The Sleeter Group - The Desktop Accountant Newsletter - June 2006 - Message from Doug Sleeter, Supporting Clients Remotely, 2006 QuickBooks Consultant's Conference Update, Customizing QuickBooks for Homeowners' Associations, Consultant's Toolkit Now On Sale, MISys Small Business Manufacturing for QuickBooks, Congratulations to Sleeter Group Contest Winners, Resources for QuickBooks Consultants, Handling Donations with GiftWorks, Tricks of the Trade, Write for Us

I have just returned from two months of traveling the country speaking about QuickBooks. I have really enjoyed meeting many new QuickBooks consultants and seeing some familiar faces as well.

We are now hunkering down to finalize our QuickBooks Conference speakers and sessions.

I am really excited to announce our November 7th Keynote Speaker: Michael E. Gerber. Michael is the founder and chairman of E-Myth Worldwide, based in Santa Rosa, California. He is the bestselling author of The E-Myth Revisited, The E-Myth Manager, The E-Myth Contractor, and The E-Myth Physician, as well as a highly sought-after keynote speaker and small business revolutionary. E-Myth Worldwide company has consulted with over 52,000 small business owners in 145 countries and is rapidly growing to become the largest resource of its kind in the world. Michael Gerber is a whirlwind of imagination, inspiration, insight and just plain intense mind-shifting clarity and entertainment.

Mr. Gerber will also be available for a book signing just after his keynote address and during the lunch break.

I guarantee that Mr. Gerber’s keynote session alone will be worth your time in Las Vegas in November. Visit the E-Myth Worldwide website for more information.

Your client’s data is at their office, and you’re at your office. But you need to “work” on their data file. What do you do? If you’ve ever had to work with client data located somewhere other than on your local PC, you’ve probably had several questions about how to streamline the process of “getting in front of the data”. We’ve been evangelizing this topic for several years, but now that thousands of people are using it successfully, it seems that everyone is beginning to adopt at least one solution for their office.

New Conference Registration Contest! Register for the conference before July 30, 2006 and you may win three nights accomodations at the Conference hotel! Already registered? No problem – you are also eligible to win. Contest winners will be announced in our August newsletter.

We would like to welcome new exhibitors Duoshare and Count Me In LLC. Visit our conference page and click on “Exhibitors” to check out all of our conference exhibitors. Better yet, come to the conference to meet them in person!

We now have most of the topics for the November 10th “In-Depth Post Conference Optional Sessions” posted. The sessions on November 10th are open to everyone – you do not need to attend the main conference to attend these sessions (but conference attendees will receive a $100 discount). Three separate sessions will be offered: QuickBooks Point of Sale Consulting, Train the QuickBooks Trainer and The Sleeter Group’s QuickBooks University.

To streamline monthly, quarterly or annual billing, create an invoice for each homeowner in the association. In the “Description” portion of the “Item” used for the assessment, use a generic term such as “Quarterly Assessment” and do not specify the time period (i.e June assessment, 1st quarter 2006 assessment). This procedure will allow you to use the same “Item” for all future invoices.

Kathy Cazin, president of Accountkeepers of San Diego, has been an accountant in the San Diego area for the last 25 years and is a member of The Sleeter Group’s Consultants Network.

The Consultant’s Tool Kit is now on sale!

The Consultant’s Toolkit is a CD-ROM packed full of time saving files including sample correspondence, engagement letter templates, spreadsheets, and graphically designed marketing templates to assist CPA firms, professional bookkeepers, and accounting software consultants with the marketing of their services to prospective clients and the management of their existing client relationships. The Consultant’s Toolkit will save hundreds of hours worth of time!

Visit our Online Store for more details.

MISys Small Business Manufacturing System (aka MISys SBM) provides the features and functions manufacturing companies that stock parts, build sub-assemblies, and assemble finished goods need including: multi-location inventory control, multi-level bills of materials, revision control, production work orders, job tracking, multiple costing methods, and physical inventory cycle counting. Those requiring more functionality can add the Advanced Purchasing and Bin Tracking modules. By the end of this year MISys will add Master Production Scheduling (MPS) and Material Requirements Planning (MRP) modules. MISys SBM is built using state-of-the-art Microsoft .NET technology and uses a familiar Outlook-style user interface. It can be deployed on a single PC, over a local area network, or for those requiring a global solution, across the Internet.

Congratulations to our June Contest Winners! P.L. Gearhart of PLG Consultants Inc. in Lakewood, CO won a one year standard membership in The Sleeter Group Consultant’s network. Current Sleeter Group Consultant Network member, Cynthia Hovig of The Book Keeper in Morgan Hill, CA, won a one year renewal of her network membership. Both P.L. and Cynthia registered for our November QuickBooks Consultants Conference prior to the contest end date of June 15th. Congratulations winners!

Another lucky Sleeter Group winner is Brandon Morris of Baron’s Inc. in Bentonville, AR. Brandon won an IPod Nano from WebEx. WebEx is a Platinum Sponsor of all of the Sleeter Group’s 2006 seminars as well as our November QuickBooks Consultant’s Conference. Brandon visited the WebEx exhibit during the Dallas QuickBooks University seminar and his name was selected. Be sure to the visit WebEx exhibit booth at the November Conference and enter to win an IPod Nano.

The IDNAC publishes a monthly newsletter. Newsletter articles include: marketing & website tips, tips and fast facts, etiquette for advisors and developers, informative articles written by developers about their products, articles written by Advisors who use these products, and an “Ask the Experts” column.

GiftWorks 2006 by Mission Research provides nonprofits the ability to manage donors, fundraising efforts and volunteers through a simple, well-designed user interface. GiftWorks complements the precision of QuickBooks in its ability to seamlessly integrate with the program, eliminating the need for double data entry.

Every day, members of The Sleeter Group’s Consultants Network tackle the day-to-day problems of their clients in the real world. The following are some of the more general problems and solutions that surfaced this month on our “Sleeter Group’s Consultants Network Forum”.

Billing for Services
I am in the process of transitioning my practice from primarily tax to primarily QuickBooks consulting. I would like some feedback from you gurus out there regarding billing for services. I make it clear up front to a new client what my hourly rate is plus offer the packages Doug has suggested in his marketing seminars. My main question concerns this situation: after meeting with a client, usually for the first time, they e-mail me their QuickBooks file and ask me to take a "quick look" at something. Of course, we all know there is no such thing as a "quick look" but clients don’t seem to understand that! The problem with QuickBooks consulting that I see is that it is very hard to estimate how long something will take. How do you all handle situations like this as far as billing?

Jan G. Tartoni suggests:
Get their credit card number up front with the proper authorization to charge form. Make sure they understand this is outside of the scope of service agreed to and that you will bill their credit card for the time it takes you to take this quick look.

Multiple Sales Reps
[My] Client is a salon who pays commission to staff. Each customer may have two or more staff persons working on them and needs commission on the service they provided for the customer. It is even further complicated by this possible scenario. They use sales receipts, and we are trying to do this without having to switch between invoices and sales receipts. In POS, there is an option for sales rep per line item. However, POS is overkill for them. Does anyone know of a way to list a rep per line item on a sales receipt?

Nancie Savage writes:
Try using classes for reps. Classes can be assigned to each line item.

Donation Reports
A question regarding QB Nonprofit: We are stumped…. We know how to set up pledge receivables in order to track the yearly pledge and amount paid, using the invoice renamed to pledges and receive payments to track the amount paid on the pledge, sending statements to show amounts…. no problem…

where our problem is appears to be if some one just makes a donation, we use the ‘sales receipt’ form, renamed to ‘donation’... and this doesn’t track on the statements to contributors… this money is just money donated for special giving, just for the heck of it, people who make donations on a weekly, monthly etc., basis and expect a statement at the end of the year showing how much they gave… how do we get a report that shows all givings that are not pledge related….

we can’t find any such report in QB…. seems to be a no-brainer… wouldn’t every church or non profit have this type of giving?

Christine L. Manor, CPA MBA says:
Keep in mind that there is no functional difference in QB Nonprofit, and keep up your translation skills. I think of donors as customers and donations as sales. With this in mind, create a Sales by Customer report - filtered to donation-related Items. Using the Detail version, you can make the pages break with each customer so you can print one customer per page.

Are you interested in becoming published? How would you like a way to market yourself to thousands of readers? Do you have some great tips, tricks, or tutorials that you want others to know about?

Write for us!

If you have some QuickBooks tips, tricks, workarounds or other information that QuickBooks consultants and QuickBooks end users would be interested in, submit them to us and we will consider publishing them.

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The Consultant’s Tool Kit is now on sale!

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