Create Accounting Firm Efficiencies With QuickBooks Ledger

For years, I have advocated that accountants need a QuickBooks product focused on their smaller internal write up clients and finally we have seen that come to fruition. The new QuickBooks Ledger product will allow accountants to serve those smaller clients in an efficient and cost effective way while being able to stay in the QuickBooks workflows that they have grown to love.

QuickBooks Ledger is essentially a slimmed down version of QuickBooks that does not include invoicing or accounts payable but still retains the bank feeds and other time saving features of QuickBooks. It is only available to be purchased by accountants but they can invite their clients to work inside of the file. The price for the QuickBooks Ledger books is only $10/month making this super cost effective for the time savings it will result in across the board.

 At Ascend, we feel that QuickBooks Ledger fills the gap in many areas but the ones we are most excited about are the following:

Tax Only Clients

We all have those tax only clients who are trying to keep their finances in excel due to software being too expensive or just overly complex. QuickBooks Ledger is a perfect solution for them. You can connect the bank feed and they can simply categorize the transaction there to produce their income statement and have a real balance sheet. This way you will no longer have to try to recreate the balance sheet at tax time and then question why it didn’t balance due to missing entries on the excel spreadsheet. With the cost of only $10/month it is perfect for these clients as the time savings alone (the client’s time and yours) will be more than enough to justify the cost.

Desktop Clients

QuickBooks Ledger’s pricing now eliminates the reluctance of those small desktop clients who have held out on moving to the cloud because of the cost. Many of these clients do not use accounts receivable and accounts payable so this is an easy transition. We love moving these clients to QuickBooks Ledger because now we are able to easily access the file, review and make adjustments all while the client gains the efficiency of being in QuickBooks Online instead of Desktop.

Write-Up Clients

We are also excited about transitioning some of our firm internal write up clients to QuickBooks Ledger. These are those clients who never access their books but we as an accounting firm simply record all of their transactions from the bank feed and produce reports for the clients. QuickBooks Ledger is a perfect solution to migrate these clients and gain workflow efficiency. At this price point the time saved is more than making up for any cost difference in the solutions we may have been using before.

Real Estate Clients

Another great set of clients for QuickBooks Ledger are our real estate clients. Especially those with one or two properties. QuickBooks Ledger is the perfect solution as it allows them to link their bank account and keep track of their transactions in real time without having to manually compile these at year end or whenever the bank requests a statement. In addition, using QuickBooks Ledger makes the handoff to our tax team simple and clean.

Holding Companies

Holding companies that hold an interest in other operating companies with their own accounting files are also ideal candidates for QuickBooks Ledger. They typically have a low volume of transactions and do not need accounts receivable or accounts payable but the ability to connect the bank account, easily track these transactions, have a solid balance sheet, and be able to record the K-1 impact from the child companies is super valuable.

Another great thing about QuickBooks Ledger is how easy Intuit has made migrating to it from other products. If you were previously using QuickBooks Desktop, Intuit has made this conversion fairly seamless with their migration tool. They have even rolled out a batch migration tool that can convert up to 50 files at once if you plan to migrate several clients. Intuit has also partnered with Dataswitcher so if you are moving from another software platform that conversion is seamless, as well.

I know you are probably saying, migrations are never that seamless, what is not going to work when I do this? And of course, you are right. QuickBooks Ledger is a slimmed down version of QuickBooks which means that you may have previously been using features in your other software that are not available in QuickBooks Ledger. The good news is that QuickBooks has built some conversion workarounds for these cases.

Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable - QuickBooks Ledger should not be used for clients with accounts receivable or accounts payable as it does not include invoicing or bill pay modules. However, if these were being used previously in the file, QuickBooks will still convert these accounts but will only post to the general ledger accounts. To change the balance in these accounts you will need to post directly to them from a journal entry or the bank feed as the invoicing and bill modules will not be available.  You will lose the ability to run an aging report on either account so it is advised that you clean these accounts up and zero them out before converting but having a balance in them will not stop you from moving forward.

Inventory - QuickBooks Ledger does not support inventory so if your client has current inventory needs I would not recommend using it. However, if your file previously had inventory and no longer needs it then when converting only the dollar value entries will be brought over into the general ledger account. You will lose the ability to run any historical inventory reports inside of QuickBooks Ledger.

Overall, we are excited about being able to use the QuickBooks Ledger product for our clients. Our team's efficiency in the QuickBooks workflow means it saves us a lot of money and the cleanliness of the files reduces headaches for our tax teams.

To learn more about QuickBooks Ledger, check out this page. This is a paid partnership with Intuit.