standard Financial Reports
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QuickBooks report categories include one labeled Company & Financial. These are reports that you can run yourself, but they’re critical for understanding your company’s financial status. We can customize and analyze these for you on a regular basis so you’ll know where you stand. They include:
Reports can only generate information about what you’ve entered in QuickBooks and exactly where it’s been entered. So it’s crucial that you follow standard accounting practice as you proceed through your daily workflow. We’re always available to answer questions you have about QuickBooks’ structure and your activity there. Your reports – and your critical business decisions – depend on it. |
Intuit Field Service Management simplifies your business and gives you more control over your technicians, customers, cash flow and costs. It eliminates paperwork from work orders to invoices – so you can get paid faster.
Field Service Management is web-based software that integrates with QuickBooks® Pro, Premier and Enterprise to schedule Work Orders and dispatch Field Technicians via a Dashboard and Mobile devices. It integrates with Google Maps to locate job-sites and minimize travel time and allows for Mobile Billing and Payments. 
The Intuit Service Provider training courses are designed to enhance the consultants’ knowledge of the product for configuration, deployment, integration and training on Field Service Management.
Rhonda Rosand, CPA is the owner of New Business Directions. She specializes in QuickBooks consulting and training services, coaching small business owners, and providing innovative business solutions.
The two major ways entrepreneurs can take money from their business is through draws or by receiving a paycheck. The type of entity in which their business is set up will determine which method can be used. In either case, entrepreneurs need to be careful not to shortchange themselves.
Especially if you’re running a service business, it’s easy to initially think you can do well with a similar hourly rate that you earned as an employee. Here’s a quick list of five elements that should be included in the compensation of every entrepreneur:
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1. Competitive Pay
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If you were doing the same work for a company that hired you, what would your pay be? Are you making at least market equivalent or better? A lot of times, as entrepreneurs, we tend to focus only on this piece of our compensation when we set our pricing, and that’s a big mistake. It’s only 75 percent of what our total pay needs to be.|
2. Profit
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As an entrepreneur, you take extra risk when you own your own company, and you should be compensated accordingly. Your capital is tied up in your business and should be earning a good return in addition to your reasonable compensation. |
3. Benefits
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Employees get vacations, health insurance, and bonuses; and you should too. This should be part of your compensation package as an entrepreneur. |
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4. Taxes
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Although our individual taxes are not deductible as business expenses, we need to compensate for them so that we’ll have enough cash for our living expenses. It’s a huge chunk too. We work about three and a half months every year, just to pay for our taxes. |
5. Retirement Plan
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When you work for yourself, no one is going to fund your retirement for you. Although the Social Security program helps a lot of seniors, it’s up to you to set additional money aside for a comfortable future. |
Complete Compensation
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Your compensation should include all of these components. If it doesn’t and you feel like you can’t afford to pay yourself that much, then your pricing might not be reflecting all of these items correctly, you might have a volume problem, or your business model may need some adjusting.
It’s normal to take a smaller paycheck the first few years as we’re building our businesses, but if you’re still doing it after several years or constantly having cash flow issues, then something may be wrong.
If you’d like our help in this area of your business, please reach out and let us know.
Make sure your future is bright and financially secure by including all five components in your entrepreneur compensation. |
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Tips & Tricks in QuickBooks®
