Guide to Getting the Most Out of QuickBooks

Use the right QuickBooks for your business

QuickBooks has product flavors that are tailored for specific businesses, like construction, nonprofit, online — or even enterprise-size businesses.

I recommend: The QuickBooks Financial Software page helps you to choose and compare the flavor of QuickBooks that is right for your business.

Learn from other QuickBooks users

QuickBooks is extremely flexible but everybody's business needs are unique. If you need to adapt QuickBooks to your specific situation, you may find that one of the millions of QuickBooks users may have already solved your problem.

I recommend: Intuit provides an online community that is monitored by Intuit employees and where experienced users gather to exchange advice. Yahoo has a list of long-running online communities that are moderated by experienced QuickBooks users, and contains searchable databases of previously given answers. Or visit For the Love of Business which is run by QuickBooks experts.

Expand your QuickBooks' capability

Need to pay your employees without the hassle of forms? Want to take credit cards without paying for an expensive processing terminal? QuickBooks has a variety of services that integrate with their products.

I recommend: Intuit has over a dozen services, ranging from Customer Manager, Merchant Services and Online Banking, to name a few.

Go beyond QuickBooks

QuickBooks cannot provide a solution for every individual business need, so it has provided a method for third-party developers to plug their products directly into QuickBooks.

I recommend: Visit the Intuit Solutions Marketplace for advanced inventory management, CRM, Billing, custom integration and reporting, among many, many others.