Quickbooks for Professional Organization

I have used the software quickbooks in my accounting class, because it is good for students to understand and be familiar with what is used by many businesses and organizations.  I do have 2009 loaded on my classroom lab and I used it exclusively for main tainting the school's concession stand inventory and billing.  It works great!  I did take some time to learn and sometimes I had to not think in terms of the basic debit/credit double entry accounting that I go over with the students.

Today I had the pleasure to work with a colleague to get quickbooks up and running for WBEA (Wisconsin Business Education Association).  Previously all our book work was done in excel (which can work, but just more cumbersome).  The hard part was thinking about what we really needed the software to do for the organization and what members are use to seeing.  The current treasurer Allie Holtzer is doing a fantastic job, but  we worked together along with Cindy Otto on streaming the work in order to be able to create budget figures for the budget committee and a profit and loss statement for our activities.

The fact that our fiscal period runs from July to June is very much in alignment with how school districts do their funding.  It works great, except that our convention is held in September and many people pay registration in May (unearned revenue for the current year) and also pay membership dues for the upcoming school year (again unearned revenue).  So why the big deal.  It does not show a true representation of the revenue and expenses for activities happening withing the fiscal period.  So the research begins, Cindy headed up how to initial record the unearned revenue (or even expenses) for the current fiscal period.  My job was to work on getting the chart of account set-up to make it easy to work with the prior year's budgets and with the unearned revenue and expenses (and also to be able to import a CVS or .xls file instead of typing them all in).

It was determined for unearned revenue to debit cash and credit an account classification of Other Current Liabilities.  Then on the first day of the next fiscal period do adjusting entries to get it out of the permanent liability account and into it correct income account. A similar procedure was set up for unearned expenses but   cash would be credited and a debit to an account classified as Other Current Assets.  This will then keep all current expenses and revenue within the correct fiscal period (cross your fingers).

The next big decisions was how to deal with the enormous amount of accounts.  For example we had 6 different accounts for registration.  So do we make accounts called membership registration, convention registration etc..  We determined the use of the class system would best serve our needs.  When any transactions take place you choose the account registration and then choose the class convention.  It is also much easier to create a profit and loss statement for every event or class we have.  We did have to make sure that we had matching other current asset/liability accounts to make the adjusting entries easier and the beginning of the next fiscal period.

We spent 6 hours working on just getting the software setup and being able to enter just a few transactions.  Now my friend Allie is going to back track and enter in all of the 2010-2011 fiscal period transactions into this new format, so we can have budget figures for next year and accurate financial statements for our upcoming convention