In this section: 

1. Introduction

2. A Few Key Tips from our VP of Customer Success!

3. Advice From the Pros

4. Advice From the QuickBooks Expert

Introduction

Many people think that the accounting department is resistant to change, but that’s a myth. A stereotype.

Denise Satterfield is the Accounting Manager for The Promotions Department, she was a controller at a bank for nine years and spent her entire career in finance, when we interviewed her about her experience moving to commonsku, the first words she said, “I love new systems!” Denise shared.

Accounting isn’t a roadblock, they simply want to ensure a smooth transition as possible and that’s what this guide is all about: insight into how others made the shift and how you can too. 

Our objective, as always, is to make your life and your workflow easier, simpler, and more efficient so that you can focus on the priorities of growing your business. This brief guide is in three easy parts:

1. A how-to from commonsku on the four key steps that will help you begin your transition.

2. A few testimonies from industry leaders in finance who successfully made the switch.

3. Insight from a Quickbooks expert to help you prepare for the accounting transition (approximately 70% of commonsku customers use QuickBooks Online, including three of the largest commonsku customers).

4. The technical details to make the transition, step-by-step.

But first, before you begin, hear a word of encouragement from two large distributors who made the switch, first, from Mark Freed, the Executive Chairman at Genumark, the largest Canadian-owned distributor of corporate branded merchandise and a top 40 distributor (one of the largest in North America). Mark was retiring and handing over the CEO reins to Mitch Freed, so we asked Mark, “Like many of us looking back at our business journey, there are probably things you would do differently, what would you encourage entrepreneurs NOT to do?”

Mark’s encouragement? Don’t delay.

“Make your decision and then hit go. I think the times when we got in trouble is when we knew what we were supposed to do and we just let it sit. Whether that was a process [change], or whether it was personnel, or whether it was a great client fit. Do your work. Figure it out. And move on. Because it’s a fast-paced world out there, and you gotta really keep it going.”

And our second word of encouragement comes from Denise Satterfield:

“Be ready to change. Be open to changing your thought process and how you want to deal with certain things. You’re obviously overthinking if you’re worried about this, there’s so much the system does, and it’s so visual, and you can keep track of so many things. I’m not on the sales side, but I can see what the system’s capable of and how many underutilized much of the system so …. dive in and see what you can do with it, you’ll be amazed!”

So, let’s begin!

A Few Key Tips from our VP of Customer Success

Aaron Kucherawy, our Vice President of Success has guided countless distributors through this transition and he has a few steps he suggests for everyone, here’s his advice in a nutshell, “When transitioning from your old accounting system to QB, there are a few essentials that we have found are important to do,”:

• Set your transition days and start day, an example:

⚬ Tell your team, “On Monday, [enter your completion date here] we will be fully functional with commonsku!”

⚬ Tell your team: “Starting on Monday, [enter your start-transition date here], all new orders will go in the new system.”

⚬ Tell your team, “The final transition day (for accounting) will be on the last day of the month of [enter your date here].”

• Let your orders taper off in your old system (any new orders go into commonsku).

• Recreate your GL accounts in Quickbooks (more on that from our QuickBooks expert below).

• Export clients and vendors from your old system and import your clients and vendors into Quickbooks.

• Move account balances over at the end of the first month. At the end of your cut-off day, take your open assets, liabilities, open COGS (cost of goods sold), and open receivables and move those over at the end of your first month going live.

Advice From the Pros

We asked a few of the industry’s leading CFOs and finance thinkers to share their best tips for converting from their old system to commonsku, and we’ve broken down their tips here!

Chuck McGrothers, CFO at Leaderpromos advises you to do three things:

1. To help make sure everyone has a voice in the transition and to keep the momentum going, create a project team that covers each of your disciplines. Select representatives from your major departments (sales, marketing, production, accounting) but keep the number of participants to a minimum.

2. Identify and document all process changes.

3. Test the process: Push the opportunity/order/ invoice all the way through to see what you do/do not get on the accounting side. This will reduce the amount of clean-up needed on the back end.

Denise Satterfield, Accounting Manager at The Promotions Department advised these tips from her experience:

1. Make sure everyone knows how to use commonsku.

2. Test drive the system so you can learn through trial and error: Spend more time setting up orders, invoicing, running reports, setting up commissions, and exporting reports.

3. Don’t transfer everything from your old system! We decided not to transfer everything over because we had a lot of junk in the old system.

4. Refine your customer list. I exported customer details from our old platform for all of the sales reps, and I asked them to go through it and weed out dead accounts and old accounts, and especially duplicate accounts.

5. Maybe this is unique to us, but the sales staff wanted to import historical data from previous years, but we only wanted the three previous years 10 (2016-2018). So we created a little hack by creating just one dummy invoice for the sales for each client for each year to get those details. It worked.

Jon Zientek is the CFO at madetoorder, inc. and they made the transition to commonsku from Profitmaker and Smartbooks.

“Moving into Quickbooks is not that difficult of a deal,” Jon said, and he was careful to point out a few keys that really helped their team expedite the process by keeping it simple:

1. The first and primary key to remember is: Start clean and keep it clean! We were on our old system for so long that there was a lot of garbage in that data, don’t bring that bad data into your new system!

2. The only thing we moved into the new system were orders that were in production. But any completed orders or invoices did not get moved to QuickBooks.

3. Be careful about not moving vendor contacts, in fact, re-enter your vendor contacts and your customer records from scratch.

4. Only transition active vendors and active customers. “Because of the nature of our industry, you’ll likely run into issues only with work in progress and that’s because the cost of goods sold and revenue is a moving target. Just be aware of it going in.”

Advice From the QuickBooks Expert

For many who are making a platform change -particularly an accounting platform change- all the worrying and fretting about the change often weighs heavier than the change itself. Many commonsku customers, after making the switch to commonsku+QuickBooks, respond “I wish I would have done this sooner.”

So, we wanted to know, from a QuickBooks expert, how to help eliminate our fears and make the conversion process easy. We interviewed Diane Shoultz, a National Account Manager with Mendelson Consulting, an accounting technology specialist firm and premier Intuit (QuickBooks) partner. (commonsku users now receive an exclusive 30% discount off of a QuickBooks Online subscription for the first year).

Diane, with her incredible energy and optimism, answered all our questions and made it a breeze to talk through. Here are the essential tips she shared to make the process easier. 

What’s the most important tool in our toolbelt when it comes to an accounting systems change?

I’m gonna say something a little unconventional: mindset. I say ‘mindset’ because when people are converting over, sometimes they’re converting over and their mindset is, “If it’s not broke, why am I trying to fix it?. Everything’s working great. This doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would I do this? Oh, and by the way, I’m also very busy running this business. So I don’t really have the time to do all of this!”

You’ve got to think: why am I making this change? Some folks are coming over because their current system is broke. And so now, on top of being stressed out and overwhelmed, they’ve got to learn something new too. But for some people, their system’s not broke but rather, they are moving over for efficiency, they know “I will be more efficient if I do this change.”

That’s why I say mindset is the first and most important because the changes that typically help you the most are probably the most uncomfortable as well. You know what your goal is, you know what you’ve got to do. Yes,it was broken. But now you have a new opportunity to save time and money. And initially, the process will be a little uncomfortable, but if we push through, we’ll figure it out in the end. Again, the things that make you most uncomfortable are typically the most rewarding.

Regardless of why you’re switching, it’s all about that mindset.

What’s unique for us to remember about the accounting part of this transition?

Accounting is not everybody’s favorite. For most folks in the business, their enthusiasm is not behind double-entry accounting. Their enthusiasm and expertise are in what they’re actually doing in the business. And so I always try to keep that in mind because the part that I work with is not their favorite. Although they’re not experts in accounting, they know that this part has to be successful for their business to succeed.

What are the four different products offered through Intuit?

The platform offers four different product selections, like subscription levels:

• QuickBooks Simple Start

• QuickBooks Online Essentials

• QuickBooks Online Plus

• Quickbooks Online Advanced (what we call QBO)

Most commonsku users typically use either QuickBooks Essentials Plus or QuickBooks Online Advanced (QBO Advanced).

Since most commonsku users use Essentials Plus and QBO Advanced, what’s the main difference between the two?

QBO Advanced has a little bit more reporting, and it’s got a couple of different features. It typically works well for folks that have a larger platform.

Why QuickBooks Online versus Desktop?

My analogy for this is an iPhone and Android user. Someone who started uses an iPhone will say, “Android? I would never, absolutely not!” And on the other side, Android users are like, “iPhone? Never!”

I have found that desktop and QBO biases are the same mindsets. If I -as a user- have a background in desktop, I am a diehard desktop user, on the flip side, if I don’t have a desktop background and I start off with QBO, they say, “QBO is great. This is wonderful!”

Ultimately, both of these products, contrary to popular belief, do the same things. Often, people who use the desktop version don’t even use a third of the features that are available. So coming over to QBO, they feel like, “Hey, I don’t have everything I need!” But the reality is you have even more than you need. I think they’re both fantastic products. My goal at the end of the day is to get you something that supports the commonsku integration, and that also supports your business.

We encourage commonsku customers to get Quickbooks online simply because we want them to take full advantage of the efficiency and flexibility to work from anywhere, especially with virtual teams. There’s a myth that QuickBooks Online is not as robust as QuickBooks Desktop, but that has changed dramatically over the years, has it not?

It has. I’m a QBO baby. I actually started working with Intuit back in 2015, back when QBO was just a baby and had not as many features, so we had to do workarounds for pretty much everything. But since that time, yes, absolutely! The goal was to get better, add more features, and be comparable to the desktop version. And they’re definitely there at this point.

What do I need to know to be prepared for this conversion?

You first need to remember that you’re not in this alone. You’ve got support, and we’re gonna figure out where we need to get to. So number one, don’t worry, don’t fret. We will take care of you. That’s number one.

We get started with QuickBooks and get you set up with your QuickBooks account.

Then we make sure that you get in touch with commonsku because then you’re gonna do the integration from QBO to commonsku in a process we call mapping. We map your accounts between commonsku and QuickBooks online to make sure they are talking with each other. And then you’ll get started!

Note:  Follow these steps to connect your QuickBooks Online (QBO) account to commonsku.

The first step to connecting commonsku + QuickBooks Online is to set up your chart of accounts. For us non-accountants, what are the five standard chart of accounts?

The five standardized chart of accounts applies to any accounting platform, and they are:

• Assets (what you own)

• Liabilities (what you owe)

• Revenues (cash you’re bringing in)

• Cost of goods sold (how much your products cost)

• Operating expenses (rent, utilities, labor, and more)

Plus, Owners’ equity (how much you put into the company). Your accountant is going to be the one to support you in making sure you have all the correct chart of accounts that you have. But those chart of accounts are really important for the commonsku integration because mapping your commonsku to your QBO chart of accounts is how you’re gonna make that seamless integration happen.

And now that we have everything mapped correctly, what about converting all our data?

It depends on the business. Let’s say you had QuickBooks Desktop and you were coming over to QuickBooks Online. You actually wanna do the conversion before you do anything. We set you up with a QuickBooks Online account and convert your data before you do anything. The beauty in that is that your chart of accounts is already there. So the conversion is gonna be number one, if you have any data, you’re gonna wanna do the conversion first, and then you’re gonna connect with commonsku to bring that information over. That is, if you have data coming from somewhere else like from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online.

If you don’t have any data, or maybe this is the beginning of your fiscal year, and you don’t wanna bring any of that data over, you want to start fresh, then think of it like this, your history, your past, is in whatever platform you were before but your future is now in QBO and commonsku.

That’s a great point. I was talking to a CFO of a very large company about a $50 million distributorship that made the transition. He mentioned how many legacy businesses have bad data, and he suggested starting over clean. Because you don’t wanna bring bad, old data (defunct client accounts, or old, irrelevant order history) into your new system. Is that possible?

Absolutely. That’s another thing that I think is a common misconception. Often, we’re just moving over lists [client lists] and balances. If you are coming from Quickbooks Desktop, for example, you can do a conversion called “lists.” And so you bring over your customer list, your chart of accounts, and things like that. No balances, no transactions, just your meat and potatoes (is what I call it). And your past is in the past, and your future is in QBO. That’s another great way to do a conversion and save some time too.

[Note: Here’s where to find QuickBooks advice on how to move your lists to QuickBooks online].

How long does the process normally take?

If you hire Mendelson to do the conversion for you, I typically can get it done pretty quickly, but we quote a 2-3 business day timeframe to move everything over.

What’s the most common problem that can occur that we should be aware of?

Typically it’s inventory. Again, it’s all about that bad data.

You help customers through consulting, and you do the process for them. Can you break down –in really rough figures, we won’t hold you to this– what it costs?

If you hire Mendelson consulting separately from the initial onboarding, it’s billable at $200 per hour. So, depending on how big the file is or what the data is, or where we’re coming from would depend on what that actual quote looks like. What I love about Mendelson is that you are gonna know exactly what you’re getting into, and you’re going to be billed for what we agreed to — no surprises.

Can you share one last word of encouragement to those about the make the change?

You are not alone! A lot of people make this change, and you’re very busy, and by the way, you also have a personal life too, not just a business. Right? So you’ve gotta remember, when you’re moving over, and you’re making these decisions, keep your eye on the prize, remember why you started! And then kind of just go all in.

Somebody once told me that you need to have only 30 seconds of courage to make a decision. Have your 30 seconds of courage and just jump right in and do it. And we’ll make sure that we support you.

These resources explore how to set goals that help monitor progress, provide oversight, and motivate your team!