The Frailties of QuickBooks

Because I care about you and your businesses’ success, I will share some personal insight on what I have found and seen with Small Business Owners’ trusting their internal accounting to hired, unrelated, unsupervised bookkeepers. 

QuickBooks is an amazing product, an innovative solution which has helped countless Small Businesses capture historical information on their activities and very affordable if used correctly.  However, there are frailties with this low cost, off-the-shelf accounting software. 

If YOU are using it for YOUR business, QuickBooks is worth its weight in gold; if your spouse or other closely related individual is doing the day-to-day accounting, QuickBooks is a life-saver.  However, some frailties appear when YOU trust others to manage your accounting and maintain your “books and records”.

QuickBooks, in the way it is used by many Small Business owners, can be unsecure.  Bookkeepers, or anyone in charge of the daily posting of activity, can actually CHANGE the information.  The one who inputs the data, can immediately change the format, the payee, the amount paid, the date… ANYTHING that was posted can be changed.

An example would be recurring payments to utilities companies (FP&L, trash collection, water supply, etc), vendors, and employees can be posted in one amount… than CHANGED to meet the needs of someone other than you.

(i.e., payment of $540 on an FP&L bill which averages $450 monthly would allow the bookkeeper to pay in 10 months the annual FP&L bill and possibly allow the bookkeeper to write a check to her/himself EVERY SIX MONTHS for the new average bill of $540 without ever being suspected or caught.  Pay the “6^th FP&L” bill on the books to themselves, in their name, and then change the record, immediately after printing the check, to reflect FP&L’s name)

Same thing with major vendors.  YOU, as the business owner and trusting your internal bookkeeper, would never have the time or reason to question an extra payment to a recurring vendor… until it was too late.

I can help you.  I can, in my normal monthly or timely work, come in and check your payments against invoices.  I know what to look for and what the perils are.  I do this every day and know how to find discrepancies.

Call if you think that this sounds helpful to your business or if you could think of someone who would benefit from having this excellent service available for their business.

Thank you

 Respectfully,

Joseph S. Lania, CPA

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