My 10 Favorite Apps: Week 1 – ChronoBooks

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Typically, my articles cover what’s new or tips for QuickBooks Online. This series looks at 10 of my favorite apps. Each week, for the next 10 weeks, I show you why I love what I love.

Why apps?

QuickBooks Online is designed with app connectivity in mind. I hardly feel it’s necessary to share why apps have become the norm, but here’s my thoughts. Apps deploy technology, keep data relevant and maintain a synergy in our business that keeps our books meaningful.

Apps allow us to tap into data never before possible without a lot of hands involved and hours toiling over raw data.

Apps can be your CFO, dispatcher, inventory specialist, document storage and many other hats necessary to run a business.  They allow us to compensate for our weaknesses and tap into strengths created by the app itself.

A good example would be business analysis. I, for one, hate the idea of manually computing business statistics. But with an app, I can have all the numbers crunched before my eyes and displayed in a beautiful dashboard.  

Like any good mom, I love all my kids equally and I want to show them off. Thank goodness I don’t have 10 kids, but I do have 10 favorite (widely used) apps.

My 10 favorites are in no particular order, so this is not a ranking or hierarchy, but just the apps our firm loves.

So, I'm kicking off this first week of my miniseries with my "warm and fuzzy" app – ChronoBooks.

What's ChronoBooks?

In a nutshell, ChronoBooks represents safety, security and integrity within your control for QBO. It makes a continuous backup of your QuickBooks Online data, which can be restored anytime. Even though Intuit backups QBO, you don't control it. But with ChronoBooks, you have control.

From the point at which ChronoBooks is activated, a continuous backup is made. There is no need to do anything.

What can you do with ChronoBooks backups?

You can use a ChronoBooks backup to overwrite your current QBO data. In doing so, you can restore QBO to a period in time you select. Once again, you're in control.

Setting up ChronoBooks

ChronoBooks is probably one of the easiest apps to setup, start and maintain. As you will see, it invovles three simple steps.

Step No. 1 – Locate ChronoBooks in the QBO App center and then choose Get App Now

Step No. 2 – Sign in to App center; select your Company/Firm name; and then choose the Client to Confirm and Authorize  

Step. No. 3 – Now that ChronoBooks is connected, select Companies from the ChronoBooks Navigation bar and then choose Enable Backup and Safeguard my Data. From this point forward, ChronoBooks will make a continual backup of your QBO data.

ChronoBooks is what we have been waiting for.

I started my Top 10 QBO App miniseries with ChronoBooks, so when connecting new apps we can be courageous knowing we have a "fail-safe" plan. That's because ChronoBooks allows us to always have a returning point. 

With this new found ability to restore, gone is my concern of importing into QBO importing or connecting to and playing with the live QBO data. This type of confidence is very important to me when doing clean-up or catch-up work, or working with other connecting technology.

ChronoBooks gives me peace of mind. And I think it will do the same for you.

Best of all, this peace of mind comes cheap. QBOA users and ProAdvisors can get ChronoBooks for $10 a month. End users can also subscribe for $30 a month.

For $10 a month, I can connect ChronoBooks for each of my clients. Then, when I'm doing some tricky work or app trials, if I dislike the results, I can turn back the hands of time and restore the file to just prior to what I was doing. It's like correcting backspace for your QBO file.

For more information about ChronoBooks, you can either visit their website or check out Murph's 'first look' article, which he wrote last July.