Why Would You Track Financials in Excel – A Rhetorical Question
February 16, 2021
by Shannon Simmons

A lot of business owners start out doing their books in Excel. It’s something they know, and they’re not ready to pay for a service like QuickBooks Online or to pay a bookkeeper.

In Excel, you can sort columns and rows, set up formulas to add up transactions, color code rows and fields based on type of transaction, even make notes right in the fields.

And sure, there’s probably a lot more you can do in Excel, but it has its limitations. Steep limitations.

That’s why we encourage business owners to get out of Excel and into QuickBooks Online as soon as possible. And then, once it’s out of the virtual box, it’s important to customize its setup to meet your business’s unique needs–something Excel couldn’t do if it wanted.

When done right, QBO gives you everything you need every month, with just a few clicks of the keyboard.

What else can QBO do that will make you want to kick Excel to the curb?

Create Recurring Payments

One of the best ways to improve your revenue is to create a system where clients pay for a service month after month. This makes sense in a traditional gym, with monthly membership fees. But so many other businesses in the health and wellness field can go this route too–and make the payments automatic for the consumer. (We have plenty of thoughts on how to do this. Let’s chat!)

Monitor Your Expenses

You may not need more revenue in your business; you may need to get a better handle on your expenses instead. It’s really easy to do this in QBO, and to do it on a monthly basis, because you’re categorizing transactions and reviewing your balance sheet and profit and loss statement regularly. If you wait until the end of the year to clean up your books and review where all the money went, chances are you won’t catch that subscription you should have canceled or those ads that aren’t really paying off. In the end, you’ll spend a lot more than you needed to!

Identify Tax Write-Offs

You know a lot of the standard write-offs but with QBO’s ability to categorize, it’s so much easier to write off certain expenses–and minimize your tax burden. It’s really easy to identify often-forgotten tax write-offs like bank charges, health insurance premiums, equipment costs, internet and phone expenses, and more because they’re right there in your books.

Everything in One Place–Electronically

Have you ever tried to build a P&L in Excel? Manually? (Whatever did we do before computers!?) Without something like QBO, you’re hunting for receipts and financials, you’re looking in one place for recurring transactions and another place for one-off sales. It’s a lot, and trust us when we say we’ve seen it all. With QBO, you have a one-stop shop for all things business financials. And it will change your life.

So when we ask, “Why would you track your financials in Excel?” we’re asking in jest. We don’t think you should if you want to have a thriving and profitable business.

Are you ready to get off Excel and onto QBO? Let’s chat!