freedomit
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 200
We are having a major review of our business process's and procedures part of which also includes QuickBooks and CRM, and I really need some advice as were going round in circles.
Background
We are a small support company of two/three people, we look after a range of clients from single users to companies of 50 employees. We do our own admin, accounts, purchasing etc. Currently we keep very limited stock as were not a shop (ram, hdd, psu etc) so everything we buy is for a job/customer.
Current Setup - Accounts
We currently use QuickBooks 2012 as our accounts package, we heavily rely on a feature where when entering items on a bill we can assign them to a customer. At the end of the month (we are changing this to bi weekly) we bill all our contract clients for there monthly support and purchases by adding on the items and applying the mark up. This method works ok but has a few flaws...Firstly if the item came out of stock or wasn't purchased from a supplier then there is a chance it wont get invoiced. Secondly we cant use reoccurring invoices for things like hosted exchange/cloud backup as it wont pull through the time and costs assigned to the customer. Thirdly, I hyave to manually check the client quotes to know what the sale price was.
Others things worth mentioning is that we don't list every item individually in QuickBooks, ie we have an item called 'HP Desktop' and then change the description on the bill to be the model number and spec rather than have lots of different model items. Also we currently don't use the stock option in QuickBooks as we keep so little, we created a customer called 'STOCK' and we assign the purchase to that customer if its for stock. When we sell the item we go back to the bill and change it to the customer that purchased it.
Current Setup - CRM
We use the cloud version of Connectwise as our CRM/Helpdesk but have made the decision to move away and our contract expires in Feb. We found the hosted version very slow for the first 4 months and this made it hard to get used to. We also found that it was targeted to larger companies with dedicated departments not small companies like us where individuals have multiple roles. The mobile app looked good to start with but when you actually come to use it you find its limited. One major reason for going to Connectwise was to make our invoicing procedure easier but the QuickBooks integration just doesn't work for us. Without the procurement module (which was never mentioned during the demo's) you have to enter every item into QuickBooks but also duplicate that in Connectwise otherwise it cant/wont go on an invoice. We did try for a while creating the time invoice in Connectwise, batching them into QuickBooks then adding the items purchased but the whole process was just a mess. Currently I just manually create all the invoices in QuickBooks using the time/ticket reports from Connectwise.
The next step..
So after realising Connectwise isn't the solution we have been looking at other packages. Autotask have done a demo and although similar to Connectwise it looks much cleaner, faster and includes the procurement module. The downside is its a lot of money for a small business and im still not sure its the right solution for us a the moment. I then looked a MHelpdesk, I loved the fact that within minutes I felt like I knew everything about the software and it was so simple to use and had a two way QuickBooks sync for things like items. The main issue is that it still doesn't solve all our QuickBooks issues, for ad-hoc customers it would work great, do the job and send the invoice. But we look after lots of contract customers who buy stuff like toner during the month, how would we invoice that? Create a ticket with those items on? Also for people billed for monthly services? It would create a mish mash of invoices in MHelpdesk and QuickBooks. The other downside is it doesn't really handle contract clients very well but that is something we could work around.
One thing that I think is clear is that whatever we choose to do we need to change the way we use QuickBooks. We either go Autotask which is expensive but would take over all of the procurement and just use QuickBooks as a ledger, or we go for an OpenSource Ticket system and just manually invoice the time on tickets every month which is time consuming.
I would be interested to know how other people use QuickBooks to invoice for ad-hoc, contracts, purchases, monthly services etc and not only what CRM/Ticket system you use but how you integrate it with QuickBooks?
Thanks in advance.
Background
We are a small support company of two/three people, we look after a range of clients from single users to companies of 50 employees. We do our own admin, accounts, purchasing etc. Currently we keep very limited stock as were not a shop (ram, hdd, psu etc) so everything we buy is for a job/customer.
Current Setup - Accounts
We currently use QuickBooks 2012 as our accounts package, we heavily rely on a feature where when entering items on a bill we can assign them to a customer. At the end of the month (we are changing this to bi weekly) we bill all our contract clients for there monthly support and purchases by adding on the items and applying the mark up. This method works ok but has a few flaws...Firstly if the item came out of stock or wasn't purchased from a supplier then there is a chance it wont get invoiced. Secondly we cant use reoccurring invoices for things like hosted exchange/cloud backup as it wont pull through the time and costs assigned to the customer. Thirdly, I hyave to manually check the client quotes to know what the sale price was.
Others things worth mentioning is that we don't list every item individually in QuickBooks, ie we have an item called 'HP Desktop' and then change the description on the bill to be the model number and spec rather than have lots of different model items. Also we currently don't use the stock option in QuickBooks as we keep so little, we created a customer called 'STOCK' and we assign the purchase to that customer if its for stock. When we sell the item we go back to the bill and change it to the customer that purchased it.
Current Setup - CRM
We use the cloud version of Connectwise as our CRM/Helpdesk but have made the decision to move away and our contract expires in Feb. We found the hosted version very slow for the first 4 months and this made it hard to get used to. We also found that it was targeted to larger companies with dedicated departments not small companies like us where individuals have multiple roles. The mobile app looked good to start with but when you actually come to use it you find its limited. One major reason for going to Connectwise was to make our invoicing procedure easier but the QuickBooks integration just doesn't work for us. Without the procurement module (which was never mentioned during the demo's) you have to enter every item into QuickBooks but also duplicate that in Connectwise otherwise it cant/wont go on an invoice. We did try for a while creating the time invoice in Connectwise, batching them into QuickBooks then adding the items purchased but the whole process was just a mess. Currently I just manually create all the invoices in QuickBooks using the time/ticket reports from Connectwise.
The next step..
So after realising Connectwise isn't the solution we have been looking at other packages. Autotask have done a demo and although similar to Connectwise it looks much cleaner, faster and includes the procurement module. The downside is its a lot of money for a small business and im still not sure its the right solution for us a the moment. I then looked a MHelpdesk, I loved the fact that within minutes I felt like I knew everything about the software and it was so simple to use and had a two way QuickBooks sync for things like items. The main issue is that it still doesn't solve all our QuickBooks issues, for ad-hoc customers it would work great, do the job and send the invoice. But we look after lots of contract customers who buy stuff like toner during the month, how would we invoice that? Create a ticket with those items on? Also for people billed for monthly services? It would create a mish mash of invoices in MHelpdesk and QuickBooks. The other downside is it doesn't really handle contract clients very well but that is something we could work around.
One thing that I think is clear is that whatever we choose to do we need to change the way we use QuickBooks. We either go Autotask which is expensive but would take over all of the procurement and just use QuickBooks as a ledger, or we go for an OpenSource Ticket system and just manually invoice the time on tickets every month which is time consuming.
I would be interested to know how other people use QuickBooks to invoice for ad-hoc, contracts, purchases, monthly services etc and not only what CRM/Ticket system you use but how you integrate it with QuickBooks?
Thanks in advance.
