I have been working on switching everything in the company over to Quick Books. It scares me how easy it has been, like im doing something really wrong cause it shouldn't be this simple. Cause of that I find myself triple checking everything actively trying to confuse myself.
Ya see, the company has been open and running since 1965- thats over 45 years, the first secretary was my grandmother. Everything was on notebooks and in pencil. We still have all of those handwritten spreadsheets and customer information. Big changes happened when the word processor came out. My grandmother had one in the office but found herself unwilling to become tech sauvy. The word processor was used for unimportant things like signs for the office saying "Employees Only", and covers for binders of loose paper.
When the fax machine became necessary and the word processor more prevalent my mother took over and my grandmother was only part time. My mother learned the processor and fax machine and my granmother was in charge of spreadsheets. They were a team. My grandmother was getting older and older and "retired".
Soon the computer was brought to the office. Programs like Microsoft Works, and Publishing. The era of the computerized spreadsheet happened and the ability to make envelopes with the printer. My mother handled all of that, she created templates and had developed her own system to keep records and create reports and spreadsheets.
My mother has only a HS Diploma and bc of her age she was never very tech sauvy. The system she created contained her blood sweat and tears. After my brother and I became more of a challenge she decided to stay home and hire a secretary. She always did the end of the year taxes but the secretary was in charge of everything else and getting the info for her to do the taxes. We had quite a few secretaries over the years, all of them ranging in age experience and intelligience.
Joann was our first and probably the best despite her being almost my granmothers age. She paid attention and was smart and loyal. After a few years though she decided to join my grandma in retirement. Then came the flirt that my mom fired because she thought she and my dad were getting too close (fast forward 8 years and thats laughable now), then there was the embezzler with a gambling problem and a few other short timers sprinkled about.
I believe it was Crystal, who brought us into the 20th century with a program called Quick Books. The problem though, she and my mother butted heads about it. Switching to Quick Books would mean that the formula my mother worked so hard on would go out the window, that a secretary whom they barely know would be creating her own system on software my mom didn't know how to use. What if Crystal left? Then no one would know how to run anything- was the big fear (and moms hurt pride). So Crystal was given limited freedom with QB. It was pretty much only to make duplicate invoices and use as an address book. Non of the record keeping would be used and we would still gather the entire month of invoices and put them in one by one on a spreadsheet to calculate the Sales Tax Due and everything else.
Crystal did leave, my mother never "learned" how to run QBs.
Then I came home and my parents wanted me to run the office because my mother wanted to be a grandma. My mother always hated working for the shop. My mother can be intolerable to work beside and my dad was totally supportive of her leaving. I was doing things my mothers way as I was trained to and using QBs to pull customer addresses and rebill Delinquent Accounts. I remember asking my parents, "Why dont we fully implement QB?"...The answers I got were wishy washy, a combination of fear of technology, lack of trust, confusion...Sort of like when you wanna switch banks. It can be hard to know where to draw the line. When does the last check go out of this account and the first come out of the new account?
Quick Books was brushed off yet again. It wasn't until the company about had a meltdown with me totally overwhelmed and failing to complete necessary tasks that I was listened to.
Ya see, despite the economy falling apart, Nebraska has been fairly unscathed. We definitly have bled out in certain areas but other areas are doing quite well. We have expanded the shop and I maintain that "If you can see through it we can fabricate, install, replace and repair it." with the additional Auto Body Shop thrown into the mix. My mother was involved with the body shop but not when it went into full swing. Nor was she around when the storefront end exploded.
To summarize, the workload people delusionally thought I was doing was the workload my mother did 5 years ago when in reality I was doing more than 3x that full days workload (or atleast supose to do/needed to do). Sheer volume alone doubled and then throwing in an entirely different seperate business. It was overwheleming and nearly impossible. If I was caught up in one area I was dangerously behind in another. I was working in the evening after Remi was asleep to barely keep my nose above water.
Finally when I was over a week behind in billable accounts and bills were do and I was sitting on over $70,000 dollars in recievables that needed to be turned into cash but wern't. I threw my hands up in the air and yelled "THIS ISN"T WORKING! Its too much, I need help."...
Then they sat and listened to me. I told them I wanted to fully switch over to quickbooks that doing all this individual manual entering was retarded, time consuming and a waste of my efforts. A single invoice needed to be pulled out for more than 4 reports. Log it, bill it, cost it, get the tax off it, file it. With QB, I just enter it, Sales Tax is automated, the billing just prints itself and I just stuff it in the envelope and I still file the original invoice but I have a perma copy on the computer. My dad wants to know the sales for the week I just click reports, he wants to know how much he chraged John Bob on that shower door 3 years ago, I just click on John Bob Job history instead of going to the attick and finding the box of 2009 and searching through 12 months of invoices.
Quick Books has taken a huge weight off my shoulders and made running the office a lot more manageable. It being February I just paid January's sales tax. It was too easy. I wasted some time going over it and over it and over it cause i was amazed, there it was, a spread sheet that I didnt have to create appeared before my eyes reflecting every taxable job for the month of January. FILE, PRINT, CLOSE done.
I am enrolled in a a quickbooks class that will be happening March 1st and 8th, QB I and QB II. After those, I will be a Quick Books Master Mind. So far though, I have been doing everything through QB, figureing it out on my own and am quite surprised how simple it really is. I can't wait for the class, I wonder what they will teach me. I wonder what even more awesome things QB can do that I dont even know about.
My dad is going to take QBI with me, he is still freaked out that if I were to fall off the face of the earth he would be left in the office jabbing at the screen and slapping the monitor wondering how to get information out of it.
This is a good example of a needless ritual being performed for years, simply because it's "the way things are done". Here's another:
Recently, my credit union got rid of deposit slips. They realized that when people brought a bunch of checks with a deposit slip to the teller, the teller was just re-entering all the information on the deposit slip into the computer. To avoid mistakes in the deposit slip, the teller would enter the information directly off the checks. So the deposit slip was just a needless chore that bank customers had to engage in, that served no useful purpose. Now, when I have a stack of checks to deposit, I just hand them to the teller, and tell her how much cash I want. Much better.