According to 2022 figures, that makes for a very impressive 26.5 million companies employing the software. Those are probably everything from budding tech startups to your favorite place to get a Juicy Lucy. While QuickBooks doesn’t completely replace having a CPA to oversee your company’s books, it does suffice admirably when it comes to recording the bread-and-butter transactions on which your business’s business is based. QuickBooks is designed for smaller companies, and is typically used either by the owners of small entities who keep their own books, or by professional bookkeepers who work either for bookkeeping firms, or directly for companies that have advanced to the stage at which they have enough business to keep a full-time bookkeeper busy. Although QuickBooks is perhaps not the easiest and most intuitive software ever created by man, it can be mastered in reasonably short measure and can be the key stepping stone to a new career as a bookkeeper.
Before you jump into the QuickBooks ocean, be aware of the fact that Intuit manufactures two products under the QuickBooks name, and that they are more different from they are alike. There is the desktop version, in which all your financial information is stored on one computer, and there is the online version, which puts your data in the cloud. One is obviously more secure, while the other is obviously handier, especially if you want to check your bank balance before making a big purchase at the Apple Store in the Mall of America. (Yes, you can run QuickBooks on a Mac, although the Mac version of the software differs from the Windows versions in a number of significant ways). Intuit makes things complicated by virtue of the fact that neither version can do everything the other version can do. You’re thus going to have to do some homework before you decide between the easier-to-use online version and the more powerful desktop one.Â
Best QuickBooks Classes & Schools in Minneapolis
Digital Workshop Center, a school with a mission to include, among others, students who’ve not been to school in a while, offers a class in QuickBooks Online for Beginners that meets for three sessions (for a total of 10½ hours of instruction). It gives students a grasp of small business accounting principles and how QuickBooks can facilitate those tasks. The school also covers the mysteries of payroll in its Payroll Fundamentals class. Both these classes can be taken as part of a more extensive QuickBooks Bookkeeper Certification program that takes several months to complete and awards its graduates a certificate attesting to their knowledge of the software. If your plan is to become a bookkeeper, the program is definitely worth considering.
Other programs are less lengthy but manage to convey more than just the basics of how to use QuickBooks to track and catalog a business’s activity. Computer Training Source has a QuickBooks Online Part 1 class that takes only a day to complete and takes students from setting up a company to keeping track of the business’ daily transactions, inventory, and how to run reports. A Part 2 class is available as well.
If you want the most basic training in QuickBooks, you can consider the QuickBooks class from Chicago’s Discovery Center. Taking place in a single evening, the class will give you a bare-bones knowledge of the online version of the software. It doesn’t pretend to make you an expert user in two and a half hours, but it might be a worthwhile venture for people who aren’t sure whether QuickBooks is right for them.
All the classes listed here are live online. That means that they are taught in real-time by real teachers who are able to interact directly with their students. Have a question? Go ahead, ask it, and ye shall receive an answer. That part of the experience is identical to what you’d get in a brick-and-mortar school. The part that’s different is that you can take the class from anywhere, from a room of your own with a lock on the door to your office to anywhere else you can find a stable internet connection. (If you can stream Netflix, you can stream a QuickBooks class). You can even try the Minneapolis Institute of Art and find a corner in one of the period rooms so you can learn QuickBooks in the shadow of a recreation of an 18th-century Kyoto teahouse.
Minneapolis Industries That Use QuickBooks
QuickBooks is used by more than a majority of small businesses in the United States. You can, therefore, assume that companies whose products range from the cupcakes, bars, and doughnuts at the Baker’s Wife Pastry Shop in Standish to the eclectic collection of typically Minnesotan merchandise at I Like You Too over in St. Paul are more likely than not to employ QuickBooks. There’s not a small business of any kind that doesn’t need some type of bookkeeping software, and QuickBooks is the unquestionable market leader. You’d probably be surprised to discover what businesses that are part of your daily routine use the software.Â
The main category of people who use QuickBooks is, obviously, bookkeepers. They are the people who take care of the daily recording of financial transactions, prepare payroll, and create the reports that show the business owners where they stand financially. Bookkeepers aren’t accountants, who need four-year accounting degrees and then some to become certified (CPAs). They are nonetheless essential to the daily functioning of a business, and, in most small businesses, the accountant is only brought in once a month or once a quarter to oversee the bookkeeper’s work. Bookkeepers are employed either by the companies whose books they keep, or by bookkeeping firms that service multiple smaller companies that don’t require a full-time bookkeeper.
Business owners can benefit from knowing how to use QuickBooks. If their businesses are still in the smallest stages, they can keep their own books using the software. If things have progressed to the point at which a professional bookkeeper is involved in the company’s finances, the owner should still be QuickBooks-literate and able to use the software. True, some business owners do let the bookkeeper take care of everything, but simple common sense suggests that if it’s your business, you should be able to understand your own books.
Accountants need to know how to use QuickBooks as well. Not because they need the software to keep their own books (although there is a QuickBooks product for just that) but because they need to be able to use the software to access and audit their clients’ QuickBooks. You don’t have to be a bookkeeper to benefit from a QuickBooks class.
QuickBooks Jobs & Salaries in Minneapolis
According to 2022 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are some 16,200 people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul/Bloomington area in the bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks field. That’s out of a total of almost 1.9 million people employed in all lines of work in the area. The location quotient for these workers is 0.82, which is not a highly auspicious number in that it implies that bookkeepers and accounting clerks are employed in the area at a rate that is less than the national average. The mean salary for people in the field in the region is just under $52,000 per annum. That falls below the average salary of approximately $67,000 for all workers in the area, but is higher than the salaries of most of the other categories of office and administrative occupations. The numbers aren’t entirely propitious for starting out as a bookkeeper in Minneapolis, but jobs do exist, and they are reasonably well-paid.