What's your REI accounting system?

[Alison Michel]

Hi again (lots of questions this morning!)

I'd love to hear some folks' set-ups for their accounting and finance management. How do you organize your documents? What software do you use? What do you hire someone else to do and what do you do yourself?

Thanks!

Alison

[Steve L.]

We use QuickBooks Online and heavily utilize classes. Hundreds of them. We also use a feature unique to QuickBooks Online called Businesses. So you can track different businesses and classes.

The easiest practical example of how this works. Say you own 10 subways.

You setup your accounts: Lettuce, Meat, Salaries, Rent

QuickBooks would allow you to see how much you are spending on Lettuce across all companies or how much you are spending at a specific business. P&L or P&L by Business.

Now let's say certain locations do catering. You would probably setup a class for Catering. You can then pull a P&L by class that shows just catering P&L items for a specific Business.

It is complex to setup, but works pretty good for me.