There are often many benefits of keeping QuickBooks up to date and many drawbacks to letting the updates pass you by. It might be easy for a business owner to say they can't justify paying for the upgrade every year because it's a waste of money, but with the updates, the time saved will pay for the upgrades alone. Many features are regularly being improved upon and new features are being added. Once certain bookkeeping areas are streamlined and they become more efficient the focus can shift to other areas of the business that need attention, such as: analyzing financial reports, general operations, growth of your sales force, expansion, blogging, reducing stress, etc.
Online Banking
This QuickBooks feature has improved leaps and bounds since QuickBooks 2008 was released. At first, the import of credit card and bank data was very tedious and time consuming. With the improvements rolled out with QuickBooks 2009, 2010, and 2011, the time used for these functions has been drastically reduced. Transactions are brought into QuickBooks and they are either matched to existing transactions, renamed, or put in a queue for you to review and properly code. Another new option is being able to delete the transactions upon being imported; this was a royal pain in the butt prior to 2008. QuickBooks 2007 and prior cannot import online transactions and does nothing more than waste valuable time. In addition to wasting time, it also means you have to pay someone to manually enter data that can be imported within seconds.
Sort Option
The sort option might seem like an upgrade that wouldn't grab your attention, but it should. When reconciling, you sometimes might be dealing with hundreds of transactions. Credit card statements are first sorted by card holder, then date. Whereas QuickBooks can sort by date, name, amount, and anything else but actual card holder. Once you sort the reconciliation screen by transaction amount, you can quickly find amounts and tick them off. Otherwise, you might waste a lot of time scrolling around looking for a needle in a haystack. Simply click on 'Amount' when in the reconciling screen and the transactions are sorted by amount, if you ever need to search for a date, click on 'Date.' Another area the sort option is very beneficial is within 'Online Banking.' When importing transactions, you can sort by amount, vendor name, or date. Again, very beneficial when handling large amounts of transactions.
Support
QuickBooks sometimes requires support, and this support is only offered to QuickBooks 2007-2011. If you run into any error messages and call the help center, you cannot get help if you are running old software. These error messages can be stressful and not being able to get support can lead to major frustrations.
If you spend too much time working on your books and feel that you should be spending more time focusing on growth and sales, send me an email, we can take a look at what version of QuickBooks you are working with and see what we can do to utilize your time more efficiently.