QuickBooks is a great accounting program, but it doesn’t handle recurring maintenance, agreements, service locations or work orders very well. You can drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with maintenance renewals and PM reminders. Some people put the information into QuickBooks notes, or create appointments in Outlook. Some even try to keep track of everything in Excel. When things get busy it all tends to fall apart. The end result is money down the drain. A simple to use fully integrated service software program can fix the problem, but finding the right product is not easy.
Stand-alone software designed for the Equipment industry will generally meet your operational needs, but their own built-in billing and accounting can’t match up to QuickBooks. QuickBooks has hundreds of thousands of accounting users around the world, and spends millions to make their product user-friendly. And training your staff to use another accounting software can be a nightmare with a product that isn’t user friendly.
There are a several popular service software products that claim to “work with QuickBooks”. But beware. They may have their own billing and accounting software that you will need to learn first.
After creating the customer invoice in their software they push their invoices and accounting into QuickBooks. This is a recipe for disaster when you or your accountant discovers that your customer’s account balance in QuickBooks doesn’t match the balance in their software. Many of these service companies end up disconnecting from QuickBooks and continue with double entry again.
QuickBooks allows your customers invoices and accounting to be created inside QuickBooks eliminating duplication.