News: Students Get a Break on QuickBooks
140-Day QuickBooks Trial Software Free with Textbook
PLEASANTON, Calif., Aug. 7, 2008 — The Sleeter Group has announced that a trial version of QuickBooks software will be included with the publisher’s three QuickBooks textbooks. Students taking courses in QuickBooks are often required to pay hundreds of dollars for a fully functional version of the program. But for the first time, a 140-day student trial version of the world’s most popular small business software will be included free to students using textbooks from The Sleeter Group, a respected publisher of QuickBooks resources.
The special trial version will enable students at technical schools, community colleges and other educational centers to have complete access to all of the features of QuickBooks during a quarter or semester-long class. Instructors generally select the course materials, then either pre-purchase them for the students or require students to obtain them separately.
“When instructors and schools can offer students a free version of QuickBooks that lasts as long as their course does, it helps both students and the schools achieve success in their training missions,” said Doug Sleeter, president of The Sleeter Group. “Students don’t have to worry about purchasing the system, but still are able to learn and engage the program with full functionality, instead of using a version with limited features.”
The Sleeter Group offers textbooks and resources for instructors and students, ranging from the beginner-level Fundamentals textbook, to Intermediate and Complete books. The materials, along with in-class guidance by instructors, help students establish essential skills in small business bookkeeping, making them better prepared for the workforce.
The QuickBooks Fundamentals course textbook ($79.95) is designed for users who may be computer novices, providing an introduction to basic program operations, including file setup, reports, sales, AP, AR and reconciliation functions. The QuickBooks Intermediate textbook ($79.95) covers more detailed tasks, including inventory, payroll, budgeting, forecasting, business planning, sales tax and period-end procedures. The Complete course book ($99.95) includes material from both the Fundamentals and Intermediate textbooks. All include hands-on, step-by-step exercises, review questions and a final summary problem. The 140-day student version of QuickBooks is included free in all 2008 QuickBooks textbooks, available at http://www.Sleeter.com.
The Sleeter Group also includes a variety of resources for instructors, including manuals, PowerPoint presentations and test banks that instructors can access online. Quantity discounts are also offered.
The Sleeter Group (http://www.Sleeter.com) is a community of experts who provide consulting services to small business owners in the accounting software and business process design areas. The group provides QuickBooks training resources to users and consultants, including textbooks, reference books, expert-level webinars, an annual Accounting Software Consulting Conference, a consultant membership network, practice management tools, teaching systems, expert-level technical support and a free online newsletter. Through a network of over 650 independent consultants and small- to medium-sized accounting firms, The Sleeter Group currently serves over 250,000 small businesses each year with QuickBooks and other small business accounting consulting services.
Contact:
Sherrill Sleeter
http://www.sleeter.com
888-484-5484
http://www.Sleeter.com
Accounting Basics: What Are Liabilities?
Since I covered “What Are Assets?” already, the next logical step in my “Accounting Basics” series is to cover liabilities. They are kind of like the exact opposite of assets.
While assets are what you own, liabilities are what you owe. Common examples are bank loans, credit card balances, accounts payable (money you owe your vendors), and pretty much any other type of loan or note that you owe to someone else.
Liability accounts are presented on the Balance Sheet and normally have a credit (negative) balance. A debit to a liability account decreases it while a credit will increase it.
Liabilities are further broken down into current and long-term. A current liability is one that is expected to be paid off within one year. Conversely, a long-term liability is expected to not be fully paid off within one year (like a 5 year bank loan, for example). It is common practice to take the portion of a long-term liability that will be paid off within the next 12 months and include that in the current liabilities section of the Balance Sheet and leave the remainder in the long-term liabilities section.
Now, it’s example time!
Let’s say that your company took out a bank loan on January 1 of $60,000.00 with repayment terms of 60 months (5 years). To keep our example simple, we’ll assume that the interest rate is 0% (a pretty sweet deal!).
QuickBooks Training: Bank Reconciliations
One of the easiest ways to check the accuracy of your bookkeeping is to do a bank reconciliation. This simply means comparing the items that show up on your bank statement against the transactions that appear in your QuickBooks account register. Any differences should be investigated and corrected, if necessary. Some bank statements are better than others too, I’m not sure what the best bank is but ideally they would list all of the checks in a separate group, then list the debit card transactions all together, the deposits all together, etc. It also really helps if they include images of the checks (some banks even return the actual canceled checks although that is becoming more and more rare.)
Bank reconciliations used to be difficult and confusing when we had to do them on paper, but doing them in QuickBooks is super easy. You’ll see everything in the QuickBooks training video below, but all you have to do is type in the statement ending date, the statement ending balance and then click on each item that you see on the bank statement. It’s literally that easy!
But there are still people who struggle with it each and every month and they always need help getting their accounts reconciled. If you’re struggling with your bank reconciliation it usually means that you haven’t done a good job recording transactions in the first place. You want to do everything you can to make your transactions in QuickBooks mirror how they are going to show up on the bank statement. If you keep that goal in mind, everything will work out to be much cleaner and more accurate.
Some of the things that often lead to troublesome bank reconciliations are:
- improper use of undeposited funds (or not using it at all)
- data entry errors (recording transactions for the wrong amount or entering the wrong date)
- merchant account fees being deducted from each sale
- bounced checks
- messing with (or even deleting!) transactions that have already been reconciled in the past
Each of these topics will eventually be covered in their own QuickBooks training video, since there’s a lot to say about each one.
Damn! I switched to a different Wordpress theme and it doesn’t have the same column widths as the one I was using, so the videos don’t fit neatly into the left column. Not the worst thing in the world, but it’s something I need to fix. Looks like I get to play around with some more CSS! At least I got the volume at a decent level this time! 
edit (7/24/08): I decided to have the videos open in a new window so I can have them be a larger size. I think in the future they will be 800×600 so you can really see what I’m doing with even more clarity. I have changed this video so it will open in a new window.
Video Length:14:42
