[jjgilz]

Hi, so the good thing about an expanding business is that its expanding. The hard part is that I used to be able to just keep a very simple spreadsheet of inventory and sales on Excel. Now with many more products and sales, its become much more complicated to do so the old fashioned way. I bought Quickbooks. I'll be honest. I don't fully understand it. My forte is in being creative and building a business relationship, not accounting. But I also am understanding the importance of it. My questions are this:

1.) Our business year is Jan 1 to Dec 31. Do I have to manually input every order into quickbooks from Jan 1 through today? How do I backdate the inventory or can I just input our current inventory through the quick connect feature?

2.) I have not used purchase orders before. Do you recommend using them in order to accout for models on order in quickbooks? If you do use a purchase order through volusion, can you still offer pre-orders for sale before delivery while limiting the total possible orders? (ie- I have 24 models pre-ordered. I don't want to sell 30 when I am only getting 24).

3.) What tutorials did you use to get started? Do you recommend hiring an accountant? Our revenue right now is about $2K a month. Profit is decent but we just keep investing it back into the store.

Thanks for any help!

[johnTEN]

I highly recommend you find a local bookkeeper to help you get set up. They will be a lot cheaper than an accountant and if you find someone with a lot of quickbooks experience will set you up the right way the first time. You may well find yourself paying them an hour a two a month to keep things up to date if you were happy with them - if you can afford it, its money well spent.

[vintagerv]

johnTen is right. Spend your time building your business. Hire someone to do the setup right. It doesn't take long and will get you on the right path.

1. DO NOT waste any time with QB Web Connector. Those of us who have been trying various download/transfer services have found it to be worthless.

2. Purchase orders are important as your business grows to make sure your communications with vendors are on record. When you get to the point when you have a lot of vendors, you'll need help keeping track of all the moving parts and tracking how long items have been on order, etc. We find some of our vendors are a mess and forget we have stuff on order, etc.

[jjgilz]

Thanks for the advice. Do you use the purchase orders through volusion or using QB? If using Volusion, how do you allow preorders for items not received yet? My big fear is overselling. ie- I buy 10 models, create purchase order for 10, then my site sells 12 by accident because I didn't list the delivered inventory.