Quickbooks Premier Does It All! By xshellyx on May 12, 2008 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

When we were starting our own business, we took a lot of advice from friends. One of the best pieces of advice that we were given was how great Quickbooks is for running a business.

We use it for everything business related. Some examples include writing estimates, invoicing customers, banking, credit cards, accounts payable, and just about anything else you can think of. This program will do everything! It alerts you to customers who are overdue or if you have a bill that you need to pay. It even prints out our 1099 tax forms at the end of the year and it can do payroll, but we don't use that feature because we don't have employees.

The reason we are using the Premier version and not just the Quickbooks Pro is that the Premier version includes the capability of price levels. We have different accounts set up at different price levels and this version will store that info and automatically put in the correct pricing as you fill out your invoice. It saves a lot of time this way. Although we don't track our inventory on paper, Quickbooks does that too.

Each piece of information you enter is cross checked to make sure that it is moved to and from the right places correctly. It basically makes it hard to make mistakes. At the end of each statement period, we reconcile our checking and credit card accounts using QB to double check and make sure everything is on track.

At the end of the tax year, you can run amazing reports on anything you wish. You can track sales by item or by customer, run profit and loss statements, track costs by vendor, or anything else you want to know. All reports have the capability of being customized to fit your needs.

We have customized our invoice too to show our company logo and we've designed the text boxes to fit our needs. Quickbooks will print invoices for you to mail or fax, or it will e-mail them directly to your customers as PDF files. I really like this feature. It not only saves time so you get paid faster, but you save the cost of mailing supplies, and the invoices are sent in a read only format so they can't be altered at the other end.

I took a class to learn about this program, but it is fairly easy to learn and has great online support and tutorials. I highly recommend it to anyone running a small business.