QuickBooks Checks

Our goal of requiring all of our clients to put all of their personal and business finances on QuickBooks (QB) is proceeding, although quite slowly.  We did scare off a few dozen long time clients, who refused to work with QB and went to other tax pros for services. We don't mind that a bit and are fairly confident that most of them will come crawling back when they see how high the taxes are with their new, less aggressive tax advisors.  That's how things have worked out in the past, when clients left because of displeasure over our high rates and relative inaccessibility.  Somehow, those things aren't as important in the big picture when they discover how much higher their taxes are with less expensive and more accessible tax pros. 

Although most of the remaining clients have QB set up for their books, I have noticed that most of them are still not using one of its most powerful and useful features, the ability to print checks from within the QB program.  They are creating a lot more work for themselves by writing their checks by hand and then entering the data into QB, usually months or years after the fact.  As I have said on several occasions, QB is not meant to be a task in addition to a normal checkbook.  It is intended to replace your checkbook.

You are missing out on one of the biggest time savings aspects of QuickBooks by not having the checks printed from within QuickBooks itself.  By doing so, your books will be constantly up to date, and you will reduce the amount of time it takes for your bookkeeping by more than half.  You can buy blank checks that work with QuickBooks from any check supplier.  They cost almost the same as the checks that you write out by hand.

An even more efficient and inexpensive way to make checks for QuickBooks is to print your own with a program such as VersaCheck.  I have been using it for several years for several different bank accounts.  It really beats having to order 500 pre-printed checks and being stuck with 400 after the bank changes name or the account is closed.  This is also the same program I use that enables us to accept faxed in checks, by making  substitute checks that can be deposited just like regular ones. 

While there will obviously be times when you will need to write a check by hand, and then enter its details into QuickBooks when you return to the computer, most of your checks can be printed from within QuickBooks a lot more efficiently than by hand.  Besides cutting your bookkeeping time in half, this will make tax and financial planning much more efficient because your data will be constantly up to date.  It is impossible to do an accurate job when the books are several months or years behind the times, especially when we need to do income shifting between corporate and personal accounts at the end of the tax years.

I know that most people don't do this just because of normal fear of the new and unknown.  There is also a big misconception that setting things up to print out checks takes several hours of time and is very confusing.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It takes just a few minutes to adjust the settings for your printer and the style of checks you are using.  I have always preferred the one check per page voucher style checks to be loaded into the paper tray of my laser printers.  The extra stubs are handy for attaching to my copies of the bills that are filed away.  When you are entering the check info, with the first few letters, it remembers the name and fills in the rest.  It also codes the payment to the proper account based on the last check that was made out to that payee.  It saves a huge amount of time.  You can also send the checks in standard window envelopes, saving even more time writing out addresses.  I would never go back to hand writing checks, and neither would anyone else who has used this very handy feature of QuickBooks.    

KMK

- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 4/30/2003 01:02:00 PM Send this post: