Create, send, and track purchase orders.
❯❯ Track inventory using the first in, first out (FIFO) inventory valuation method. QBO supports light inventory needs: If you sell finished goods, QBO should be able to manage your needs. But if you need to assemble finished goods to sell, QBO won’t meet your needs on its own. You can look for an app to supplement your inventory needs; I talk about apps at the end of this chapter.
❯❯ Track, create, and send 1099-Misc forms.
❯❯ Categorize income and expenses using class tracking.
❯❯ Track sales and profitability by business location. You can assign only one location to a transaction, but you can assign multiple classes to a transaction.
❯❯ Give employees and subcontractors limited access to the QBO company to enter time worked.
❯❯ Track billable hours by customer.
❯❯ Create budgets to estimate future income and expenses, and create multiple budgets per year, location, class, or customer.
The Plus version supports five simultaneous users and two accountant users and can be scaled up to support 20 users. The Plus version also contains more than 65 reports: all the reports found in both the Simple Start and the Essentials versions, and some additional reports.
Essentials and Plus with Payroll
If an end user signs up for QBO Essentials or Plus on his own and creates his own company, he can create the company using the Plus Payroll option, or later he can sign up for QBO Payroll (QBOP) separately. An accountant also can create the company that uses QBOP for a client. For details, see the section “Addressing Payroll Needs” later in this chapter.
What Does It Cost?
The big question: What’s it cost? The price is dependent primarily on the QBO version you choose.
If you are an end user who signs up on your own for a QBO subscription, the price per month as of the date this book was written appears in Table 2-1.
TABLE 2-1 QBO Subscription Pricing
You’ll receive a bill on a regular basis from Intuit. Intuit gives you a free 30-day trial that includes payroll processing along with the rest of the subscription’s features. If you opt to continue QBO Payroll after the 30-day trial, your subscription fee increases. The free trial also includes the Payments app, which gives you the ability to process online and mobile payments with rates per use as low as 1.75 percent + 25 cents per swipe and 50 cents per bank payment/ACH.
If you are an accounting professional, you can sign up for the Wholesale Pricing program and use QBOA for free. If you create a client’s company as part of the Wholesale Pricing program and you manage the client’s subscription, Intuit sends you the bill for the client’s subscription. It is your responsibility to bill the client for the QBO subscription. The bill you receive from Intuit is a single consolidated bill for all the QBO subscriptions you manage. For a little more information on the Wholesale Pricing program, see Chapter 11. But, for the complete skinny on the Wholesale Pricing program, contact Intuit. Note that accounting professionals might be able to get QBO for their clients at a reduced price.
If your client initially sets up QBO with his or her own subscription, you can move that existing QBO subscription to your consolidated bill at the discounted rate. And, if your arrangement with your client doesn’t work out, you can remove the client from your consolidated bill, and the client can begin paying for his own subscription.
Addressing Payroll Needs
QBO can handle payroll regardless of whether an end user or an accountant creates the QBO company.
If an end user signs up for QBO Essentials or Plus on his own, he can create his own company using the appropriate “with Payroll” option – Enhanced or Full Service Payroll – or, after the fact, he can sign up for QBO Payroll from the Employees screen (see Figure 2-1).
FIGURE 2-1: If you sign up for QBO on your own, you can turn on payroll from the Employees screen.
Both Enhanced and Full Service QBO Payroll sport the following features:
❯❯ Paying employees with printed checks or by directly depositing paychecks
❯❯ Automatically calculating tax payments and paying them electronically
❯❯ Processing Federal and State quarterly and annual reports and preparing W-2 forms
❯❯ Processing payroll for employees in multiple states
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