Top 10 reasons graphic designers and artists should use Quickbooks
Vol. 086
Top 10 reasons why graphic designers and artists should use Quickbooks
How graphic designers and artists can use Quickbooks for financial organization, invoicing, client and contractor hub, manage W9s, file with IRS, work with a CPA and so much more.
A quick bite:
How does saving days worth of time and $100’s or even $1,000’s of dollars sound? Quickbooks can help you make more money and take your creative business to the next level! If you’re like I was: organizing your finances with Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or Apple Numbers, it’s time to elevate your approach and save yourself DAYS worth of time…
Continue reading below…
Quickbooks is an accounting and financial software that businesses large and small use to manage their company income and expenses.
If you’re trying to take your creative business to the next level, it’s time to stop organizing your finances with Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or Apple Numbers, and upgrade to Quickbooks.
Below are the the top 10 reasons why graphic designers and artists should use Quickbooks in their creative businesses:
Invoice with ease
Less likely to be audited by IRS
Saves you days worth of time
Thorough business reporting
Helps organize your business
Financial transparency
Quickbooks grows with your businesses
Client and contractor hub
Easy access for CPAs and bookkeepers
Relatively inexpensive
1) Invoice with ease (and automated invoice followup reminders)
How do you create an invoice for graphic design? It’s as easy as a few clicks using the Quickbooks invoice button.
Gone are the days of excel sheets with "invoice status" columns, annoying followup emails, lost invoices, and chasing down your clients for payment. With the click of a few buttons, you can easily add the details of a new client, select your service/amount/hours, and send an invoice over to them with beautiful pre-designed invoice, pre-written messages, and auto-followups that can be sent with whatever frequency you'd like!
Pro of using Quickbooks: You no longer need to carry the burden of invoice followup, double checking who paid you and when, and annoying invoice adjustments.
2) Less likely to be audited by IRS
Let's be real, the IRS is scary and intimidating. And, if you're here, you're likely a graphic designer, artist, or creative of some sort — we aren't necessarily know for being organized and analytical.
Even if you accidentally mess up filing your taxes, you can be audited.
Being audited by the IRS not only has potential repercussions for your business status with the Better Business Bureau, but it is incredibly time consuming, frustrating, and can be incredibly expensive.
What's worse than straight up losing money? Straight up paying money to the IRS for an accident.
Pro of using Quickbooks: once you get the basics down, Quickbooks is pretty fool-proof. The peace of mind in knowing that your income, expenses and other finances are being clearly communicated and broken down for the IRS in a "professional" well worth it!
3) Saves you days worth of time every single year
Time is money when you have your own graphic design business. A smart business owner knows that they should focus on what they're great at, and delegate as many tasks as possible.
Prior to using quickbooks I was using Excel to track my finances. I would copy-paste my bank statements into excel, setup equations, and calculate my income and expenses "the old fashioned way." It was miserable. Worst of all, if you do this, you likely have to reconcile your bank statements manually at least once per quarter, which was taking me about 6hrs. That's 6hrs of unreliable math equations with tons of room for human error.
Pro of using Quickbooks: while yes, you do have to pay for the service, it will save you days worth of time, which enable you to either enjoy your life, or focus on fun, creative work instead of boring and miserable financial excel sheets.
4) Thorough business reporting
Instantly break down your finances in every way that you could want.
Quickbooks has a reports feature that allows you to breakdown your finances in just about every way you could imagine. By year, by month, by client, by service, profit, loss, expenses, categories — you name it, Quickbooks has the ability to instantly break down the numbers.
Access to this reporting allows you to truly watch, plan and predict your business numbers, growth and success!
Pro of using Quickbooks: thorough reporting allows you to truly understand what's happening in your graphic design business. The better your understand what's happening, the better you can plan and forecast, the more money you can make and the less you can work.
5) Helps organize your business (financial, client, contractor, service offerings, and more!)
If you're anything like me, financial organization doesn't necessary come naturally.
Having Quickbooks synched up with all of your relevant credit and debit cards, connected to your bank, and constantly evolving software updates allows for best-in-class organization of your graphic design business' finances.
Pro of using Quickbooks: you don't have to be inherently organized in order to have financial clarity and organization — pay Quickbooks to do it for you!
6) Financial transparency: understand where your money is truly coming from
As your graphic design and creative business evolves, you're like to acquire additional revenue streams.
With growth comes a bit of complexity, and you'll want to have visibility on what services are bringing in the most money so you can continue to invest your energy in the right places!
Common incomes streams for graphic designers might be logo design/branding, traditional graphic design, painting murals, and some print/product sales. Quickbooks allows you to easily see how much money is coming in from which of these services. Knowing this information helps you know how to best prioritize your time.
Pro of using Quickbooks: Knowing how much money each revenue stream of your business actually brings in allows you to know where to best spend your time.
7) Quickbooks grows with your business
A misconception that I had was that Quickbooks is for "big businesses." Not true! Quickbooks is for all businesses. It has all of the tools and reporting needed for small businesses and enterprise-level offerings for large corporations.
Pro of using Quickbooks: as your business begins to grow, change and evolve in ways that you never anticipated (I personally never planned to hire contractors, let alone full time employees!) Quickbooks can easily adapt and scale with you. And, thankfully, the program is so robust that it's unlikely that you'll ever really need to purchase the "premium" version unless you're to the point that you have 20+ employees.
8) Client and contractor hub
Having the contact details of your clients easily accessible and knowing how much they've paid you (and/or how much they owe you) is very important information to have at your fingertips.
As you begin to hire contractors, Quickbooks makes it incredibly easy to collect information for 1099s as well as send out W9s.
Pro of using Quickbooks: Not only does Quickbooks have your finances organized, but this program also organizes, synthesizes and consolidates all of the people/businesses with whom your finances are most closely tied.
9) Easy access for CPAs and bookkeepers
Quickbooks is one of the most commonly used financial and accounting programs for CPA's (Certified Public Accountant) and Bookkeepers.
Hiring a CPA was the first contractor that I ever hired to help my business, and to this day (aside from Adobe Creative Cloud) a CPA is only other expense in my business I'd never stop paying.
CPA's help you organize your finances, properly structure your business, file forms with the IRS, and plan for and pay your taxes. Quickbooks has an "accountant" portal where you can give them access to all the things they need, and none of the things they don't. Because CPAs themselves use Quickbooks on a regular basis, Quickbooks is one of the best accounting software you can use while easily integrating any CPA.
I personally don't yet have a bookkeeper (someone who regularly goes through) and reconciles the credits and debits of your business (simply, someone who's regularly checking to ensure all is going smoothly financially), but Quickbooks is easy to access and use for them as well.
Pro of using Quickbooks: Using the main accounting software that financial professionals use will make hiring support far more easy and far less expensive.
10) Relatively inexpensive
Whether or not something is expensive or inexpensive is a highly subjective topic. However, my payment for Quickbooks services is ~$250/year (+ additional processing fees for certain payments). When considering that using Quickbooks saves me days of time, allowing me to do MORE creative work and LESS financial organization in Excel allows me to actually make more money. So yes, Quickbooks does cost you money, but it will save you so much time that you'll have more time to make that money back through doing the graphic design or creative work you love.
Pro of using Quickbooks: I strongly feel that the expense of Quickbooks if FAR outweighed by how much time you save by using this program.
If you’re on the fence, they currently have a 30 day trail for FREE for Quickbooks Online — check it out!
*For reference, I use the Quickbooks Online Simple Start plan which, I am billed for annually at $270 (That’s only $22.50 / month!, and it saves me DAYS of work every year!)
I hope this helps you save as much time and money as it did for me.
Cheers,
Adam
