Oh for the days when the agent did the negotiating and invoicing! I tell you, this is the hardest part of my job. I wrote recently about negotiating and some of the pitfalls there, but another area that takes time and creates a great deal of frustration for me is the Invoicing part of the process.

I switched to QuickBooks a couple of years ago to try to streamline this whole process – reducing what was a three-step process to one. I used to enter client data into FileMaker, create Invoices in Outlook and then reconcile through Quicken. Now it’s sort of all in one place, but I still find QuickBooks to be confusing. I am not an accountant.

Quicken is simple – it is a checkbook ledger. Not QuickBooks! Oh it has some interesting features, like the ability to set prices for each regular client as necessary and create lists of items to help make the creation of the Invoice simpler.

But it is more than the act of creating Invoices and/or Sales Orders. I usually manage to get one of those started. It is that I sometimes forget to convert the Sales Orders to Invoices and then I even forget to SEND them.

And ultimately a check comes in and needs to be entered into QuickBooks. First you have to Receive Payments and then you have to Record Deposits. And somehow I manage to mess that up too – and then try to UNDO something in QuickBooks!

Is it time for an accountant or a bookkeeper? Yikes that means spending money. But as I start my plan to step things up, perhaps that should be something to consider at the beginning of the plan.