Business Owner Management of QuickBooks 2012 Accounting System

Many business owners don’t view the accounting system contained in QuickBooks 2012 as anything more than a tool to produce invoices and paychecks and information required for the annual tax return. Unfortunately, that distant relationship with the accounting system means that business owners often don’t feel much need to actively manage what happens with the accounting system.

An accounting system should be a tool that you, as a business owner, use to better manage your business. And it can be that. But if it’s going to be a tool for better managing your business, you need to manage the system.

In other words, it is recommended that you take responsibility for ensuring that employees are trained to do the things that protect your accounting system (such as backing up the data file) and that you ensure that they complete appropriate accounting procedures on a monthly and annual basis (such as sending out all invoices, reconciling bank accounts, cleaning up messy transactions, and so forth).

This management responsibility needs not be a heavy one. You can rather easily make sure that people are doing the sorts of things they are supposed to be doing by creating some simple checklists like the table of a sample monthly accounting to-do list and sample annual accounting to-do list shown below.

You can use these as starting points for constructing your own list of things that the accounting clerk or office manager must do every month or at the end of every year.

A Sample Monthly Accounting To-Do List

Data backed up and moved offsite

Bank accounts reconciled

All invoices, credit memos, statements out

Any suspense accounts cleaned up

Financial statements delivered

Exceptions reported (for example, overdue invoices, bills, purchase orders, under-stocked inventory items)

A Sample Annual Accounting To-Do List

Adjust trial balance

Burn CD with year-end numbers for permanent record

Consider cleaning up data files if they’re huge

Close year when really done

dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/business-owner-management-of-quickbooks-2012-accou.html