What's at the Core of Your Business? (Part I)

Vendor Corner

Every business has a heart and soul. It’s what drives the mind of the owners and managers, and the motivation behind every employee. In the deepest sense, it is what’s at the core of every business.

Now, BQE is offering you a way to strengthen and automate the core of your business. Core by BQE is the next generation of business software designed for the heart, soul and mind of your business. With its cutting-edge design and “smart automation,” Core can help transform ordinary accounting and project management into extraordinary business intelligence. This will give you all the information you need and want in the way that makes the most sense for your business.

Core is not only the evolution of a series of BQE products, but an entirely new way of looking at business software. It features the best designs and features of all the BQE products, with almost unlimited preference-based customization within a totally new platform, configured for the way that businesses work today, including remote and mobile.

And just look at how totally gorgeous it is.

I could list all the attributes of Core, telling you about the dashboards, and time and expense tracking, the billing and reporting, but I’d rather just take you through a typical day in the life of a Core user. This view comes from the standpoint of a new contact, project and work assignments. 

In Part II, I’ll look at how we spent our time, what expenses we incurred and how we not only invoiced our new client, but also paid our associated costs.

What’s in a Name?

Have you ever had the hassle of conflicting “name” lists in your accounting software? An employee can’t be a customer, a customer can’t be a vendor, or a vendor can’t be an employee? You go around adding extra meaningless characters to names, turning “William” into “Bill” in a different list just to get around the limitations. Core uses a master list of names called “contacts,” which enables you to use each name however, wherever and whenever you need it.

A contact might be a prospect who turns into a sale, or a potential vendor who becomes a major supplier. Who knows, you might even turn your supplier into a customer and sell them a thing or two.

If you’ve guessed that I’m starting our Core journey by recording a new Contact, you’d be correct.    

It’s easy to set up new contacts in Core. By the way, you can call your contacts anything you want to call them – customers, clients, patrons, donor, etc. Core allows you to customize your terminology in a way that works best for your business. To set up your new Client:

1. From the main menu, select Contacts

2. Choose Clients

3. At the top right of the window, click the blue Create New button

4. On the Create Client screen, you’ll start with the Details, entering basic information that begins by selecting if the client is a company or an individual

5. Fill in the rest of the information, including Name, Address, and other contact information

6. Click on Billing Options, which allows you to set up things like invoice options, fee schedule and tax options

7. Click the blue Save button in the lower right of the window when you’re finished

You can add an unlimited number of contacts for any client, but I'm more interested in getting to our client's “project” right now.

The Work You Do

If I’m a QuickBooks Consultant, I’d probably consult on QuickBooks, so I’m going to need a billable item to create this project. But before we set up our project, let’s look at this billable item I called “QuickBooks Consultation.”

From the main menu, I selected Lists, and then chose Activity Items. When my list opens, you’ll see that I have a lot of different items available, some of which were set up by Core when I configured it (we’ll review aspects of that near the end) and some I added.

I can easily add new activities or items to this list, but for now I want to look more closely at my QuickBooks related item. Once I locate my item within the list, I click on the blue “Detail” link at the right-hand side of the row to open the item. 

You can assign all kinds of valuable information to this item, including the appropriate accounting, minimum billable hours, cost and billing rates, and taxability. Core allows you to assign activity items to groups, so that you can limit the use of a specific item to any group of contacts. You can also associate the activity item with custom fields and documents. 

You may have noticed I didn’t create cost or billing rates for this item. That’s because I’m going to associate my rates with the person performing the work. Not all my employees are billed out at the same rate.

If I wanted to get very specific with my items, I could have a QuickBooks sub-item for network troubleshooting and another for data corruption analysis. In those cases, I might want to attach a workflow or checklist that would outline the steps that should be used with each item.

Who works for whom?

Well, I have my client and my item setup. So what about someone to do the work on the project? It just so happens that I also set up Sam Smartguy as my trustee employee in much the same way my client was set up from Contacts, and then Employees. The Employee Details set up is shown below.

When I select Salary & Rates, a new window opens, which allows me to set billable rates along with the employee’s salary and cost information. 

Projects and more

Finally, I’m ready for my project, because my client has called in and asked that we install his new QuickBooks Enterprise 2018, convert his existing Company file and insure that every workstation connects properly in multi-user mode. 

You can create projects either from scratch or a project template that gets set up ahead of time. To create this new project (from scratch):

1. Select Projects from the Core main menu

2. Click the blue Create Project button, and select “From Scratch” on the drop-down menu

3. On the Create Project window, enter the appropriate information, including a Project ID (this is a short name or number for your project), along with the Project Name (which is really a description), and then associate the project with a Client. 

4. Continue to fill out the project information, including the assigned project manager and principal, as well as the originator. In the above example, you’ll see that I’m both the Manager and Originator, while my trustee employee, Sam Smartguy, is the principal on the project. 

5. I need to define the contract type as an hourly project, lump sum, etc., as well as the contract amount. If I’m using a specific fee schedule that allocates specific rates to specific personnel for specific items and specific customer(s), I must select that fee schedule as part of setting up the project.

I’ve decided to use the Core’s Allocation and Forecasting feature so that I can show it to you. Typically, this feature would be used for much more in-depth projects over an extended duration of time. In the following illustration, you can see that I allocated certain tasks for Sam Smartguy and me: 

This is like a miniature budget” for a task or set of activities. While Core allows you to configure budgets, a budget would typically be associated with a much larger project or a company-specific segment of operations. This allocation and forecasting feature helps to further define what’s expected for specific work in terms of revenues, costs and who’s doing what.

I also created a “To-Do” entry associated with my Project. This feature is good for a lot of things, but in this case, I used it to assign the work to Sam Smartguy (shown below):

One of the features I like about the “To-Do” entries is that they permit tracking of the associated activity by allowing either the creator or the assigned individual to enter the “% complete” as the work progresses. Of course, all your “To-Do” entries appear on your dashboard, meaning you never loose track of the work being accomplished.

Tracking the Work

A couple of days goes by and Sam Smartguy has visited the client twice. He has posted both time and expense entries against the project.

From the main Core menu, select Time & Expenses, then select Time Entries. In the illustration below, you will see he posted three time entries for this project on the Day 1, and two time entries on Day 2. A total of 10 hours was worked on various QuickBooks consulting tasks.

He also made two trips that will be invoiced to the client, for which he will be reimbursed since he used his own vehicle. Those trips appear in the Expense Entry window (shown below).

When we configured this Trip expense item, we set the cost as $20 for reimbursement to our employee and a billable rate of $40 to the client. From this one set of entries, we can not only bill the client, but also create a payment to Sam for his expense reimbursement.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, be aware that Core allows you to configure a workflow within the product to allow for review and approval of both time and expenses in a manner consistent with your internal work structure.

The illustration below shows the review and final approval of these project associated costs and billable items:

This is a simple but highly informative workflow that allows a manager to see all of the associated activities of his personnel for any given time frame, customer or work group. 

Speaking of tracking the work, Core offers a variety of special dashboards that will help keep you on track when it comes to project management. Now our little QuickBooks job is so simple that it doesn’t make much sense to look at it from a dashboard perspective, so let me open up a Core sample file and show you the kind of sophistication you can expect from this solution.

This is one example of how Core can display the key performance measures to illustrate if one of your projects is on track from not only a revenue versus cost standpoint, but from a budgetary and overall company resource standing. 

Data metrics like these means you can say goodbye to all those Excel spreadsheets you have an associate prepare after all the accounting data has been verified. With Core, you will get clear, real-time information of where each project stands, how much it has generated, and what it has cost from both a time and expense standpoint.

With all your projects available right before your eyes, you’ll be confident you’re on top of every aspect of the work and your business.

In Part II, we’ll look at the “rest of the story,” as famed newsman Paul Harvey once said. With the project completed, we’ll look at closing it out, invoicing the client, paying the associated expenses and wrapping things up. 

We’ll also take a look as some of the additional features, including QuickBooks integration Core offers.

So be sure to check out Part II. In the mean time, if you want to see Core in action, check out its website to schedule a demonstration or try it free for 15-days.