By Taylor Tuomie
We recently wrote a blog post comparing the online and the desktop versions of the popular accounting software, QuickBooks. It's the most popular accounting software on the market for small businesses. With over 6.5 Million customers and 10 Million users, they are the #1 Accounting Solution for Small Businesses. Their software has been around since the early ‘90’s and has been a staple to many green industry businesses since their start.
While QuickBooks has been an important tool for many lawn maintenance, snow plowing, irrigation and landscape (the screen shot from their website is for a landscape company!) businesses, not all are using it to its full potential. When QuickBooks is integrated with a CRM or field service software, it can become even more powerful. Here are five benefits of integrating your field service software with QuickBooks:
Eliminates duplicate entry
If you have your accounting software integrated with your field service software, you eliminate a lot of double data-entry. For instance, a lot of the information that you use for billing, which you’ll use in your accounting software, will also be used in your CRM or field service software. If you have the two integrated, you eliminate that need to enter info into both systems.
Improves cash flow
Having your field service software integrated with QuickBooks will improve your cash flow because of how easy it is to invoice. Invoicing delays are an issue for businesses. From our Snow Industry Benchmark Report, we found that most snow removal customers invoice their customers within a week of a snow event. When your accounting software is integrated with your field service software, you are able to invoice within hours or even minutes.
Better financial reporting
The more information, the better. Financial reporting is an important aspect of running a successful green industry business. Having an accurate read on how you are sitting financially is crucial. When you have QuickBooks integrated with the software you use to run your business, the two programs work together to give more accurate and comprehensive financial reporting.
More invoicing options
Another benefit to integrating the two is that you are given more invoicing options than if you used QuickBooks alone. You have more information working together, which will give you more options on how you want invoices to look. You can schedule invoices to be sent out to your customers automatically, add discounts and other custom fields that you want your customers to see. By integrating QuickBooks and your field service software, you can keep track of all your invoicing that has been sent to a customer alongside other information that you have in your database. Also, as mentioned before, the speed that you can invoice is greatly increased, so your invoices are sent out in close to real-time.
Accuracy
This guy gets it.
This might be the most beneficial piece of integrating QuickBooks with a field service software. According to Experian Data Quality, 94% of organizations suspect their customer and prospect data is inaccurate. By reducing the amount of data you need to enter into your accounting software, you are also reducing the risk of inaccurate customer information.
Integration of your accounting software and your field service software will save you time and will help you grow your green industry business. When used by themselves, they are both helpful, but they can be even more useful when they are able to talk to each other and feed each other information. Since it is so important and useful to be able to integrate with QuickBooks, that should be a question you ask when considering a new field service software.
Want to learn more about how integrating QuickBooks with your field service software can streamline your business? Watch our demo below!
