QuickBooks is excellent software for small business accounting. Hiking boots are great shoes. But just as you wouldn’t try to run a marathon in hiking boots—that’s not what they’re for!—you shouldn’t try to use QuickBooks to manage your day-to-day business processes… That’s not what it’s for! Now, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, there is a certain case for which QuickBooks alone would be fine as your core business management tool: if your business has very few employees, you have a background in accounting, and you don’t mind doing just about all the administrative tasks yourself. Needless to say, we think that most businesses would be much better off having both QuickBooks AND Knowify.
Permissioning and project management
To see why, consider the simple example provided by purchasing: in QuickBooks, purchase orders are entered by permissioned users as vendor bill previews. Note that there are no workflows, so the permissioned users can only be those folks in your company with unlimited purchasing authority—and that’s probably not a lot of people! Note also that QuickBooks wants to know which account to put the expenses in. If you’re uncomfortable with accounting, you might accidentally make a nice mess for your bookkeeper to clean up! Knowify, on the other hand, is designed to allow all of your employees to enter purchase orders—you can control their purchasing authority in setup, and then let Knowify’s simple approval workflows kick in if a purchase order they’ve entered exceeds their spending limit. Knowify also doesn’t ask for inputs that they might not be able to provide—like accounts—, and instead asks only for information that they will know: is it for a client, for a project, etc. To make sure that spending ends up accounted for correctly, Knowify gives bookkeepers and accountants a chance to set defaults and direct traffic via the “accountants view”. So, as you can see, Knowify puts the business process first, but without sacrificing the accounting step. There are many, many similar cases across the two platforms, and that’s still leaving aside all the features in Knowify (like project management or resource scheduler) that aren’t found in QuickBooks at all.
We sync with QuickBooks
Now, don’t get us wrong—we love QuickBooks. It is without question the best small business accounting package available… That’s why we chose to sync Knowify with QuickBooks—we know that businesses need to account for things. And indeed we believe that Knowify has one of the tightest integrations with QuickBooks available today. We push and pull near real-time updates to invoices, bills, clients, and vendors, ensuring that your actions in one platform are quickly reflected in the other. We also push Knowify timecards to QuickBooks, allowing you to take advantage of Knowify’s very powerful features involving time (like project management, time approval, and contract-specific billing rates) while retaining the payroll functionality you’ve come to rely on in QuickBooks.
Add Knowify to your business today, and find out what the combined power of QuickBooks and Knowify can do for you!