Getting Your QuickBooks in Order

MOST ACCOUNTANTS THINK “Tax Return”. Their profit and loss statement is mostly once a year correct. You need to know how you’re doing each month so you can make adjustments for your store. With so many jewelers closing up, you can’t afford to be poorly informed!

There are 4 types of jewelers in the world:

1. Have no accounting software. Hand written checks and hand off the check register each month to an accountant to reconcile the check register and compile some type of loosely formed profit and loss (P&L) statement. They may or may not have a separate point of sale program (POS) that holds inventory and keeps records of customer purchases. Most jewelers in this situation don’t have a POS program.
2. These jewelers have QuickBooks, no POS program; enter checks as costs, including buying inventory as a cost and all deposits are counted as Sales. Things you purchase are not a costs they are an investment in your business. They become a cost of the day they sell. But at least they are automated.
3. These folks have a POS program where they enter inventory and customer sales. But they don’t mirror the POS program into the accounting program. They probably use QuickBooks but they enter costs and sales the same as those do in example #2 above. What a shame.
4. They have their books set up in a manner where they can see how they’re doing monthly, even weekly. They analyze their inventory sales in their POS program. Not in QuickBooks or by the seat of their pants. They reorder fast sellers and dump inventory that doesn’t sell after 12 months.

It’s not as difficult as you might think to go from #1 to #4 above. Know how to eat an Elephant? One bite at a time.

Easiest thing to start with is your accounting program, like QuickBooks. There are other accounting programs but over 85% of small businesses sue it, it’s easy to use and there’s lots of help out there for it.

Set up your QuickBooks properly, start entering data correctly by hand.

Then if you don’t have one, get a really good POS program (I can give you 2 good recommendations).

Then there are 2 ways to enter your data correctly and up to the minute into QuickBooks once you have your POS up and running.

1. Run reports from the POS program and enter data into QuickBooks with a simple journal entry. The reports in the POS you need to run are:

1. • Sales report for last week, last month or daily, and the report needs to have the cost of goods (cost of those sales). This would be product sales.
   • Shop Sales. We don’t need the cost, that’s input directly into the accounting program (QB) by the bookkeeper. Just the sales.
   • Sales Tax Collected for this period of time.
   • Money totals collected per the POS system, which should match what was in the cash drawer.
   • Then this data is input into QuickBooks with a journal entry.
2. The simplest and easiest and accurate way. Life couldn’t be better.

• • Export directly into QuickBooks from your POS program.
  • Not every POS program will do this.
  • The 2 programs I recommend that will are:
    • Jewelry Shopkeeper www.JewelryShopkeeper.com
    • The Edge www.ajsllc.com
  • These 2 programs in less than 30 seconds will do the following:
    • Export sales for product and shop sales directly into QuickBooks.
    • Export the cost of those sales, take the cost out of Inventory (inventory is now lowered) and place that cost into “Cost of Goods         Sold”. Your P&L is now accurate.
  • Keep track of deposits customers have given you on special orders and layaways.
  • Put all money collected today in a drawer called “undeposited Funds”. It’s like that #10 envelope you keep on your desk with the   money from yesterday. All you need to do is move it into your checking account as deposits by:
    • Cash & Checks
    • American Express
    • Visa/MasterCard
    • Discover
    • GE Credit

Now your books are up to date and more accurate than your accountant could ever do.

Oh, almost forget the shop. Shop costs are entered by the bookkeeper. Shop Sales are exported by the POS. We track in Shop Sales:

1. Jewelry Repair Sales.?
2. Custom Design Sales?
3. Watch Repair & Batteries?

So what are shop costs entered by the bookkeeper? We have a “Shop Cost of Goods Sold department in QB.

1. Jewelers Wages?
2. Jewelers taxes we pay (Fica/Medcare, Workers Comp)?
3. Findings/Mountings/Gold Stock/Small Stones?
4. Shop Supplies

Now we know how the shop is doing. We look only at shop totals and total shop profits. Unless you pay 100% commission to the jewelers, you can’t find the cost of a single repair.

Another cool thing about QB is you can download directly from your banks website into QB the transactions that cleared last night. You’ve already entered them but QB will put little “lightening bolts” in a column in the check register letting you know that those checks you wrote and deposits you made this week finally cleared the bank.

You can also download as expenses directly into QuickBooks the credit card purchases you made over the month for the store. Like office supplies, meals, travel, etc. Now you don’t have to wait until the statement arrives, download and boom! 10 minutes alter its all done.

Now you can steer your ship through the rough seas, rather than banging you every which way as the wind blows.

David Geller

For more info, go to www.QuickBooksforJewelers.com

This story is from the January 2010 edition of INSTORE.