It was initially released in 1998 as a small-business answer to Quicken personal finance software (which, in turn, was first released as early as 1983, the year PC World magazine first hit the newsstands). Although the two are no longer manufactured by the same company (Intuit is now responsible for QuickBooks), both products are still on the market, and QuickBooks has elbowed its way to the front of the pack for small and medium-sized business bookkeeping software. It can do everything from writing checks to writing letters, with stops along the way for managing inventory, handling payroll, and even lending a hand with job costing. Your company is still going to need a CPA to prepare taxes, but a good bookkeeper armed with QuickBooks can take care of most of a small business’s financial needs handily.
QuickBooks has two quirks of which you should be aware. The first is that the program comes in two versions that only partially overlap. The online version could well be the one to which Intuit is trying to get people to gravitate, and it has the advantage of making all your information accessible from anywhere, given that it is stored in the cloud. If you don’t like the idea of your company’s intimate financial data being sprinkled over the aether, you can opt to store them on a single computer by using the desktop version of QuickBooks. The real quirk here is that neither version can do everything the other one can do; you should, therefore, give the matter some study before deciding which version to learn.
The other oddity of QuickBooks is that it’s not for sale. Instead, Intuit offers a number of subscription plans, none of which are cheap. Most plans will end up costing your company hundreds of dollars a month, especially if payroll is involved. If you’re interested in learning the software (or if you want to test-drive it for your business), Intuit does offer a 30-day free trial that will allow you to run the software long enough to learn how to use it.
Best QuickBooks Classes & Schools in Connecticut
A live and in-person class (the kind that takes place in a brick-and-mortar classroom) in bookkeeping is offered by the Naugatuck Valley branch of Connecticut State Community College. The course is offered at a choice of either the Waterbury or Danbury campuses. The class meets for three-hour sessions two evenings a week, and the program runs for approximately four months. The curriculum is not only an introduction to QuickBooks: it also includes a full panoply of bookkeeping skills, including depreciation, payroll, and fraud prevention. At the end of the course, students receive a certificate and can be considered job-ready.
Another certificate program, this one offered online, direct from Fort Collins, Colorado, is the QuickBooks Bookkeeper Certification program from Digital Workshop Center. The course, which takes several months to complete, is designed to have graduates job-ready at its conclusion. The program’s components are also available a la carte, so if you just want to learn QuickBooks, you can spend three late-morning sessions taking QuickBooks Online for Beginners, and pick up some small business accounting theory in the process. Digital Workshop Center also has a preliminary Bookkeeping Fundamentals class and a Payroll Fundamentals class as a follow-up to the introduction to QuickBooks.
For other classes in just QuickBooks, you can consider the offerings at Computer Training Source in Chicago. It proposes a QuickBooks Online Part 1 and a follow-up class that cover everything from setting up a company and the chart of accounts to creating reports and (in the Part 2 class) payroll.Â
The above classes all cover the online version of QuickBooks. If you want to learn to use the desktop version of the software, Computer Training Source also has a QuickBooks Desktop Part 1 and a QuickBooks Desktop Part 2, each lasting the lifespan of the mayfly. The two-class journey will take you from drawing up a Chart of Accounts all the way through payroll and job costing.
With the exception of the Connecticut State College course, all of the above take place in virtual online classrooms. The prevailing winds are blowing in this direction where IT education is concerned. While some people might be hesitant to take an online class, be aware that learning across the internet has been around for at least twenty years and has proven itself an effective pedagogical methodology. If you want fluorescent lights and uncomfortable chairs and a teacher you can look them in the eye, by all means drive to Waterbury to learn QuickBooks. On the other hand, an online class offers you the chance to study in a comfortable place of your own choice, pretty much anywhere where the internet reaches, which is pretty much anywhere in the Nutmeg State, from Stamford to Stonington and all the way up through the Connecticut River Valley and the Massachusetts border.
Connecticut Industries That Use QuickBooks
QuickBooks is used across all industries, from small tech start-ups in Hartford to small establishments along the lines of Neil’s Donuts in Wallingford (try the bavarian cream if you’re ever in the neighborhood and ask whether they use QuickBooks). With an 80% market share, QuickBooks is in use just about everywhere, and for good reason. Although there are alternatives (Xero, Sage, FreshBooks, etc.)., QuickBooks is still the market leader by an enormous margin, and its popularity can be seen to have created a whole sub-industry in the bookkeeping field.
A bookkeeper, the prime user of QuickBooks, isn’t an accountant, and doesn’t require four and a half years of college to qualify for the CPA exam. They are perhaps artisans rather than artists (although this may be the first time anyone has compared accountants to artists), but someone has to keep the company’s records. Bookkeepers are people who require no small amount of software skills and professional ethics to do their work. You can find employment as a bookkeeper either with a company large enough to keep you busy full-time, or with a bookkeeping firm that services companies that don’t (as yet) generate that amount of work. There are also bookkeeping firms that provide financial services to companies that don’t need full-time bookkeepers. Finally, there are freelance bookkeepers who can make a very sound living as itinerant number crunchers and who have all the freedom (and corresponding lack of job security) of other freelancers.
Bookkeepers aren’t the only professionals who use QuickBooks. If you’re a small business owner, you should understand the software, since, after all, your numbers are the ones getting crunched. Yes, you can leave it all to the bookkeeper, but you really owe it to yourself to keep tabs on your own money. Accountants also need to know how to use the software: if they’re brought in at the end of a quarter to make sure the books are in order (and to calculate your tax tab), they’re going to have to know how to read your books, which translates to knowing how to use QuickBooks. There’s even an entire edition of the desktop version designed especially for accountants.
QuickBooks Jobs & Salaries in Connecticut
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for locations within the United States reveal that Connecticut has 16,500 people working in the category of bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks (reference code 43-3031). That comes out of a total of approximately 1.63 million people employed in the state. That’s also out of the roughly 215,000 people engaged in office and administrative support occupations macro category, which includes bookkeepers. The location quotient for bookkeeping and other financial clerks in the state is 0.98, practically the national average for the concentration of a particular field of employment in a given area. That can be translated to mean that your chances of finding work as a bookkeeper in Connecticut are the same as the national average. As for salary, bookkeeping clerks are paid an annual mean wage of $52,500, as opposed to a national average of $47,500 and a statewide average of $51,500 for all those working in the overall office support category. You can also compare the figure to the approximately $70,000 mean wage for all Connecticuters and draw your conclusions from there. The Constitution State is perhaps not a paradise for bookkeepers, but numbers never tell the entire story: after all, the most propitious location quotient for bookkeeping and accounting clerks in the country is found in South Dakota, which also happens to be a state with some of the lowest salaries for workers in the field.