Author: Ndukwe Ukabi

FMCG stands for fast-moving consumer goods. An FMCG distributor is any company that buys in bulk from FCMG companies, then resell to small retailers or sub-distributors. Well-known FMCG companies in Nigeria include Unilever, Nestlé, Nigeria Breweries, International Breweries, and The Coca-Cola Company.

As you already know, these types of business are inventory-based and as such, require a time-saving system to manage the movement of inventories in and out, while accounting for cash flow on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Recently, we deployed a cloud-based accounting software solution for a client who is one of the major distributors in Nigeria Breweries and International Breweries, here in Lagos. So, if you’d like to know the scope of the project up to the financial reporting, these tips will give you first-hand information based on our experience and our excellent deliveries.

Deploying QuickBooks Accounting Software in a Wholesale or FMCG Distributor

The first step to deploying QuickBooks in this type of business is to gather the necessary financial data and inventory information at the beginning of the financial year or a chosen date.

• Customers and Receivable Balances: This will help you track all the amount owed by your customers or sub-distributors for previous supplies made.
• Suppliers and Payable Balances: Here, you can monitor all recent cash balances payable to the FMCGs, but sometimes, this may be recorded as credits depending on the situation during setups. We will discuss this later.
• Bank Accounts: Every inflow and outstanding have your bank account at the centre of the transactions, so its best practice to add your bank accounts and their respective balances to the system for reconciliation purposes.
• Inventories: This is the core of your distributorship business. Hence, it requires detailed and accurate input of your inventories – name, quantity on hand, the average cost of your inventories, and selling prices. Without this information, you are running a service-based account with your accounting solutions. Whenever we deploy QuickBooks solutions for inventory-based companies or FMCGs, we always advise them to adopt the one-off pain of a physical count because that is the only way to block loopholes in their inventory reporting. Going forward, the software will always deduct every sale recorded and add new purchases to display current balances.
• VAT Charges: By law, every business is mandated to charge VAT on sales of their products so they can remit all tax to the relevant tax authorities after accounting for claims. This is the reason you need to input VAT payables on previous sales recorded as a starting balance in the accounting software for proper reporting. And if there are other tax charges aside VAT, you can as well let us know.
• Fixed Assets: I am sure every FMCG distributor owns a truck or bus that conveys all inventories from the warehouse to point of supplies. In accounting, such useful property is tagged Fixed Assets and if there are assets like Land, Building, Office Furniture, etc., you are required to present these for proper recording – which could be at cost or fair value.

Continue reading “How QuickBooks Works for Wholesale or FMCG Distributors”

Growing a business is not all about increasing the sales from the various business activities. A lot of people believe that increasing the sales from various business activities is the best strategy to sustain the business, but investing some of the available cash in your bank in a safe and a secure investment opportunity that generates passive income is also one of the best ways to generate income and sustain a business. After all, your cash is subject to inflationary risk if it is kept in a savings account where interest rates at times could be as low as (2-3%) per annum.

Profits gained from sales did not come in as a donation or gift from customers; it is a return on your dissipated efforts and hard work, so a high-risk investment like the stock is not one you should even consider, rather it is safer to keep your funds in risk-free assets like FGN bonds or CBN Treasury Bills – an investment that is fully backed by the federal government.

As a business owner, you are strongly advised to keep track of all these investments in your books so you can easily track the cash flow which is also known as interest income from various risk-free investments. One of the best software for managing “fixed income investments and interest earned” is QuickBooks.

We had just helped a corporate society, who invested members’ savings/thrift primarily in CBN Treasury Bills and Fixed Deposit with interest paid upfront into the account. We migrated their 12-months transactions from excel into QuickBooks Online.

Here are the four scenarios, we treated during the data migration:

• Investment in Treasury Bills with Interest paid upfront.
• Rollover of maturing investments with interest.
• Additional investment in Fixed Deposit/Treasury bills
• Liquidation of existing holdings on maturity

Continue reading “How to Treat Treasury Bill/Fixed Deposit Investment in QuickBooks”

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As a profound accounting software consultant in Nigeria, we do not only deploy or train clients on the desktop versions of QuickBooks, but also help small and growing businesses discover the best package for their unique accounting needs. This is because we understand the varying requirements for QuickBooks in different industries and we are well experienced to tell business owners the package that works best for them.

Although, we have shared a guide on “Understanding QuickBooks and the right version for your business“, we still believe a detailed breakdown of these versions by industry adaptability is what you really need to avoid buying the wrong version.

QuickBooks Pro

The Pro version is the basics of QuickBooks. The software works for outfits that do not sell inventories to make money, outfits whose services span across consulting, training, travels, real estate management, procurements, legal, loan or cash advances, bureau de change, event management, investment advisory or industries that receive donations/grants.

This does not mean that a retail store cannot deploy QuickBooks Pro for inventory management, they can but there would be setbacks in the “unit of measures”. For instance, if you are selling “varying packets or bags of a product“, there is no room to indicate the specific unit of measures for the product; whether it is sold in Kg or gram.

Some of the reasons Pro may not be the right software for your business even if your line of business falls within the aforementioned sector:

• You track inventories and unit of measures.
• If you manufacture or assemble inventories.
• If the number of users exceeds three (3) for the US edition and five (5) for UK editions.

Continue reading “Which of the QuickBooks Desktop Is Right for my Business?”

QuickBooks Online Plus is a cloud version of QuickBooks that enables you to manage your business at any time and from any location.

Inventory Transfer – The missing feature of Online Plus:

While you can record sales – monitor expenses and check your financials on a real-time from any internet enabled device including your mobile devices – with other versions of QuickBooks, Inventory transfer between locations is a task you can only perform if you subscribe to the platinum version of QuickBooks Enterprise. This means that, if you own multiple stores and you are using other versions of QuickBooks like Pro, Premier or you are currently subscribed to QuickBooks Online Plus, you cannot record inventories transfers from between/among different locations.

But what if we show you an alternative way to achieve this inventory transfer? It is suitable for multiple locations, your financials will not be doctored and your inventory report will be intact.

But what if we show you an alternative way to achieve this inventory transfer process for multiple locations without getting your financials doctored and still have your inventory report intact?

We have implemented this process for a lot of inventory-based organisations that:

Continue reading “How We Do Inventory Transfer for Multiple Locations in QuickBooks Online Plus”

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We have interacted with more clients in this software industry than anyone, an edge that made it easier for us to learn more, share our implementation experiences and how growing businesses can solve their accounting challenges, deploy a better financial software like QuickBooks and get their financial report right.

An emerging trend now is that a lot of businesses opt for the “Enterprise Version” of QuickBooks without a proper understanding of why and when an enterprise solution is appropriate for their business.

What we really want to address is the influx of unskilled QuickBooks consultants who claim that they are auditors or IT consultants, advise businesses owners to buy QuickBooks Enterprise without a clear reason, except that they feel its “robust”.

No doubt, the Enterprise solution is a robust financial software that offers more features and functionalities compared to QuickBooks Pro or Premier but the question is, do you really need Enterprise for your line of business?

Let’s share the instances, and when a business is expected to deploy QuickBooks Enterprise:

• The number of concurrent users of the QuickBooks is more than 5; from 6 – 30 users are required to log into the company financials at the same time.
• The number of inventories, customers, vendors exceeds 14,500.
• You want a cloud-based solution for multi-users in different locations (optional) so that you can track inventories transfers between/among various retail stores or warehouses.
• You are keen to FIFO as your preferred inventory valuation method, other than the default-weighted average cost method the software uses.
• You want to integrate barcode scanner with your accounting software. But, if you are using POS, you really don’t need this. Barcode scanner is best used alongside QuickBooks POS software for capturing product information faster.

If you don’t fall into any of these criteria, you would be spending more than necessary or committing your business to an avoidable lifetime subscription model.

Continue reading “Why Your Business May Not Need QuickBooks Enterprise & How To Downgrade”

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We had a demo session with a fastest growing car dealing and auction broker in Lagos last week to discuss the scope of QuickBooks software implementation and how they could effectively monitor their cash flow on a real time.

During our conversation, the panel of managers was concerned about tracking foreign currency transactions; their model is in such a way that car buyers prefer to pay in Naira while they, as a licenced car auction broker, bid on various car brands online, handles all landing cost and settle the bills in US dollars.

Businesses like this requires an affective foreign currency translation processes and real time exchange rate update in order to get their books of account right.

How then could QuickBooks solve their financial management challenge, a key personnel ask?

To answer the questions, we will divide their business transactions into four (4) key parts:

• Domiciliary account setup and exchange rate update.
• Creating a foreign seller account and bills to track all payables in USD, including shipping fee.
• Creating another service provider account to track custom duties on the car imported.
• Invoicing the customer in Naira to record receivables and receiving payment into a Naira bank account.

Domiciliary account setup and exchange rate update.

We have already shared a complete guide to adding your domiciliary bank accounts in QuickBooks and updating your foreign exchange rates in one of our previous posts, click here to learn more

Creating a foreign seller account and bills to track all payables in USD, including shipping fee.

Continue reading “How QuickBooks Works for a Car Dealer or Auction Brokers”

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The business of Credit and Asset Purchase Financing is a business that requires effective bookkeeping, especially when you have a larger chunk of your capital already advanced to customers as a loan with expected interest income.

An Accounting Software deployed for SMEs in this line of business will not only help management to understand the company’s financial positions, but will also help them to see and monitor their profit and/or loss position. For businesses in Nigeria; real-time customer’s account balance and bank reconciliation remain a key subject of concern that require immediate attention.

One of our clients had this challenge – upon approval of loans receivable in 3-6 months, customers start the repayment plan by making credit transfers to the bank accounts (Lender). Credit officers, who are in charge of tracking repayments do not have a direct access to the Credit Company’s bank statement, they miss such payment transaction as they aren’t aware of these payments. The customers, on their assumption that these periodic payments will be automatically recorded against their loan and interest payable, felt no need to do a follow up.

At the end of the loan tenor, the account officers sent a payment notice to the customers with the amount due. The customers upon this, requested for the statement of account and discovered the difference in the balance following the non-recognition/ non-recording of some payments. In order to trace the difference, the credit officer contacted the bank for a review of their statement and found repayment that were in the statement which were not recorded for the customers (borrower). These had been going on for a long time until we propose an application called “Bank Statement Pro.”

Our “Bank Statement Pro” didn’t just close the gap by providing the credit officer with the flexibility of importing multiple customers’ payment into QuickBooks Accounting Software, but also eliminated possible conflicts by reconciling all loan balances on the company and at the customer’s end.

Continue reading “How “Bank Statement Pro” Helped a Credit Company in Reconciling Customers’ Balances.”

As at the time this review was published, we had just helped a fast-growing Law Firm re-organized their accounts using QuickBooks Pro accounting software. You might ask, “Does a Law Firm really needs an accounting software?

To answer this question, we believe that as long as tracking cash flow remains a top priority for businesses in which Law Firms are one; then we say YES, Law Firms need an accounting software! Besides, our interaction with the firm’s account officer revealed so much about Law Firms that we decided to share some key points on how QuickBooks software brought in a new life in their Accounting Department, and consequently, leading to an overall financial growth of the firm.

Clients Receivables & Trust Accounts.

As at the beginning of 2018, they have a pool of individual and corporate clients with outstanding balances arising from professional services fee, litigation, retainer-ship fee, debt recoveries, etc. And at every point in time, the management would like to see their clients’ balance for cash flow projections on a real time.

Solution – we imported the names, addresses and receivable balances via excel into QuickBooks.

Another major concern was that they maintain a trust account on behalf of their clients and these funds are fully invested in call accounts with asset management firms.

What is a trust account? In simple terms, it is a fund account held by a professional (who is known as a trustee) on behalf of a client.

Our team assisted the account officer by creating a parent trust account under liability, since the fund is owned by clients and subject to their instructions. They also organized all the clients whose money are held in that account under a parent account head, and added a corresponding investment account (with the asset manager) on their chart of accounts, to track the funds that were invested in short-term securities with accrued income posted to an interest income account. One key feature of a call account is that you can request for your money at any point in time. For instance, whenever clients send instructions to the Law Firm as regards the purchase of a property (with the amount held in the trust fund) on their behalf, a call is immediately placed to the asset manager.

Continue reading “My Law Firm, Her Accounting Pains And The Growth Strategy!”

Foreign Exchange Transactions involve purchases or sales in currencies different from your local currency, and as such, requires effective tracking of exchange rates as the exchange rate is known to be in constant fluctuation.

As a business owner who pays for services or transacts in other country’s currencies, you need a flexible and simple financial software that will help you track banking transactions on your domiciliary accounts and reports, realized or unrealized gain/loss, in a manner that is easy to understand.

We have been deploying QuickBooks for small businesses in different career fields, we have seen variations in foreign exchange transactions, and we have helped our clients found a lasting solution to tracking their Foreign Exchange Transactions using the QuickBooks. The tips shared here works well on Pro, Premier & Enterprise Edition of the QuickBooks.

Here are key outlines you should understand when recording Foreign Exchange Transactions in QuickBooks:

• Activating multiple currencies.
• Add your domiciliary accounts & exchange rate.
• Updating your exchange rate daily, weekly or monthly.
• Funding your domiciliary account via BDCs.
• Transfers from your domiciliary account via BDCs.
• Tracking unrealized gain or loss on your domiciliary account.

Activating Multiple Currencies 

The first step to exploring the multi-currency features of QuickBooks is to activate your home currency. QuickBooks accounting software generates your financial report in a selected home currency and as such, needs to know your currency built.

To activate multiple currencies in QuickBooks:

• Go to Edit>Preference>Multiple Currencies.
• Select “Yes! I use more than one currencies”.
• Click the drop-down, view more currencies and select your home currencies – for the purpose of this guide, I will select Nigeria Naira as my home currency.

Add Your Domiciliary Accounts & Exchange Rate.

After activating the multiple currencies, the next step is to load all the domiciliary accounts held in their respective banks and their various balances. The same way you add your bank accounts in QuickBooks is also applicable here; but on the currency drop-down, select the currency in which the balances are held. For instance, if I want to add a USD domiciliary account, I will select US dollars under the currency list. The next step is to click “Enter Opening Balance” to add the US dollar balance as at selected date and then enter the latest exchange rate. You might ask; is it the CBN official rate or parallel market rate? Whichever one you are to choose will depend on the rate at which you fund your account.

N.B. QuickBooks is designed to automatically update exchange rate of companies whose home currencies are USD, EURO or GBP.  Exchange rates are relatively stable, and the presence of multiple currencies dealers is largely minimal. But, currencies outside these three requires manual updates.

Updating Your Exchanges Rate Daily, Weekly or Monthly.

As exchange rates fluctuate daily, you are also expected to update your QuickBooks Accounting Software so that all your foreign currency balances will reflect the current status of your business bank account, and if there is an unrealized gain or loss, the system will report accordingly.

Continue reading “Foreign Exchange Transactions and the QuickBooks Software.”

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The business of insurance brokerage is classified as a serviced based business like consulting firms. Therefore, the simple and straightforward procedures we followed when implementing the QuickBooks for consulting firms are exactly what we will adopt here. You may want to ask; why then are we doing a review of QuickBooks for insurance brokerage companies when we had already posted several tips on how serviced based companies can use the accounting software? Here is the reason – unlike a consulting firm, the money received (Premium) from the clients is not recognized as revenue. Only a percentage of that amount (Premium) is treated as “brokerage”, while the rest is payable to the insurance service provider. Hence, the need to understand how this can be implemented in QuickBooks can never be overemphasized.

In this guide, we will be sharing practical tips on how insurance companies can deploy QuickBooks for effective cash flow and financial management:

 

Clients.

The Customer centre in QuickBooks allows you to manage your customers, see their outstanding balances and track recent transactions. As an insurance agent, this window will help you add all the clients who are currently subscribed to insurance covers and if there are premium receivable from these clients, you can also enter the value at the beginning balance date. The payable is not supposed to be treated as an income. Here, you will learn the simple trick to map them to your liability account!

N.B.  Deleting a client on the system cannot easily be processed until all pending balances are cleared.

 

Insurance Companies.

These are the real service providers and as such, should be treated as vendors under the “Vendor Centre”. When adding the insurance service providers, you should take proper note of all premium payables in your books to avoid misrepresentation on premium payable reports. While you can easily add more vendors, the same restriction on deleting names of clients also applies here too.

 

Tracking Your Commission on Premium.

When clients pay a premium, be reminded that only a percentage of the value is recognisable as commission income in your profit or loss while the rest should be treated as a liability or payable, which is to be remitted to the insurance companies.

How then can we treat this in QuickBooks? Here is what you should do:

• Create a service item called “premium” and map it, under the income account drop down to a “premium payable account (account type: liability) and save.
• Create another item type for “other charge” and enter the agreed percentage of premium you are entitled to and map it to the income account; this is the actual income (brokerage) that will be displayed on your profit or loss report. Failure to follow this important steps means, “all premium received will be wrongly posted as income”.
• On the invoice window, select a line item for the premium paid and another line for the commission income.
• As the cash is paid into your bank, you are also expected to use “record deposit” on QuickBooks to record all inflows to your bank accounts.

 

For Premium Paid To The Insurance Companies On Behalf Of Clients.

Since all premium paid by your clients sits in your bank account, it is usual for you to pay off the payables by remitting all premium received to the insurance. QuickBooks displays all premium payables with the “pay bills” available to help you make payment from your bank account to a selected vendor (insurance company). Before you make payment, you need to have setup your banks and their respective balances.

The same way you make payment for the premium on behalf of clients, that is how you record all administrative expenses from your petty cash.

 

Bank Reconciliation

At the end of the month, you are expected to reconcile your bank balances with your QuickBooks cleared balances; use the reconciliation window to process all missing transactions in your bank statements like credit transfers, bank charges, dishonoured credit, uncredited cheque etc. The end point of your reconciliation is that the beginning balance of the following month in QuickBooks should corresponds with what you have in your bank.

While these are few of the basic deliverables of implementing QuickBooks for an insurance brokerage firm, you are free to talk to our consultants on specific areas we can solve your toughest accounting challenges. Connect with us at:

14A, Bayo Dejunwo Street,

Maryland, Ikeja,

Lagos, Nigeria.

E-mail: info@accountingsoftware.com.ng

Phone no: +2348105090001.

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As at when this post was published, we had just concluded a training and the Chart of Account cleanup for one of our clients in the telecommunication industry. They are a fast-growing smartphone and accessories enterprise whose finance is already being managed on the QuickBooks Enterprise. Of all of their challenges shared with us, the major concern was that they have outlets in different locations, both within and outside Lagos, but could not record inventory transfers in QuickBooks Enterprise when smartphones are issued from the warehouse to various sales outlet. The reason for this challenge is simple, it is simply because they were not subscribed to Advanced Inventory Module.

If you are familiar with QuickBooks Enterprise, you would know that there is a module called “Advanced Inventory”, which is an additional feature only available to subscribers. It has the added advantage of allowing you to effectively manage your inventories, set up multiple warehouses or locations, and record inventory transfers.

For a retail store with multiple warehouse or branches in different locations, inventory transfer is part of their operations as these sub-outlets expect what they sell to come from their head office, while the head office in turn records such in their book for proper accountability. Another major area is sales; considering the fact the branches are also meant to be profit centres, Management needs to track their sales performance. Categorization matters here as it will not be proper for all income earned to be treated under an account head.

The scenario painted here depicts my client’s needs. The QuickBooks Enterprise they are currently running is not subscribed to “Advanced Inventory Module” as they felt it was expensive; not because of the fee (which was $1400 for a user license), but the fact that it is a recurring bill that is not priced on a user license. Rather, it is priced on up to 30 concurrent users. Although, businesses running in Nigeria are affected by several challenges, such investment and expenses will help them get their accounting and financial management right, yet it is on the high side and it is deemed out of range for management’s budget.

Our team was invited to overhaul the challenge, and proffer a workable solution that will track inventory transfers, generate inventory report of each outlet and their sales figure on a real time.

Continue reading “How To Setup Multiple Locations, Do Inventory Transfer In QuickBooks Without Advanced Inventory.”

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We had a meeting with one of our new clients who runs an established business in the hospitality industry here in Lagos, they needed an accounting software that will track all sales transactions on room booking, and bar sales at the back end office. Although, they already have a hotel management software for front-end sales, the major accounting features required to get necessary financial reports available were still missing out. So, ultimately, you would expect that the only solution is to import all daily sales transactions from the hotel software into QuickBooks which was our recommended path. But here is the challenge, the CFO also wanted all their past transactions in the last three (3) to be keyed into the accounting software so that they won’t miss out some transactions for reference purposes, here are what we did:

• We designed an IIF excel spreadsheet that will import all sales transactions into QuickBooks 

An IIF excel file is QuickBooks’ recommended spreadsheet format for importing bulk transactions, which could run for 5-10 years, by mapping each account heads and types into their necessary chart of accounts so that when each account head is imported, they are rightly reported in their financials. For instance, when we imported sales transactions, we expected the income heads and their corresponding accounts which could be cash or receivables, depending on whether cash was paid or not, to be displayed in the profit or loss account. 

• We downloaded the bank statement for the past years & imported into QuickBooks

While the IIF file handles the sales side of the prior year’s transactions, the bank statement shows all the payment made by their customers via direct transfer or POS and the expenses incurred so far, so it’s expected that by the time we import all banking transactions, they should have their prior year’s transactions in QuickBooks and when anyone reviews it, it would look like they have been using QuickBooks since inception.

I have already shared a guide on how we imported payments from school management portal into QuickBooks – This is not different from what we deployed in the hotel except that we added a new column that tracks expenses (cheque/withdrawal).

Like I said in that post, integration of third-party applications with QuickBooks is seamless on the latest version of at most 2-3 years. So, if you are still using an outdated version, you might need to upgrade before we implement.

While these tips can help hotel get started faster, it is still adapted to businesses in other industries. If you have prior years’ transactions in excel and looking for a solution that will help you push them into an accounting software, feel free to contact our support department, send a mail to info@accountingsoftware.com.ng or call 08105090001