As someone who has worked with Quickbooks and supported others in the past I am an advocate of the product.
I am assisting a small business owner who has started 1 and half years ago with the accounting and bookkeeping. As would be expected the owner is not an accountant and does not understand accounts or Quickbooks and the maximum that can be obtained is information on Excel needing some scrubbing.
I took a two-layer approach here. I first experimented with the Demo QBO file to test and see how QB could be conceptualized, configured, set up and used and thereafter performed sample data imports and repeated that numerous times.
After that I created a mock environment using a QBOA Accountant file (as it can do mass edits and undo reconciliations in case things go wrong). I was able to set up the QBOA file, migrate the real data etc all successfully.
Now, I have some business dilemmas/questions for which I need smart suggestions, opinions:
DILEMMA 1: Should I get a proper QBO subscription straight away regardless of whether or not it shall be used; whether or not the owner shall continue in business; whether or not the owner is capable or able to learn and adopt QB; whether or not the owner and staff is able to change the workflow and processes to align with QB; whether or not QB would practically work, etc, etc?
DILEMMA 2: If it is decided to adopt QBO straight away should I enter opening balances or migrate the entire past year data just like I did in QBOA (obviously having all transactional data would be beneficial than simply opening balances and doing now will be small duplication of effort but everything is fresh in the mind including how data migration was done)?.
DILEMMA 3: If at some point in future it is determined to adopt QB, should I enter opening balances at that point in time or migrate entire data including for past year and anything after that and beyond if any (obviously this would require more time and effort)?
QUESTION 4: Given the above concerns should I continue with QBOA as usual until such time it is decided to abandon QB or alternatively the business is ready to adopt QB (basically we cross the bridge then)?
QUESTION 5: What is the limits of QBOA versus QBO (other than Accountant’s functionality) in terms of performance, limits to number of Customers, Suppliers, Invoices, Bills, data entries, etc etc?
QUESTION 6: If QBO is adopted for the same region as the one QBOA belongs to (e.g. UK) is there a difference in the Data Import Templates between QBOA and QBO?
QUESTION 7: Would going for QBO Plus be an overkill for very small business owner now (no Class needed; no Location needed and certainly no Multi-currency needed at least for now)?
Thanks.
