Industry Editions

For more information about each of the industry editions, please select your industry below:

Retail

QuickBooks Enterprise Retail Edition tracks stock using different units of measure, computes the required components from your stock to build finished goods, tracks sales by item, sales representative or customer and determines which stock items are your top sellers.

Retailer software simlpifies staffing and payroll management

Employees, point of sale and time-management are the three primary issues facing retailers in Australia’s fiercely competitive retail environment.

When it comes to employing and managing staff retailers have a harder time than most as the nature of retail often means lots of casual employees and relatively high staff turnover. Not surprisingly, recordkeeping often suffers. The ATO pulls no punches here, specifically targeting small business retailers every year since 2005 with a particular focus on payroll records.

Retailers, therefore, require a solution that makes payroll management as efficient as possible. The answer is accounting software that incorporates payroll features, such as QuickBooks Enterprise Retail Edition. Retailers only have to enter staff names, hours worked and hourly rates. QuickBooks does the rest, calculating PAYG tax, generating superannuation reports, printing payslips and producing payment summaries at the end of the year.

A frustration for many small retailers is cash registers or point-of-sale systems that don’t ‘talk’ to their accounting systems. Doing the books usually means many lonely evenings poring over receipts, till rolls and bank statements.

With the technology available, why enter anything twice? The answer for a retailer is to get point-of-sale software that interfaces directly with their accounting software. For example, Reckon’s Retail Point of Sale product speaks the same language as QuickBooks Enterprise, automatically sending details of every transaction out of the point-of-sale system and into QuickBooks at the end of each day. Retailers end up with a single company file that not only contains all payroll transactions but a complete record of sales, purchases and inventory. From here, producing a Business Activity Statement is only a few mouse clicks away.

The theme of both payroll and point-of-sale management is that elusive quality: time. One of the biggest differences between retail and other kinds of business is the sheer demand on a retailer’s time, with shop opening hours alone usually extending way beyond the average working week.

The Retailers Edition of the QuickBooks Enterprise strips the amount of bookkeeping time normally required with new features including customisable menus and icon bars, sophisticated memorising of transactions and automated importing of transactions from bank statements. For retailers selling online, new technology even allows for automatic integration of shopping-cart orders.

Similarly, Reckon’s two new Retail Point of Sale products effectively track sales, inventory, purchase orders, customers, accounting and more for both start-ups and long-time traders. The Retail Point of Sale Professional and Retail Point of Sale Lite programs integrate seamlessly with the QuickBooks Enterprise helping streamline business operations and minimising the hours spent balancing the books.

Less time doing the books means more time to spend with customers. What more could a retailer want?

Contractor

QuickBooks Enterprise Contractor Edition shows which jobs are profitable, gets airtight estimates, sets up and tracks holdbacks, and sets up multiple labour rates for employees, jobs and customers.

Build fortresses and fortunes with construction software

Want to make money out of your construction business or trade? The answer isn’t to spend more time hammering nails or laying tiles. The answer — gloomy as it may seem — is to spend a little bit of extra time working on your books.

The mention of accounting software probably conjures images of piles of receipts, doing BAS and tax returns. However, gaining a competitive edge involves working the accounting software harder, so that it helps contractors run their businesses better. An effective accounting software package aids with everyday activities such as generating quotes, keeping track of different jobs and billing customers.

For contractors, the wise choice is QuickBooks Enterprise Contractor Edition. The software is designed specifically for builders, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, tilers and others in the construction industry.

For most contractors, one of the hardest things to manage is quotes. It’s easy to feel anxious about winning the job, and end up underquoting. But what if you could analyse the profit on every job, no matter how large or small? Maybe you’re underquoting on small jobs or spending too much time following up service calls?

The Contractor Edition of QuickBooks Enterprise helps contractors manage jobs more efficiently with a special menu dedicated to job analysis and in-depth cost tracking. Every single nail or bit of timber can be entered as an expense. Contractors can also track expenses to automatically bill customers.

The other challenge for many contractors is managing retainers. QuickBooks is one of the only accounting packages that accommodates this by allowing for progressive invoicing as each stage of the job is completed. Just enter budgets for each job and compare actual results against budgets as the job progresses. If the job has been underquoted, you will know the moment it happens so quoting strategies can be adjusted in the future.

Even if you have never used a computer before, navigating is child’s play with no feature more than two clicks away. QuickBooks Enterprise excels at second-guessing what users want to do, with lots of handy pop-up help and suggestions. Even complex accounting tasks such as producing Business Activity Statements only take a couple of minutes to complete.

Contractors don’t want to spend time pouring over bookwork. QuickBooks Enterprise understands this, helping you do the books (with surprisingly little pain), managing job costs (with less chance of underquoting) and making larger profits, all in the one hit.

Non-Profit

QuickBooks Enterprise Non-profit tracks and allocates donations and pledges, sets budgets from programs, creates and sends letters to donors, and generates non-profit industry-specific reports.

The not-profit industry is unique in nature, whereby the ultimate goal of an organisation shifts from profitability to the sustainable provision of a good or service. QuickBooks Enterprise non-profit edition understands this and is built to help users meet the unique challenges of a philanthropical organisation.

With extremely limited budgets and a heavy reliance on donations, volunteers and community goodwill non-profit organisations need to ensure that every dollar received is accurately recorded, so effective programs can be retained, and ineffective programs can be improved. Similarly, every dollar spent must be accounted for so products and services keep delivering and donors keep donating.

The tracking features built into the Non-profit edition tracks funds, memberships, donations, grants and pledges, and allocate them towards individual programs as required. The intelligent reporting allows you to view which initiatives are the most successful, and which initiatives need the most work.

As money in a non-profit organisation is always tight, the budgeting facility allows for every dollar to be tracked on a monthly basis, and budgets can even be created on a per program basis.

Professional Services

QuickBooks Enterprise Professional Services Edition tracks job costs, writes proposals, sets up and monitors retainers, and tracks and manages labour rates.

Key Features

Professional Services Menu	The Professional Services menu lists the most commonly used tasks professionals need to perform each day. Think of this menu as a short-cut to those activities you do most often. Using it will help save you time!
Job Costing	Job costs are all the costs of providing service to a client. Once the project cost has been calculated, you can compare it to the revenue generated to determine the project's profitability.
Proposal Writing	Use an estimate to create a proposal or bid. After a client has approved your proposal and the work has been completed, invoice the client directly from the original estimate.
Charge-out rates by partner/employee and by client	QuickBooks for Professional Services has made it easy to control varying labour rates so you can: • Make sure your best customers get the best rates • Accommodate different rates for a variety of employees • Charge different rates for different individuals doing the same job (eg junior vs senior partners)
Professional Services Reports	Professional Services Edition reports show how to leverage your strongest resources to make your business more profitable. Reports include: • Project Costs Detail • Unbilled Expenses by Project • Expenses not Assigned to Projects • Billed vs. Proposal by Project • Billed/Unbilled Hours by Person • Billed/Unbilled Hours by Person and Project • Billed/Unbilled Hours by Person and Activity • Open Balances by Client/Project • A/R Ageing Detail by Class • Project Status • Project Contact List

Manufacturing & Wholesale

QuickBooks Enterprise Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition includes the ability to track mileage and shipping expenses, handle volume discounts, issue work orders to your manufacturing plant, and document damaged goods.

Surviving as a manufacturer or wholesaler is all about effectively managing costs and profit margins. A slim 2 per cent variation in profit margin can spell the difference between success and failure.

For manufacturers, cost management usually involves complicated calculations, factoring in not only materials and consumables, but labour and factory overheads as well.

Inventory costing involves a level of sophistication usually associated with more expensive high-end accounting systems. However, the latest Manufacturing and Wholesale edition of QuickBooks Enterprise offers advanced unit of measure features to help specific industries manage costs and profitability — from raw materials through to finished goods.

While wholesalers may not have to allow for labour as part of unit costs, their margins are often influenced by fluctuations in foreign currency. In the last 12 months alone, the Aussie dollar has ranged from US$0.60 to US$0.98, meaning a change in costs of 63 per cent for many wholesalers. In this environment, it’s essential for accounting software to include multi-currency features. For example, QuickBooks Enterprise allows wholesalers to account for all foreign exchange transactions. If a spike in the exchange rate makes for unexpected differences in unit costs, wholesalers can report this separately on their financial statements.

Even with accurate costing information, the question for both manufacturers and wholesalers often comes back to the quality of reporting systems. In the past, many accounting systems have failed to provide reporting that’s flexible or detailed enough. QuickBooks Manufacturing and Wholesale comes with a selection of industry-specific reports, all of which can be customised. The SQL technology in QuickBooks Enterprise has enabled greater customisation and faster processing speeds when generating reports.

It’s this new technology that provides the backdrop of flexibility that wholesalers in particular demand from their accounting software. The real change with QuickBooks Enterprise — and something that makes this product unique when compared to other accounting software in a similar price range — is fully customisable menus, data-entry windows, templates and reports. This flexibility leads to increased efficiency, improved business management and a reduction in costs.