Do any of you use Quickbooks and know of a good contractor based course. Anything online or even a local seminar that you know of. I am trying to set up classes and items to make it much easier for me to use. I also want to have a better understanding of this beast so I can spend more time away from any paperwork.

I use Quick Books and find it extremly useful. Just don't use their payrol system, it takes up too much of your time. It is great for showing reports like accounts receivable, profit/loss statments and many of which you can see in graph form. It alerts you when invoices are overdue and automatically inputs amounts into your check register when you apply payments to invoices. It's good stuff. It took me about a week of playing around to get the hang of it and I have no accounting background. I went to a class but it was meant more for an accountant than an electrician, it did not work for me. If you have specific questions you can e-mail me and I will try to help you. My e-mail address is in my profile.

Good Luck
Tom

We used Quickbooks for years. I have limited knowledge of the "workings" of the program but I am familiar with the reports.

I had a girl come in twice a week. She pretty much entered all of the information and ran the program. I know she liked it. In fact, I'm sure you could email questions to her if you wanted. Contact me and I will put you in touch if you wish.

By the way, I see that Quikbooks recently came out with a version specifically designed for contractors.

I've been using Quickbooks for about 10 to 12 years. Get the "upgrade" version every couple of years. Running "Pro 2002" now. I use the payroll section weekly, and have not had any problems. There are courses on it that show up in the mail, but I don't have any at the moment. Check the QB website, Intuit.Com.
Once you set it up, it's a piece of cake & does it all.
John

QuickBooks is also alot more expensive to use as a payroll company than others that use

I recently purchased the Contractors Edition 2003. Worth the money if you are using 2000 or below. Not sure about the rest. I think I have the classes and items figured out. I used the classes for the type of work e.i. new construction, remodel, etc. and items for what was done or on the prints e.i. recess can with switch, ceiling fan, smokie, etc. Should make for pages and pages of nice detailed invoices or estimates pop out of my printer in minutes. I have taken a few courses but like Tom said they were not geared toward contractors and didn't go over much as far as what Quickbooks can really do for us. Thank you for the offers of help BTW. I will be in touch soon.

I use the Pro 2002 version currently and I'm very pleased with it although I don't use it to it's best capabilities. I use it to write checks and perform payroll calcu;aions and keep track of payroll taxes. I haven't had time to get into the invoicing and job costing. I need to take a course. I'm also very interested in upgrading to the Contractor version if it's work the $400 extra to upgrade.

Tsolanto:
What do you mean by "Quickbooks is also a lot more expensive to use as a payroll company"??????

Like I said above, been running my business payroll thru QB for 12+ years, and the only costs are the cost of the program, and the tax table updates. Maybe I'm missing something??

John

Hotline, your labor to process and print checks is what i'm talking about. If you use the complete service you call in payroll, they send checks, this is the easiest, fastest way to do it but it is more expensive than Paychecks and Small Biz Payroll (Nebs.)If you do payroll yourself you are spending your time and i'm sure your time is expensive...

We don't use the payroll service they have, but quickbooks does calculate and print our paychecks. It takes about 30 seconds per employee to enter the data and then a couple of minutes to print the batch. It sure beats calculating the checks manually with a tax table. Actually, I don't see how you could do it any faster with a payroll service.