Do I Need an Accountant if I Use QuickBooks

In the past, managing the financial records of businesses meant a lot of paperwork, hours of calculations, and stressful tax times. But digitalization trends like the introduction of online bookkeeping and accounting software have made it easier for business owners to manage their financial records. But does that eliminate the need to hire an accountant? Let's find out in this blog!

 To understand if QuickBooks can replace an accountant, you must first know what you can achieve using this online software. 

How Can QuickBooks Help You?

Track Daily Transactions

With QuickBooks, you can download and categorise your expenses in a single place. This way, you would always receive every payment. Connect your bank and credit card accounts with your QuickBooks account and forget the hassle of bill payments. 

 

Track your upcoming payments with a few simple clicks on your screen. Create an A/P report with details of your past and present due bills.

Take Care of Your Invoicing Needs

The first thing that you need to understand is that QuickBooks is primarily a bookkeeping software. It can help small business owners take care of their bookkeeping needs like expense management, processing of invoices, employee time tracking, etc. 

A simple manual invoicing process may work for you when you have just started your business. But as your customers increase, you may need to shift to a more organised and automated form of generating customer invoices. 

QuickBooks can help you process invoices, send reminders and organise payments according to date, time, names, etc. It also has the feature of accepting online payments. 

Track Employee Details

In most small businesses, employees submit a manual time or expenditure sheet, later updated into the tracker by a bookkeeper. With QuickBooks, you can add time and billable expenses directly to a customer's invoice before sending it. This way, tracking time or money spent on a particular job by your employees is more accessible. 

Get Financial Statements

QuickBooks helps you print three reports- Profit and Loss Report, Balance Sheet Report, and Statement of Cash Flows. All these reports can help you assess your business's short-term and long-term profitability. 

How Do Accountants Help?

Now that you understand the benefits of QuickBooks for your business let's look at all the processes that an accountant helps with. QuickBooks does not offer these services. QuickBooks is more like a tool that can help accountants work faster and wiser. 

1.     Accountants Offer Guidance

In addition to managing your balance sheets, an accountant assist you in your day-to-day business by providing you with valuable guidance on financial issues. They study trends and patterns to segment information that one can use for making business decisions. 

Your accountant can help you understand whether an investment is profitable. He can also guide you on how to make your underperforming assets perform better. They can use QuickBooks to simplify their work and reduce the time spent on data entry work. One can utilise this time for complicated tasks like offering business advice based on studying the data stored and managed on QuickBooks.

2. An Accountant Can Confirm Your Records

On QuickBooks, you may sometimes enter the numbers under the wrong accounts, and it would not identify the error as long as your credit equals your debit. An accountant checks all your records to ensure they are entered under the correct account. 

An accountant ensures that all your entries are independent of your balance sheet and income statement. This way, an accountant is more beneficial for your business. 

3. Accountants Assist in Ensuring Compliance

You need an accountant to ensure compliance because QuickBooks enters data. It does not mind if they are wrongly entered. An accountant helps you comply with tax filing rules, rules related to payroll compliance, and other rules for depreciating, etc. 

QuickBooks can provide all the information related to these compliances, but it cannot ensure that your business performs such compliances. An experienced accountant can ensure your annual tax returns are correctly filed to minimise any penalty that may arise from wrongly entered data.  

To Sum It Up

In the end, QuickBooks is just a tool. It's like a hammer and chisel for a workman. Even if you have the best hammer and chisel (QuickBooks), you still need a workman (accountant) to use the tools properly. 

Of course, instead of using a trained worker, you can use these tools on your own, but keep in mind that there will be some trade-offs you will have to make.

QuickBooks can help your accountant work faster, smarter, and more efficiently. If you are still trying to decide whether to hire a full-time accountant for your business, you can always choose to outsource your accounting needs. It saves money and time and lets you gain the right expertise without putting a lot of work into it.