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Using QuickBooks™ to Run Your Floor Covering Business?

December 2012

If you are a flooring dealer using QuickBooks Pro™ software to run your business, you may want to also take a look at QFloors™. There are two ways QFloors can be incorporated:

OPTION #1: Use QFloors™ with QuickBooks™

Some people are huge QuickBooks™ fans. Back office employees and outside accountants are often already familiar with the software, and feel no inclination to learn a new system. However, QuickBooks was created as a generic tool for businesses, and so struggles in certain areas to meet the specific needs and requirements of the flooring industry.

So flooring professionals can get the best of both worlds, by using QFloors Basic™ software alongside QuickBooks Pro™. QFloors Basic flooring software provides industry-specific features you won’t enjoy if using QuickBooks Pro alone to run your floor covering business. QFloors Basic works in tandem with QuickBooks and provides helpful features like inventory management, customer invoicing, job costing, sales productivity (CRM) tools, work orders, commission/contract labor/sales tax reporting, some B2B connectivity, and more.

The benefit of this option is that it allows you to use what you already know (QuickBooks) for back office needs. Then QFloors Basic supplies helpful features customized for a flooring business that QuickBooks either doesn’t offer or cannot do well. Another benefit is that by using QFloors to augment QuickBooks, your numbers will be more accurate. When used for the flooring industry, QuickBooks’ accounting methods don’t result in accurate financial statements. Accurate and up-to-date financial statements are necessary for you to steer your floor covering business wisely into the future.

QFloors can handle information like invoices, products, orders, PO’s, job costing, etc., and then total the jobs and costs into a report. That report is transferred into QuickBooks, which means flooring business owners will get the proper numbers at the proper time.

You’ll also save a lot of time incorporating QFloors flooring software with QuickBooks Pro. Because QFloors is user-friendly, everyone in the company can use it to streamline operations.

The one down side to using QuickBooks to run a floor-covering store (or stores) is that certain hoops must be jumped through in order to adapt it appropriately to the unique specs of the flooring industry. We have been surprised that the majority of accountants and CPAs are unaware of the intricacies of the floor covering industry, and the adaptations to QuickBooks that those require. Our tax and accounting experts at QFloors would be happy to talk with you or your accountant at any time, to better explain what steps are required to ensure your accounting is accurate, your numbers are reliable, and you are paying the proper amount of taxes.

OPTION #2: Use QFloors™ instead of QuickBooks™

To really streamline operations and maximize efficiency and productivity, use QFloors software to manage your business, top to bottom. This option offers you and your employees tons of features geared specifically to the flooring industry, as well as extensive automatic B2B features like imported vendor bills and instant stock check (where you can click on a product in your invoice, connect to the supplier, and instantly see, in real time, exactly how much stock is available in their warehouse). Financial, business, customer, and inventory data are all integrated and shared throughout the system, saving time and errors. Flooring dealers can have confidence that their financial numbers and reports are accurate and that they are not paying too much or too early in taxes. It allows a carpet store, or any type of flooring business, to save significant time and money. Best of all, QFloors is so easy to learn, all employees can use it, and thus benefit from the time-savings. That frees them up to do more important things (like closing that sale, for instance.)

Here’s a quote from one former QuickBooks user, who is now a happy QFloors customer:

“You can’t run a flooring business with an accounting program. Stores that are using QuickBooks are probably losing $30-40,000 a year. I used QuickBooks for awhile and I was constantly catching areas where they were losing money. I had to put all kinds of hands control into the operation, until I found QFloors. Now I can look at my business and say, “Where am I this week? Can I advertise this week?” I couldn’t do that with QuickBooks. With QuickBooks, I would find we were in a hole and ask, “When did that happen?”, because there was money sitting on the shelf but not in our hands. It gives you a false sense of security. QuickBooks may work well to run your household budget, but it doesn’t work to try to run a flooring business.

For me the most valuable part of QFloors has been the job costing. For instance, we discovered through QFloors that each of our 2000 jobs in a year was costing us $50 in freight. When you add that up, it’s a significant amount of money. So we added that as a cost to each job, and earned $10,000, simply by including freight in pricing. Job costing allowed us to identify and cover costs that we weren’t picking up before.

To those who say they can’t afford QFloors: You’ll get money back in the first year, simply by having the controls. You can’t afford not to have it.”

Steve Elder | Gainesville Carpet & Floors | Gainesville, FL

Whether you are frustrated or very satisfied with QuickBooks, we believe QFloors can help make running your floor covering business easier and more profitable. Talk with us today about QuickBooks and QFloors. We’d love to give you a short, FREE, no-obligation demo of your different options.

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