While Quickbooks is a great program for basic accounting for a wide variety of businesses, occasionally you’ll find it has its limitations. That’s when clients look to 3rd party software programs that work well with Quickbooks. One great source of additional utilities for handling tasks that Quickbooks doesn’t handle on its own are those created by Karl Irvin. Karl is a Certified Quickbooks ProAdvisor and, I believe, the creator of all the Quickbooks utility programs listed on the Q2Q.US website.
. I’ll just comment on a few of Karl’s utility programs. Let’s say you have an invoice that you’d like to duplicate for many customers (for example, monthly membership dues). Rather than having to create the invoice individually for each customer, you could use the Invoice Duplicator program. Now let’s say, you’ve created the invoices & printed them, but you want to print them again 2 weeks later. Instead of having to open each invoice & mark it “to be printed” again, you can acquire the “Mark Invoices to be Printed” Utility, which will mark a whole batch of invoices to be printed with a few clicks.
. There are utilities that will combine A/R & A/P data from several Quickbooks company files. Another will transfer data from one Quickbooks company to another. I’ve used the Data Transfer utility and Beginning Balance Transfer Utility to shrink Quickbooks data files for clients when the file size has become too unwieldy. There are other specialized utilities worth checking out, as well. Karl currently has 22 listed on his website ( www.q2q.us) . The utilities are all reasonably priced and tech support is great. You’ll usually get a response to any email query within 24 hours from Karl himself.
. As 3rd Party programs continue to add a lot of value to your accounting experience, allowing you to expand the usefulness and productivity of Quickbooks, I will continue to write about them in future columns. Feel free to contact me if you have questions regarding Quickbooks and 3rd party software.
