ManagePLUS Goldâ„¢ lets QuickBooks Users Allocate Overhead Expense with Drag-and-Drop Ease…and Spreadsheet Accuracy

The new release of ManagePLUS Goldâ„¢ for QuickBooks, from Flagship Technologies, Inc. (www.goflagship.com) lets users allocate expense from cost- and support-center classes and accounts to profit center classes, using a visual drag-and-drop approach.

Many businesses and nonprofit organizations use the classes feature of QuickBooks to track revenue and expense for the departments or activities of the organization—its cost centers, support centers, and profit centers, such as Office and Administration, Packing & Shipping, or Manufacturing. They set up classes to represent these, and apply those classes when entering transactions to identify income and expense with specific departments or activities.

This is all part of a cost accounting technique known as activity-based costing (ABC), the goal of which is to determine whether each income-producing area of the business—each profit center—is profitable. To get this done, the “overhead” expense accumulated for the organization’s cost centers must be allocated among profit centers on some reasonable basis.

Using QuickBooks by itself, allocation is anything but simple. It requires making journal entries or using “zero-dollar checks”, and there’s no way to automate the calculations involved. In fact, most users export transaction totals from QuickBooks to a spreadsheet, do the allocation calculations there, then manually enter the results as journal entries in QuickBooks. The entire process is difficult and offers plenty of opportunities for making errors.

ManagePLUS Gold overcomes all of these problems. With a couple mouse clicks, it retrieves transactions from QuickBooks and totals the amounts available for allocation from each class to other classes. Users then build allocation formulas visually by dragging a class onto the other classes to which it will be allocated. (The allocation formulas can be re-used in subsequent accounting periods, so the job is even faster and easier the next time.)

Because accuracy is just as important as ease of use, ManagePLUS Gold supports allocation based on “management quantities” the user has associated with individual classes, as well as on a percentage basis. Management quantities can be any physical or dollar amount related to the activity–things like labor hours, tons/gallons/bushels produced, miles driven, dollars of direct expense, etc. The result is spreadsheet-like allocation capability but without building spreadsheet formulas, exporting accounting data, or making journal entries.

Once allocations have been built, with a couple more mouse clicks the user can prepare a profit and loss report for any class, showing direct revenue and expense as well as the amounts that have been allocated to it.

But that’s not all. The new version 3.1 of ManagePLUS Gold adds the ability to send allocation transactions to QuickBooks, with a single click of the mouse. So now users can choose whether to get class profitability reports in ManagePLUS Gold or in QuickBooks, and have the option of doing anything with the allocation journal entries that they can do with other QuickBooks transactions—create customized reports, export them, include them in backups, etc.

Allocation capabilities are the “tip of the iceberg” with respect to ManagePLUS Gold’s features. Here’s a few of the other things it does:

– Lets users associate “extra” data with accounts and classes, and manages that data separately for each accounting period.

– Uses the “extra” data to automatically add management information and per-unit statistics to reports—things like average cost per unit of sales or per unit of production for each class.

– Provides advanced quantity handling and storage in QuickBooks transactions by supporting entry of two quantities per transaction, such as the weight and count of items bought or sold.

– Provides specialized reporting capabilities for the two-quantities feature, including automatic statistics like weight per each, count per weight, cost per weight (pound/ton/etc.), and cost per each.

– Supports advanced, automatic unit of measure labeling on reports.

ManagePLUS Gold sells for $149 per single-user license and is compatible with Microsoft Windows versions of the Pro, Premier, and Enterprise editions of QuickBooks, 2004 and later, including U.S., UK, and Canadian releases. A 30-day free trial is available to download from the product’s Web page: http://www.goflagshipcom/products/mphome.htm.

Via EPR Network
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ManagePLUS Goldâ„¢ for QuickBooks Supports Farm and Ranch Enterprise Accounting

QuickBooks accounting software is popular with farmers and ranchers because it offers a lot of power and flexibility, while being easy to use and having wide support among CPAs, tax preparers, extension educators, and other professionals.

The classes feature of QuickBooks is popular in agriculture too, because it allows tagging income and expense transactions as belonging to specific departments or enterprises within the farm or ranch business: fertilizer for the Corn class, mineral supplement for the Beef Cow class, combine fuel for the Harvest Services class, feed mill repairs for the Feed Processing class, and so on–often referred to as cost centers and profit centers. Using classes in this way is part of a cost accounting technique known as activity-based costing (ABC), the main goal of which is to isolate the income and expenses associated with major activities of the business, to determine whether each income-producing activity—each profit center—is profitable.

For ABC to yield useful management information, the expenses accumulated for cost centers (often referred to as “overhead”) must be allocated among profit centers on some reasonable basis. For example, expenses of the Harvest Services class would be allocated among the profit center classes in which Harvest Services get used: the farm’s crops, like Corn, Soybeans, and Wheat.

Using QuickBooks by itself, allocating expense to several classes is anything but simple. It requires making journal entries or using “zero-dollar checks”, and there’s no way to automate the calculations involved. In fact, most users export transaction totals from QuickBooks to a spreadsheet, do the allocation calculations there, then manually enter the results as journal entries in QuickBooks. The entire process is difficult and offers lots of opportunities for making errors.

ManagePLUS Gold, from Flagship Technologies, Inc. (www.goflagship.com) overcomes all of these problems. With a couple mouse clicks, it retrieves transactions from QuickBooks and totals the amounts available for allocation from each class to other classes. Users then build allocation formulas visually by dragging a class onto the other classes to which it will be allocated. (The allocation formulas can be re-used in subsequent accounting periods, so the job is even faster and easier the next time.)

Once allocations have been built, with a couple more mouse clicks the user can prepare a profit and loss report for any class, showing direct revenue and expense as well as allocated amounts. For example, a profit and loss report for the Corn class would include the amounts allocated to it from Harvest Services and from other cost centers.

But that’s not all. The new version 3.1 of ManagePLUS Gold adds the ability to send allocation transactions to QuickBooks with a single click of the mouse. So now users can choose whether to get class profitability reports in ManagePLUS Gold or in QuickBooks, and have the option of doing anything with the allocation journal entries that they can do with other QuickBooks transactions—create customized reports, export them, include them in backups, etc.

Allocation capabilities are the “tip of the iceberg” concerning ManagePLUS Gold features that are used in farm and ranch businesses. Here are some of the other things it does:

    – Provides advanced quantity handling for QuickBooks transactions, by supporting entry of two quantities per transaction, such as the weight and count of livestock bought or sold.

    – Provides specialized reporting capabilities for the two-quantities feature, including automatic statistics like average weight per head, average price per pound, average price per head, and so on.

    – Supports advanced, automatic unit of measure labeling on reports.

    – Lets users associate “extra” data with accounts and classes, such as crop acreage, bushels harvested, or the number of head of livestock involved, and manages that data separately for each accounting period.

    -Uses this “extra” data to automatically add management information and per-unit statistics to reports—things like average herbicide and fertilizer cost per acre, average feed cost per head of livestock, and other per-unit management factors.

ManagePLUS Gold for QuickBooks sells for $149 per single-user license and is compatible with Microsoft Windows versions of the Pro, Premier, and Enterprise editions of QuickBooks, 2004 and later, including U.S., UK, and Canadian releases.

Via EPR Network
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FormCalc Does Spreadsheet-like Calculations on QuickBooks Invoices, Estimates, Purchase Orders and More

For almost as long as QuickBooks has been on the market, QuickBooks users have wanted for the ability to have across-column calculations and column totals on Invoices, Estimates, Purchase Orders and other forms. FormCalc for QuickBooks, from Flagship Technologies, Inc. (www.goflagship.com), is now available to fill that need.

FormCalc lets users set up calculations which add, subtract, multiply, or divide numbers in two columns and put the result in a third column; or do math on two columns and multiply the result by another numeric value before writing it to a third column; or display a count of unique items in a column, in the Description field of any line; or provide column subtotals or totals.

The user controls where column subtotals and totals appear by identifying certain QuickBooks Items as “trigger items”. When FormCalc encounters a line containing a trigger item, it puts the column subtotal or total on that line.

Users can define any number of calculations to apply to various columns on a form, and apply all of them at once by pressing a hotkey. Also, users can define as many as ten sets of calculations. So if different calculations are needed on Invoices and on Purchase Orders, a separate set of calculations can be defined for each.

Maybe the most unique thing about FormCalc is that it works directly on the QuickBooks form, in real time, so users immediately get to see the results of calculations before saving or printing the form. There’s no need for a separate step of exporting the form’s data to do calculations outside of QuickBooks, then re-importing the data again.

What kinds of things are FormCalc users doing with it? They are calculating per-item and total shipping weights for Invoices, totaling estimated labor requirements on job Estimates, calculating board feet for lumber pricing on Invoices, showing prices in two different currencies, totaling invoiced alcohol sales quantities to meet requirements for liquor taxation record keeping, totaling the number of shirts of each size (S, M, L, XL) on an Invoice, and much more.

FormCalc for QuickBooks is priced at $99 for a single-user license, with lower per-license pricing for multi-user licenses. FormCalc is compatible with Microsoft Windows versions of all QuickBooks editions (Simple Start, Basic, Pro, Premier, Enterprise, etc.), and also with all international editions (U.S., UK, Canadian, and Australian).

Via EPR Network
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