I started out in a very strange world of accounting compared to most people of this generation. I had a general ledger book that was about a foot and half wide and a foot high that we tracked 100,000 square feet of “parts” for our little manufacturing shop. It was a supreme brain drain figuring the cost of each build, the profitability of each sale, what COGS went to this product and what labor hours went to that job. After about 8 months of the monotony, the owners of the business decided they needed to part ways and I was left to manage the day to day on my own until we hired a new CFO.
My first assignment was to find accounting software – mind you one that did not require a connection to the internet and we would not be printing checks from the software itself. I stumbled upon QuickBooks and Peachtree in my AskJeeves query. As a test, I downloaded a copy of each and tried to put in a month’s worth of data. This exercise was before I took any accounting course, with very little accounting knowledge; however, I quickly found that I could understand QuickBooks much better because of the flow of data.
Once I had approval from the CEO of the company to purchase the $250 QuickBooks Pro software, I began to back enter almost two years of data from our general ledger book into QuickBooks. Sometimes I would get stuck and need to Google (yes the search engines change that quickly) the answer. Other times I would use the QuickBooks help menu to determine the right course of action. In the end, we had balances and transaction details – including inventory – in a centralized accounting system with visibility to the CEO.
This company bought and sold a lot of old equipment and parts on Ebay. The ProAdvisor who came on site reviewed my work and approved most of the flow. She gave helpful pointers here and there, but the biggest was how to set up the chart of accounts type – credit card. As an accounting want-to-be, I hated Ebay and Paypal. The reconciliation was tedious and intricate. With this new credit card ledger I could track my purchases on our company card through Ebay at the item level. I literally got tears in my eyes knowing this would save me hours every week in monotonous data entry.
Being that I was a soccer coach for 8+ years, this was my moment where I realized how I can take coaching into the business world. I wanted to tell other people about the credit card reconciliation tool in QuickBooks as well as all the other features that help small to mid-sized businesses function.
Why did you become a QuickBooks consultant?
