Quick Books Essay

Information Technology (IT) is a foundation for conducting business today. It plays a critical role in increasing productivity of firms and entire nation. It is proven that firms who invested in IT have experienced continued growth in productivity and efficiency. Many companies’ survival and even existence without use of IT is unimaginable. IT has become the largest component of capital investment for companies in the United States and many other countries. Accounting/Finance application systems and QuickBooks let you manage your business with a little or no experience.

All three application systems allow the users to manage the companies’ capital including bookkeeping, inventory, non-inventory & service items, sales orders, purchase orders, and reports. It allows the companies to keep tracking of the financial assets and at the same time have the information the accountant needs. Using the accounting/finance application system, makes it easier to enter and process the data rather than manually enter and process the data.. QuickBooks is an accounting software package which is developed by Intuit, Inc. It was launched in the 90’s and since than it is one of the market leaders in accounting software.

The software was designed to help the small business owners who had no formal accounting training. Very shortly after the introduction, there was no doubt that the product is going to be a hit. With a deep focus for the non-accountant, and a lower price than the competitor’s products, it outsmarted its competitions. Intuit states that the company’s mission is to create new ways to manage personal finances and small businesses that are so profound and simple, customers cannot Imagine going back to the old way QuickBooks created an application that is most commonly used accounting product for small businesses QuickBooks Pro

The world today is in the computer age. Almost everyone now has a computer or access to a computer. Now that almost everyone knows how to use a computer, almost every business has one. Business’s before had to rely on people to do all the accounting by hand, and doing the accounting for a business used to take a lot of man-hours to complete. Business’s slowly moved into letting computers do a lot of the work for them, but they still had people to check on the computers because the applications that they were using would sometimes screw up and cause a lot of confusion or even loss of money.

With the latest application QuickBooks Pro 2011, there is little need for any backup measures. This application does everything that the business needs to do, manage your business, track time, do payroll, develop estimates, and much more. QuickBooks Pro 2011 quickly finds the reports you need with the Report Finder, shows you critical information about your business at a glance with Company and Customer Centers, and track Features of QuickBooks that will help the company implement sound internal control policies and procedures; Access to accounting records should be limited to designated individuals.

Once a transaction has been entered, the ability to change or delete it entirely should be limited to some other individual, preferably an accounting manager. Financial statements should be prepared monthly, with gross profit percentage and expense percentages, so that management can question apparent errors or omissions. The monthly financial statements should be comparative, i. e. show last year’s figures alongside this year’s, preferably with percentages as well as dollar amounts, to make apparent any significant variations in revenue or expense items that should be investigated for possible error or even fraud.

Budgets should be prepared, and variances between actual and budgeted figures should be shown on budgetary income statements each month. The deficiencies with this program for internal control starts when you initially set up your accounts, you enter in your beginning account balance amounts (unless you are a brand new company with no activity). The problem is that if you do not input an amount, or input an amount correctly, the difference will go to Opening Balance Equity.

If it is not fixed, it will stay there indefinitely. QuickBooks will allow you to enter a transaction for any date that you wish. While this is convenient for purposes of making projections, it can have bad consequences if you go backwards. QuickBooks retains every transaction you enter from the day you started using it. While this is useful to get historical information, on a practical basis, the file sizes can easily get large enough to be unmanageable and slow your computer.