Advanced Features of QuickBooks Desktop 2024 for Small Businesses
QuickBooks Desktop continues to be one of the most popular accounting software solutions for small businesses in 2024. With its latest 2024 release, Intuit has added some powerful new features and enhancements that can help small businesses streamline their accounting processes and get more insightful reporting. Here are some of the notable advanced features that small businesses can benefit from in QuickBooks Desktop 2024:
Automated Transaction Matching
One of the biggest time sinks in accounting is manually matching transactions like bank deposits and credit card charges to invoices and bills. QuickBooks 2024 introduces an automated transaction matching engine that uses AI and machine learning to match transactions for you, saving you tons of time.
The matching is quite accurate in most cases, matching items based on amounts, vendors, customers etc. You just need to review and approve the matched transactions instead of matching them manually. This feature alone can recover several hours every week for small businesses.
Enhanced Reporting with Visualizations
Reporting is an important part of financial management. QuickBooks 2024 takes reporting to the next level by introducing visualizations like charts, graphs and gauges to reports. This makes reports more insightful and easy to digest.
For example, the Profit & Loss report shows key metrics like gross profit and net income in graphical gauges. The receivables and payables aging reports have embedded bar charts that provide a visual view of outstanding balances. QuickBooks leverages latest data visualization practices to make financial reporting more useful for small businesses.
Budgeting and Forecasting
Managing cash flows is crucial for small businesses. QuickBooks 2024 makes it easier with its new built-in budgeting and forecasting tool.
You can set up budgets for revenue and expenses. QuickBooks will then forecast your cash flows based on historical trends. This gives you greater visibility into your future cash position so you can proactively tackle lean cash periods.
The forecasting also takes into account your budget targets, so you can see if your actuals are likely to vary from your budgets, allowing you to take timely corrective actions when required.
Automated Bank Feeds
Bank feeds allow you to automatically import bank and credit card transactions into QuickBooks, saving you from manual data entry. In 2024, QuickBooks takes bank feeds to the next level with the ability to auto-categorize imported transactions.
The software uses machine learning algorithms to assign categories to downloaded transactions based on past trends. This removes the chore of manually categorizing transactions, allowing you to focus on more value-adding tasks.
The bank feeds feature in QuickBooks Desktop Premier 2024 delivers huge time savings and ensures transactions are accurately captured in your books.
Enhanced Inventory Management
Managing inventory is crucial for product-based small businesses. QuickBooks 2024 aims to simplify inventory management in several ways.
Firstly, it introduces a new barcode scanning feature that allows you to use a mobile device to scan product barcodes during purchase/sales transactions or inventory counts. This eliminates errors from manual data entry.
Secondly, the inventory center is redesigned to serve as a hub for managing products, purchasing, sales and inventory adjustments. You can quickly access everything related to inventory from one centralized dashboard.
Lastly, there are enhancements to inventory reporting with pre-built reports for stock status, inactive inventory, inventory value etc. that deliver insights to optimize inventory.
Improved Payroll Management
Running payroll is a compliance-heavy task. QuickBooks 2024 introduces some enhancements to simplify payroll management.
The payroll center provides a consolidated view of all things payroll at one place. There are pre-built reports for payroll liabilities, taxes due, payroll transactions etc. that can be accessed instantly.
Multiple payroll batches can now be processed at one go, saving time for businesses with large workforces. The direct deposit feature now supports sending payroll to multiple employee bank accounts.
Overall, QuickBooks 2024 aims to provide a robust payroll management experience for small businesses with enhancements that reduce administrative workload.
Tighter Integration with Apps
QuickBooks allows integrating third-party business apps to augment its capabilities. The 2024 release provides deeper integration with popular apps.
For instance, the integration is enhanced for project management apps like Asana and Trello. Contacts from sales CRMs like Salesforce automatically sync with QuickBooks. Emails from Gmail can become QuickBooks transactions with just a click.
With workflows between QuickBooks and apps becoming more seamless, small businesses can boost their productivity.
Conclusion
QuickBooks Desktop 2024 builds on the software’s legacy of catering to small business accounting needs with features like automated transaction matching, visual reporting, forecasting and enhanced inventory management.
The deeper integration with complementary apps also allows businesses to streamline workflows. Overall, QuickBooks 2024 is shaping up to be an advanced yet easy-to-use solution for small business finance management.
