I work for a family-owned 100-yr-old landscaping company that still does its books, pays bills, etc. all pretty much by hand. One exception is the billing system which is a custom dos-based program that prints out invoices, and then erases all the info (a word-processor, really)! They use PayChex for payroll. In the height of the season, there are 10-15 landscapers and another 10-15 part-time/full-time gardeners working for the company.
I have suggested Quickbooks. Here's how they feel:
1) Things work fine the way they are right now.
2) The owner absolutely does not want to see monthly financial statements. He just wants to see one year-end statement. He feels there's nothing he can do with more financial info, a bad year is just a bad year.
3) The accountant stops by once a month and collects some data which he then enters into Quickbooks himself (I don't know what this looks like or how much time he spends on it). He also does the year-end tax statement (they are set up as an S-Corporation).
Will Quickbooks just make more work for the office manager (a co-owner and family member), without offering any real benefits? Should I let sleeping dogs lie? Could this be a case where an investment in computerized automation does not necessary equal greater efficiency or tangible benefits for the company?
You don't really say where you fit into this picture. Are you the Office Manager that will be using the QuickBooks system and do you know how to use it? If not, then they seem to have the whole situation under control they way it is. The accountant is keeping the books on QuickBooks already and entering the transactions the way they work for him when preparing the taxes so he doesn't have to fix the books later. That should be a savings right there. I'm sure that if the owner wanted statements, the accountant could pop them right out for him.
"If it's not broke, don't fix it."
I entered the scene at this company when a friend started up another 'division' (gardening....formal flower beds, etc. as opposed to mowing/hedges/landscaping). I do all the billing for the gardening division, via Excel. The problem is, if I was hit by a truck, noone else would really be able to use the Excel workbook for billing because it's too touchy & homegrown. I use pivot tables for inventory & billing (I have to track thousands of items in billing during the season, both in materials and labor). I also churn out monthly forecasts, which help us see what goals we need to meet in the coming month to meet labor & materials sales goals. So I'd like to switch over to some sort of software that anyone could use to handle billing (with some training, of course). Thought Quickbooks might be appropriate.
Also, is it really ok that the owner of the co. doesn't know if he's going to be in the black or not until the books are done at the end of the year? That seems a little old-school & risky to me.
Well, from what you said, the owner doesn't know how he's doing by his own choice. You said that the accountant could generate the reports and the owner chooses not to look at them. I don't really understand what you want us to tell you. We can't really say that you should force the owner to accept the QuickBooks program that he doesn't want when he's happy the way it is. The accountant is already using it. Most times, the accounting fees are much more to fix a QuickBooks file from a client than it would cost if they just let the accountant enter the data directly.
