As an accountant and efficiency consultant, I’ve helped hundreds of businesses evolve their workflows for the last 23 years – everything from software and hardware to how their desks are set up.
Small business owners look to me as their trusted advisor, which is a role I take very seriously. But I also find that it’s actually really fun making businesses run more efficiently! I start the process with QuickBooks. It’s always been easy to use, and QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise fits right in when it comes to creating not only efficiency, but also extreme efficiency for my business clients.
Enterprise is a total business management solution that helps clients create new efficiencies. The truth is, the numbers never lie in accounting, or when it comes to the fact that survey says, 9 out of 10 QuickBooks Desktop customers agree that it helps them get work done faster. It’s easy to understand why when you consider these facts:
- It’s the total business management solution that I can customize for every client quickly and easily.
- Before clients have even bought or loaded Enterprise onto a computer, they pick the edition that’s tailored to their industry, which translates into efficiency from day zero.
- Each edition has specific tools and reports that are built with the needs of each type of business in mind.
- Enterprise offered a system that is designed for a specific industry, such as contractors, manufacturing, wholesale and distribution, retail, non-profit, professional services, and, yes, accountants. We matter, too!
Another big efficiency gain for Enterprise users – like all QuickBooks products – is that it is super intuitive and so easy to use. You can onboard an entire team, with no accounting experience necessary, which is perfect for many small business clients who are experts at what they do, but who hire us as professionals to support them when it comes to the numbers side of their businesses.
Enterprise offers so many efficiency-enhancing features that it really is a natural choice for me to recommend to my clients. Consider these benefits:
- Each user can modify the icon bar, so that their most-used icons are the easiest to get to. I do this for all my clients when they’re new to Enterprise. It sounds like a small thing, but it does make a difference in their day-to-day efficiency.
- Clients have all their data at their fingertips – with centralized vendor and customer information, and all your inventory and prices, all in one convenient platform. In itself, this makes a huge difference for many businesses that may have been working in separate tools or using manual processes.
- Centralized data also means your clients can do more with it, such as pulling reports for an accurate picture of their business activity.
Those are just a few small efficiency boosters that can add up to big time savings and business wins over the long-term. A huge win for Enterprise users is also the ability for clients to automate entire parts of their business.
For example, after we worked over several weekly meetings to set up and automate Enterprise for one of my clients, they didn’t even need to meet with me anymore. Her business was just humming along, on its own. After several weeks of this, we decided to grab lunch instead!
Clients with inventory? Help them gain even more efficiency with Enterprise. The Advanced Inventory feature in Enterprise is a game-changer if you have clients of any size with inventory. As you know, inventory is something you’ve got to stay on top of, and Enterprise saves you and your clients tons of time doing it!
In the Enterprise dashboard, you can manage and track inventory across warehouses down to the specific bin or pallet. Orders are pulled from the right locations, inventory levels are updated in real-time, and it’s all reflected in your clients’ numbers. Clients can even turn their inventory team’s mobile phones into barcode scanners to manage warranties, returns, recalls, and the whole pick, pack, and ship process. I told you the efficiency in Enterprise is extreme. This is just one more example!
When it comes to actual orders (the lifeblood of any business), you can track and manage everything from one super-efficient dashboard in Enterprise, which works seamlessly with Advanced Inventory data to show orders across all locations. Clients can even see when a shipment is on the way!
This quick view into their sales, and the ability to drill into some of those details and tailor the view, eliminates the need to access multiple systems to see the status of product levels and order fulfillment in a business. It’s a true timesaver.
Project-based clients benefit from the efficiency of QuickBooks Enterprise integrations. While I’ve covered a lot about Enterprise itself, the key to elevating efficiency even more in your clients’ businesses is leveraging all of the integrations available between it and other QuickBooks solutions.
Enterprise features both QuickBooks Time (and the QB Workforce mobile app) and Assisted Payroll right in the software. Together, these tools provide a truly powerful solution for your clients, with project-based revenue streams to track job costs in real time, with minimum effort required!
These tools are all native to the software, so there’s no need to set up a system to bring data in from disconnected sources. Having the data right inside Enterprise is a huge time savings, which creates amazingly high levels of efficiency. However, that’s just the beginning because the real efficiency optimization occurs when these two steady streams of information flow right into your reporting, supplementing the job costing information available in Enterprise.
This where efficiency truly meets profitability. With job costing in Enterprise, clients have a clear window into their actual overhead, labor, and material costs to compare to estimates in real-time. This makes it so much simpler to adjust these variables and keep the work on track.
Remember the client I mentioned, who became my lunch buddy? She has a project-based business, so it was an easy win to use Enterprise to make her job-costing much more efficient. Now, instead of trying to be successful by making educated guesses, she can see her complete job costs, including overhead, labor, and parts. These insights allowed her to make a swift decision to increase her price estimates, which has really helped her business grow more profitably!
Engaging in the Enterprise community empowers business owners with support and actionable advice. Beyond the software itself, the Enterprise user experience is built around sharing insights – and this extends to the expansive community of QuickBooks users. This is a go-to place for businesses to share best practices, knowledge, and insights, with the goal of supporting the collective success of community members.
There’s no doubt in my mind that learning from others can also boost efficiency and reduce the stress of being a business owner. Being able to have encouragement and access to a proven path provided by peers, rather wasting hours of valuable time trying to implement untested processes, is already a huge efficiency gain. I know this firsthand!
The benefits I’m provided by collaborating with the Intuit® network of experts and practitioners is truly invaluable. From having questions answered to creating how-to videos – and so much more – I know myself, my clients, and thousands of small business owners have found deep guidance and so much valuable information this way. It really does feel like a family – plus with all the time I save using Enterprise in my practice and for my clients, I have more time to enjoy my own family, too, which is the ultimate goal of all of the available efficiency gains!
Enterprise is my extreme efficiency go-to solution!
Now that you know how Enterprise can help you eliminate time wasted in your day, and how it can help you give your clients significant amounts of time back in theirs, it’s easy to understand why QuickBooks Enterprise is my go-to total business management solution. Eliminating wasted time and creating more productivity in my practice, so that I have more time for the important things – now that’s the definition of extreme efficiency to me!
To learn more about QuickBooks Enterprise visit https://quickbooks.intuit.com/desktop/enterprise/.
