USA Use of Excel for QuickBooks tasks?

[Morton Herald]

I am a small business owner who is learning QuickBooks (Pro 2015 Desktop) because I fired an off-site accounting consultant who was handling all my accounting. Very small company $250K revenues; 6 checks per month; 2 ACH's; one credit card with appx 10 line items per month; one bank account with <15 transactions per month; one line of credit; 1-2 deposits per month; 1-2 client invoices written per month each with less than 10 line items. Low transaction account.

I am able to complete these routine monthly tasks in 2-5 hours.

My accounting consultant was billing 25 - 45 hours per month where the Audit Log Reports showed 3 to 6 hours of activity in the QB file.

When confronted in a contentious meeting, she explained that she did all her work in Excel ----- migrating data into and out of QuickBooks. Exporting and Importing QB data does not appear on the Audit Trail Log Reports (Desktop versions) and that was her explanation for the discrepancy.

Question: How many accountants on the forum use Excel to perform their QB work? If so, does that use approach the ratio just mentioned? QB is a powerful software that should be able to handle all accounting functions. I can see exporting of financial statements, AP and AR aging, Chart of Accounts, etc. but not routine tasks such as entering checks, expense reports, invoice pass through's, etc.

 

[Steve-LevelUp]

I have been an extensive user of Quickbooks for many years, and I have not had success in using excel imports/exports extensively. I used Quickbooks for a $7m business, so our activity was extensive. The only time that we needed to use excel was for analytics and review purposes. I do not want to specifically say that your accountant was doing something in appropriate, but in my experience, Quickbooks just isn't used in that way.

From the sounds of your company, it would actually be longer/more work to type everything into excel first, and then load it into Quickbooks. Quickbooks is specifically designed for quick entry.

It is possible that your accountant was providing analytics relevant for your business, but I think you would be well aware of that.

I suspect that your accountant was keeping a separate/duplicate record of everything they were doing in excel for their own purposes (or perhaps to protect themselves), but this is just a waste of time as quickbooks would be the system of record.

Personally, for a business such as yours, you are probably better off doing the work yourself. It keeps you very close to the activity of the business (spending, balances etc) plus it really doesn't take very long to do, so it is a worth while endeavor.

Happy to discuss further

Regards.
Steve

 

[Morton Herald]

Steve,

Many thanks for the time to share your thoughts. Very helpful and much appreciated.

I compared the QuickBooks Audit Trail logs for 24 months with the line items on the accountant's invoices for 24 months --- 2015 and 2016. QB hours for that time period totaled 168 hours. Invoiced hours totaled 963 hours. Difference is 795 hours.

You are right. I have learned QB and am performing the monthly tasks myself. I am logging about 7 hours per month to complete everything. This comports with the account's time spent in the QB file 168 hours / 24 months = 7 hr / mo.

Mort

 

[Werner Reisacher]

I sucessfully use Excel with QuickBook. I prepareI spreadsheet templates for my customers. Once of their non accountant employee fills their daily transactions into the templetes. At the end of the month, I use Pivot tables, and only enter the few summary amounts into the QB. Both my customers and I are happy.

 

[Morton Herald]

I sucessfully use Excel with QuickBook. I prepareI spreadsheet templates for my customers. Once of their non accountant employee fills their daily transactions into the templetes. At the end of the month, I use Pivot tables, and only enter the few summary amounts into the QB. Both my customers and I are happy.

Werner......Many thanks for your response. Very helpful..........Before my business partner left our company in 2014 he used Excel in a similar manner as you explain. He performed all accounting tasks for the company. He traveled extensively for 15 years accumulating $5,000 to $10,000 of travel expenses per month. He configured a Palm Pilot with our company's exact QuickBooks Chart of Accounts. On his downtime in hotels, airports and airplanes he would input his expenses using the Palm Pilot. When he returned to the office he would insert the Palm Pilot into a holder linked to his computer. Then via IFF files he could Import his travel expenses into a Bill in our Desktop version of QuickBooks software......Mort 7/13/17

 

[ladyrider]

Steve,

Many thanks for the time to share your thoughts. Very helpful and much appreciated.

I compared the QuickBooks Audit Trail logs for 24 months with the line items on the accountant's invoices for 24 months --- 2015 and 2016. QB hours for that time period totaled 168 hours. Invoiced hours totaled 963 hours. Difference is 795 hours.

You are right. I have learned QB and am performing the monthly tasks myself. I am logging about 7 hours per month to complete everything. This comports with the account's time spent in the QB file 168 hours / 24 months = 7 hr / mo.

Mort

Ok but that's not exactly fair to the accountant actually. Just because he or she was only working in QB those hours in no way means they weren't working on your accounting. There is far more to keeping a set of books then what is actually done and tracked in the QB audit trail. There's time spent working in the bank account, answering emails, phone calls, running reports, looking up checks and deposits - all of that would not show up as actual activity in the QB audit trail. As for their methods of using excel, no I don't use excel no but you state you learned QB which is great BUT do you know what your are doing in the accounting side of things? As a degreed accountant with over 35 years of experience with 9 years of working in my own business clients like yourself are insulting and would be fired as soon as they started bringing up that they were checking the audit trail. You are paying for results not a trained monkey to do the data entry.

 

[Drmdcpa]

I will chime in on a few points.

I have used QB since it first came out. Yes I have been in the industry that long.

I work and have worked with sales ranging from $100K to above $10M, 1 - 400 employees covering 1 - 20 states, a dozen to 300 or more monthly invoices, and bank statements that fit on one page to those that look like telephone books.

I rarely import into QB especially from Excel. But many of my clients import directly from bank and credit card accounts.

I do export from QB to Excel several times per month on average.

QB does not cover all aspects and sometimes can be cumbersome. Most of my clients use it for nuts and bolts but use other programs for much of their other needs especially analytical, time keeping and estimating.

You should not regularly do your own bookkeeping. Your time is more valuable than $25-$45 per hour. Your time should be used to meet the needs of your clients and get new clients. Also I have seen small biz owners get bogged down in the tedium of bookkeeping to the extent it impacted their biz and quality of life. Generally if it is a married couple, one takes care of the office while the other does the field.

With that said, intermittently and randomly you should step in and reconcile your accounts. If your bookkeeper knows that at any moment you will reconcile the accounts for that month, they are less likely to attempt to embezzle because it takes at least two reconciliation cycles to wash the trail.

From what you detailed it sounds like 5 hours per month for bookkeeping might be overkill and allow for the additional quarterly and annual work.