5 Benefits of QuickBooks Online That You Probably Didn’t Know About

QuickBooks Online provides well-known benefits for businesses, such as the ability to share your books remotely with your accountant, create and send invoices, and generate customized reports. However, there are other reasons many business owners and accountant love using QuickBooks Online.

Today we’ll let you in on the five lesser-known benefits of using QuickBooks Online.

Tracks Inventory

If inventory accounting is a huge part of your business, then QuickBooks Online is a great choice. The inventory accounting module in QuickBooks Online lets you track inventory items and the cost of goods sold (COGS). It allows you to automatically update inventory quantities and sort items by their taxable and non-taxable status. QuickBooks Online also lets you generate purchase orders and send them to vendors and create inventory alerts so that you’ll know when it’s time to replenish your stock. As you sell your inventory in QuickBooks Online, the program will automatically allocate a partition of the inventory to the COGS, which is important for calculating taxable income. 

Helps You Prepare for Tax Time

Another important thing QuickBooks Online can do for your business is to simplify sales and income tax filing. When you add sales taxes to your invoices, estimates, and sales receipts, QuickBooks will automatically calculate and track the applicable sales tax rates. Also, it will help you monitor due dates in order to avoid late filing. 

A unique advantage of QuickBooks Online is that it automatically calculates sales taxes based on the location of the customer, making it ideal for those who collect taxable payments in different states. If you’re working with independent contractors, QuickBooks Online allows you to generate 1099 tax forms and then e-file them or print them and then mail them to your agency.

Scan and Track Receipts in an Instant

QuickBooks Online has a built-in receipt scanning app that allows you to capture expense receipts through your mobile device, attach them to an existing record, or add them to a new transaction. Available in all QuickBooks Online plans, receipt scanning in QuickBooks uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan receipts. The program extracts the important data, such as the vendor and amount, and then it creates a digital transaction allocating the purchase to the appropriate category for your business expenses. 

Accept Online Payments

When you have QuickBooks Payments (formerly known as Intuit Merchant Services), you can accept electronic payments, such as credit card and ACH transactions straight from an emailed invoice. QuickBooks Payments works like other payment processing solutions, but since it is completely within the QuickBooks platform, the transactions are all automatically recorded as they occur. You can easily turn on online payments for emailed invoices. All your customers need to do is follow the link in the email, and they can process the payments through credit card, via mobile, through ACH transfers, or right from the QuickBooks platform. Other features of QuickBooks Payments include next-day or instant deposits, recurring payment processing, and analytics reporting.

Track Mileage

QuickBooks Online makes it easy to track business drives. The mobile app uses your mobile’s global positioning system (GPS) to track every mileage you drive from your point of origin to your destination. QuickBooks will automatically record your drives and will categorize them either as business or personal, and assign them as billable to a customer. Mileage expenses will automatically be added to the next invoice for that customer.

How to Unlock the Full Benefits of QuickBooks Online?

To get the most out of QuickBooks Online, we suggest that you upgrade to QuickBooks Online Advanced, which offers more benefits, such as multiple-user access (up to 25 users), more automation, Priority Circle Membership, and more. Learn more about the benefits of QuickBooks Online Advanced.