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QuickBooks 2011 Available Beginning September 27, 2010

Published September 7, 2010 | By Nancy Smyth

The news we have all been waiting for – QuickBooks 2011 announced.

According to a press release from Inuit, QuickBooks 2011 will be available to purchase beginning on September 27th 2011 directly from Intuit and Authorized QuickBooks Affiliates (such as ourselves).

Some of the new features include:

Customer Snapshot – which offers a consolidated view of an individual customer’s purchase history, average days to pay, and outstanding balance.
QuickBooks Search – lets users quickly find any customer, account, report, and even invoice details within their company file; using a simple keyword search.
Customer Y Vendor History – provides at-at-glance views of customer and vendor details; such as history, estimates, and past orders – all on a single screen.
Balance Sheet by Class - allows Premier and Enterprise users to trace multiple funds, departments, or locations in a single balance sheet report.
Batch Invoicing – lets users who often bill many customers for the same service to create a single template invoice to send to all related customers.
Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail Integration – allows users to send invoices, estimates, reports, etc via email using these email providers.
Collections Center – helps users to identify overdue and almost due invoices, and then directly email collection notices from Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail.
Improved Integration with Office 2010
Improved Purchase Order functions and reports.
Commissions Manager
Customer Snapshot
Improved Document Management
File Manager – geared toward Accountants or companies with multiple QuickBooks company files.
Faster Start Up & Load Times
Multi-location Inventory for Enterprise Users
New Online backup
Improved PDF printing
Work with Multiple QuickBooks files at the same time – geared toward accounting professionals or businesses that have multiple company files.

Watch over the next few weeks for reviews of these features and more.

Download a 2-page.pdf which provides an overview of new features available in QuickBooks Pro & Premier 2011, Enterprise 11.0 and QuickBooks Online versions, by clicking here.

QuickBooks Tip – Determing Cost of Goods Sold

Published June 8, 2010 | By Nancy Smyth

Question:

How do I determine the Cost of Goods Sold for an item?

Answer:

I tell my clients that Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) is any cost incurred that directly relates to getting the sold goods out the door.

I have them ask the question “Would you have this expense if you hadn’t made the sale?”

Typical examples of COGS are product purchased for resale, subcontractors or vendors you hire specifically for preparing a product for sale, shipping materials like packaging, freight costs of receiving the resale product and shipping the product to your customers, payroll/labor costs of your employees who are directly related to preparing the goods to be sold or shipped out (would you have hired them if you didn’t have the product to sell?).

Costs that are not directly related to getting the product out the door are considered Expenses or Operating Expenses and include things like your liability insurance premiums, telephones, office supplies, office-related postage and delivery, advertising, clerical payroll, employee benefits and health insurance for the employees and would be considered costs of managing the paperwork for the overall business,

Again, if you would have the expense if you weren’t selling your product or service, it is an expense considered overhead. If you have the expense only because you selling the product or service, it’s COGS.

This is a very simplistic definition and there are certainly areas of disagreement among different people, but if you relate it strictly to your business you should be able to come up with your COGS vs Expenses.

In a nutshell…

Cost of Goods sold is anything and everything that costs you money to buy items for resale, have them delivered to your store to sell, package and label them, import them, fix them or otherwise make them fit to sell.

If it costs you $100 to purchase an item, $5.00 to have each one shipped to your store, it costs $2.50 each in import duty and taxes, $10.00 each to have them inspected by QC, and $5.00 each to fix little problems with each item, your COGS is $122.50.