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:
1. Competitive Pay
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2. Profit
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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. |
4. Taxes
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5. Retirement Plan
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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. |
Watching the cash balance is one of the most frequent activities of a small business owner. Besides making sure you have enough cash for payroll and bills, there is another huge opportunity you can benefit from: lowering the cost of processing your bills. It can be expensive and time-consuming to process bills and handle the paperwork involved. We’ll take a look at a couple of the many ways you can streamline your accounts payable processing costs in this article.
Opportunity #1: Go Digital
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The Intuit Payment Network (IPN) is a best-kept secret when it comes to sending and receiving money. It’s free to set up your account, and it’s also free for your receiver to set up an account. All you do is add your bank account, and you can easily transfer funds between the two accounts just by knowing the receiver’s email address.
Another way to go digital is via PayPal. Fees vary, and are usually paid by the receiver. |
Opportunity #2: Get Control
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When it comes to finances, it’s never a good idea to mix business and personal, especially when it’s coming out of the same bank account. Keep separate accounts for business and personal, and your bookkeeping costs will go way down. Do the same thing for credit cards as well.
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Opportunity #3: Automate
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Opportunity #4: Verify
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We hope you never pay bills that aren’t yours, but it can happen. To avoid it as much as possible, implement a three-way matching process on all your payables, especially those related to inventory. The three-way part refers to the three documents involved in accounts payable:
Before any invoice is paid, these three documents should be matched line by line – for quantity, price, and description — to ensure you ordered and received what you paid for. Only then should your bill be approved. This will ensure that you don’t pay a fraudulent bill, you don’t pay for out-of-stock that didn’t ship and that you paid the correct price you agreed to in the first place.
Please feel free to reach out and ask us about this if you’d like to know more. |
Opportunity #5: Tell Yourself a Little White Lie
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Reduce all that by telling yourself a little white lie about your bank balance. If your bank balance is $10,000, tell yourself it’s only $5,000 (or whatever amount makes sense for you). That way, you’ll always have a cushion in your account that will help you reduce transfers. There are several ways to set this “little white lie” up in your books. |
More A/P Ideas
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These are only five of many ways you can reduce your processing costs and save time on accounts payable processing. Give these five accounts payable ideas a try, and if you’d like to know more, please reach out and let us know. |
I’m honored to have just earned my QuickBooks Cloud ProAdvisor designation from Intuit. We are excited to continue our strong relationship with Intuit in the QuickBooks ProAdvisor program where we receive outstanding access to higher-level software support, multiple software products including third-party add-ons, and additional training and certification options that help us increase our proficiency in the Intuit QuickBooks product line.
For you, my new certification means I’ve achieved a level of competence recognized by Intuit that demonstrates my knowledge of QuickBooks Online. With this knowledge, I will be able to answer your questions about QuickBooks Online, help you assess whether this product will better meet your business needs compared to other QuickBooks products, and provide you with productivity-boosting training filled with all the tips I’ve just learned.
If you’re interested in finding out more about whether QuickBooks Online can better serve your business’s needs or anything about QuickBooks Online, then please reach out and give us a call.
To learn more about New Business Directions and QuickBooks®, or to schedule an appointment, please call (603)356-2914, email rhonda@newbusinessdirections.com or visit the website at www.newbusinessdirections.com.
There are a lot of clues that indicate trouble with your QuickBooks company file. Is it time for a check-up and tune-up?
After this ridiculously long winter, you’ll probably hear few complaints about things like puddles in the street, summer heat and spring cleaning. Most people are eager to throw open the doors and windows, and attack the dirt that the season left behind, both inside and outside of the house.
It’s not hard to see when your home is dirty. QuickBooks company file errors are harder to detect, but they’re there, including:
- Performance problems
- Inability to execute specific processes, like upgrading
- Occasional program crashes
- Missing data (accounts, names, etc.)
- Refusal to complete transactions, and
- Mistakes in reports.

Call for Help
The best thing you can do if you notice problems like this cropping up in QuickBooks – especially if you’re experiencing multiple ones – is to contact us. We understand the file structure of QuickBooks company data, and we have access to tools that you don’t. We can analyze your file and take steps to correct the problem(s).
One of the reasons QuickBooks files get corrupt is simply because they grow too big. That’s either a sign of your company’s success or of a lack of periodic maintenance that you can do yourself. QuickBooks contains some built-in tools that you can run occasionally to minimize your file size.
One thing you can do on your own is to rid QuickBooks of old, unneeded data. The software contains a Condense Data utility that can do this automatically. But just because QuickBooks offers a tool doesn’t mean that you should use it on your own.
A Risky Utility
The program’s documentation for this utility contains a list of warnings and preparation steps a mile long.
We recommend that you do not use this tool. Same goes for Verify Data and Rebuild Data in the Utilities menu. If you lose a significant amount of company data, you can also lose your company file. It’s happened to numerous businesses.
Be Proactive
Instead, start practicing good preventive medicine to keep your QuickBooks company file healthy. Once a month or so, perhaps at the same time you reconcile your bank accounts, do a manual check of your major Lists.
Run the Account Listing report (Lists | Chart of Accounts | Reports | Account Listing). Are all of your bank accounts still active? Do you see accounts that you no longer used or which duplicate each other? Don’t try to “fix” the Chart of Accounts on your own. Let us help.
Figure 3: You might run this report periodically to see if it can be abbreviated.