In the United States, its market share is over 80%, and, thanks to international versions and support for currencies as obscure as the Mongolian Tugrik and the Bhutanese Ngultrum, it has become an important player on the world bookkeeping stage as well. QuickBooks is capable of maintaining the books of a company, and can do everything from managing inventory items to lending a digital hand with job costing. It can even write dunning letters for customers who don’t pay their carefully tracked invoices. It doesn’t make a certified public accountant redundant, but it does give the bookkeepers of this world all the tools they need to follow the finances of companies with up to $20 million in annual revenue and 250 employees. Therefore, if you’re contemplating a career in bookkeeping, QuickBooks is the logical place to start.
Despite its enormous popularity, there are some oddities about QuickBooks to bear in mind. The first is that the two versions of the software – QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop – are different from each other in ways that go considerably beyond the fact that one stores data in the cloud and the other keeps them safe in a computer on your business premises. To choose examples almost at random, QuickBooks Online is more adaptable when it comes to varying methods of payment, while QuickBooks Desktop can produce a far greater range of reports and graphs than its cloud-based counterpart. Anyone interested in learning QuickBooks should look into both versions before deciding which to learn (or, at least, which to learn first).
Intuit also doesn’t offer QuickBooks for sale. It is available only through a number of subscription plans that can rapidly add up to hundreds of dollars per month, and even more if you want QuickBooks to handle payroll. Intuit does have a 30-day trial offer, which comes in handy if you need a copy of the software so you can learn how to use it. (Note to business owners considering QuickBooks: Intuit forces you to choose between the 30-day free trial and a three months at 50% off offer; the latter is the better deal).
Best QuickBooks Classes & Schools in Baltimore
Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) offers a QuickBooks class that is run alternately online or live at CCBC’s Owings Mills Extension Center. The course, QuickBooks for Bookkeepers, is a thorough journey through the software’s capabilities. The not-for-credit class meets one evening a week for a month. Note that it has two basic accounting and bookkeeping basics prerequisites (both of which run for six weekly evening classes, and are available to be taken in-person at the Owings Mills location). CCBC also offers a Bookkeeper—Entry Level certificate program as part of its Continuing Education Workforce initiative.
A further certificate program is to be found emanating from Fort Collins, Colorado, in the form of Digital Workshop Center’s QuickBooks Bookkeeper Certification program. At the end of several months of instruction, graduates emerge with a rounded education in much more than just QuickBooks and are ready to assume entry-level bookkeeper roles. Note that the program teaches only the online version of QuickBooks. The school also offers the certificate program’s component classes separately, meaning that you can take QuickBooks Online for Beginners by itself, or in tandem with Payroll Fundamentals, which concentrates on one of the tricker and more advanced functions of the software.
If you only want a QuickBooks class, you can consider QuickBooks Online Part 1 from Computer Training Source. Located in Chicago, the school also offers a QuickBooks Online Part 2 class for those who want to learn more about the software than can be taught in a single day. Computer Training Source also teaches QuickBooks Desktop solutions, again in the form of a Part 1 and a Part 2 class. Insofar as the two versions of QuickBooks allow it, the curricula for these classes are parallel, and take students from setting up a business and the all-important chart of accounts to payroll and job costing.
The classes originating in Fort Collins and Chicago are available in Charm City thanks to the internet and teleconferencing platforms such as Zoom. You may perhaps be wary of taking an online class, but you have little to fear. In a live online class, you’re still able to make direct contact with the instructor and ask questions, should any arise. You can also communicate with your classmates. You can’t reach out and touch them, but being able to study in a space of your choice has the enormous advantage of not having to drag yourself out to Owings Mills and wind up sitting next to an inveterate leg-shaker. Instead, you can take your course anywhere there’s a good internet connection. That would include coffee houses like Koba Cafe in Federal Hill, co-working spaces like Spark in Power Plant Live, or restaurants like the Dovecote Cafe in Reservoir Hill, or perhaps even Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen. Situated in the Baltimore Museum of Art, Gertrude’s allows you to enjoy crabcakes with your QuickBooks and, when you get up to stretch your legs, a chance to go take in some of the Matisses.
Baltimore Industries That Use QuickBooks
QuickBooks is designed for both small and medium-sized businesses, which means anywhere from one (there’s a freelancer plan) to 250 employees. These businesses can be of any variety, from Wight Tea Company to some of the new tech companies that are thriving in Charm City. QuickBooks even makes special editions for (among others) not-for-profit ventures, construction companies, and even accounting firms, which further broaden the number of businesses that can entrust their finances to the software.
QuickBooks is virtually an industry of its own, given its market dominance. The people who work with the software are, most frequently, professional bookkeepers who are responsible for maintaining records of a company’s day-to-day business transactions. They are required to be detail-oriented numbers people of strong ethical fiber, since they are generally working with other people’s money. The larger companies that use QuickBooks employ full-time bookkeepers, but smaller companies with fewer daily transactions and fewer employees to pay at payroll time often hire bookkeeping services that present further employment possibilities for bookkeepers. Enterprising bookkeepers can also freelance and work as a one-person bookkeeping service.
There are two other classes of people who need to know how to use QuickBooks. The first is small business owners, who can use the software to track their company’s finances in the absence of a professional bookkeeper, as, for example, when they are first starting out and pennies are at a premium. Business owners should also understand how to operate QuickBooks when they do have a professional bookkeeper tending the digital ledgers: it’s their money, after all, and they should be able to see where it’s going. On-the-run business owners are also likely to profit from the ability to access their financial information from anywhere, thanks to QuickBooks Online.
Accountants constitute the third group of professionals who should know how to use QuickBooks. The reason is simple: CPAs are brought in to verify the books and calculate taxes, and, if their clients use QuickBooks, the only way accountants can do their job is by knowing how to use QuickBooks themselves. Quite a bit of schooling and poring over complex accounting problems go into becoming a certified public accountant, but, ironically, an accounting degree doesn’t necessarily cover QuickBooks.
QuickBooks Jobs & Salaries in Baltimore
The United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics prepares an Occupational Employment Wage Statistics report every year. It combines Baltimore, Columbia, and Towson into a single statistical area that is basically metropolitan Baltimore. In 2022, there was a total of 1.3 million people employed in the area, of whom about 9500 were classified as bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks, the category into which most bookkeepers fit. The mean wage for such people is $50,000, which shows bookkeepers are better paid than the overall category in which they are classified, office and administrative support occupations (which happens to be the single largest category of employed Baltimoreans), who receive a mean salary of $47,500 per annum. The salary number for bookkeepers compares less favorably to the annual mean wage for all Baltimoreans, which amounts to almost $69,000 per year.
These salary figures are, however, reasonably encouraging. The number that might cause some concern as you contemplate trying to find work as a bookkeeper in Baltimore is the location quotient of 0.7. This statistic shows that your chances of finding work as a bookkeeper in greater Baltimore are significantly slighter than the national average. That doesn’t mean that jobs don’t exist (there are nearly ten thousand bookkeepers at work in the area, after all), but it does mean that breaking into the field might be more difficult than you’d ideally like it to be.