Friday, July 20, 2007

New Blog

As I have mentioned on several occasions, the key to good tax and financial planning is good records. We in the tax profession can only do so much with what we are given by our clients. GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out. We have long required our business clients to keep their books using the QuickBooks programs, either on their own or with the assistance of outside bookkeeping professionals.

One of the most time consuming aspects for working on tax returns is cleaning up the QB data so that it provides what we need. This is the case with many professional bookkeepers, as well as people who do their own entry work. I am planning to post copies of many of the tips I send to other QB users on this new blog. I am also hoping to be able to post short mini videos that show how certain tasks are done.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I decided to set up a new separate blog for this topic was so that I could have a chance to play with the new features that the Blogger service has developed which are not available on my old style blog, such as the poll on the right side.



Saturday, July 7, 2007

QB Data Conversion

I recently took a survey for QuickBooks on their new Client Solution Center as part of their Certified ProAdvisor program.  While I like their new data conversion tool that allows people to import data from Peachtree, Microsoft Small Business Accounting and Microsoft Office Accounting, it does have a serious limitation, which I explained as follows in the request for additional feedback.



Your conversion tool should include the ability to convert from the QB Online format to the QB desktop format.  I have always advised against using your online service because of the inability to do this, and will continue to advise against your online service until it is possible to easily move data from the online program to the desktop one.