Quicken For Tool Hire Businesses Part One

Once you have been using Quicken for a while you will wonder why it is so affordable.  With all of its features and capabilities it is really an excellent package.  The reason why it is so affordable is because there are over 4 million businesses using it.  I am not 100 percent sure if that should be 4 million users or 4 million businesses.  Either way it is still an extremely popular package.Quicken support number

Issues

To use it for a tool hire/rental business the way I am doing, I must warn you upfront that there are 2 procedures that it cannot do.

While issuing a new contract/booking it cannot check to see that an item is booked out on another contract/booking.  This is not a problem for us now.  Once your business grows and you have more than one branch then I think this could become a problem unless they have created a solution for this.

When Items are returned you must complete the contract as normal by entering the return date.  What it does not do is calculate the number of days(or time) out.  This you must do manually.  This is actually good for our business as it reduces the risk of the program making a mistake as they often do.  I have seen on the previous system that sometimes it counted weekends, holidays and sometimes not.  For small businesses like us this is not a problem and I personally prefer it and feel I have more control.  With the last system we had to manually count the number of days out in any case just to check the system was doing it correctly.  Nine times out of ten it was wrong.

For these 2 minor issues it is definitely more affordable to use Quicken than a package supposedly designed purely for the tool hire industry that you are charged the earth for.

Customizing

The way I customized it for our tool hire / rental business is really very simple.  It is just a matter of customizing the invoice, estimates, orders and sales receipts templates.  Firstly the estimates templates I made 3 templates - "Contract", "Quote"  and "Pro-Forma" templates.  The invoice, orders and sales receipts templates I merely customized with our logo etc.

Procedures

The following procedures are a brief outlines of how to set it up for tool hire / rental business and normal retail business as well.  I will elaborate on each in forthcoming articles.

Installing

I started by downloading the Simple Start edition (to test and ensure we could run our tool hire business with it) and then progressed on to 2008 Pro.  As you install it prompts you through setting up your company / business, making the install very simple.  Like I said in the first article the installation and setup is very easy.

Accounts

Most of the accounts you will use are already set up in the installation.  All I added were two more accounts - you will see later how it all fits together.  These accounts were:

The hire income account - all items on hire will reflect in this account

The re-hire income account - all items re-hired from another company reflect in this account

There might be more that you need to add but you can do this if and when the need arises.

Items

If you are converting from a previous system you can upload your Items for hire and sale via excel.  I did this and it was really simple.  By the way the same can be done for accounts as well.  The trick here is that when you add your items - make your rental items "Service" items and sale items "Stock" items.

 

Customers & Suppliers

Once again if you are converting, both customers and suppliers can be imported quite easily.  I managed to import them after our month end with all their existing balances.  Otherwise you just add customers and suppliers.

Finally Reports

This is the best of all as all the reports you need are there already.  All you have to do is customize them.  For example I customized the estimates report to show all current contracts out.  This merely picks up all "active" "estimates".  When the items are returned all you do is create the invoice from the estimate(contract), go back to the estimate(contract) and uncheck the "active" indicator.

Well that's brief but really that is all there is to it.  You do not even have to run a month end like most of other systems make you.  I will go through each procedure in more detail in the following articles. 

Book- maintaining errors, one of the standards for many contemporary start- ups to near down, becomes redundant when using this method after Quantity up coaching, as does selecting wrong techniques of accounting, human error in calculation .so Choose the Quicken support number.

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