For many retailers, the phrase “month-end close” is enough to elicit a collective groan. If you are currently using Retail Management Hero (RMH) as your Point of Sale and QuickBooks as your accounting system, then you are fortunate enough to be utilizing two very powerful systems. However, until now, they were two silos information goes in one but then must be physically transferred into the other.
Not only is this a tedious task, but it’s also a bottleneck. It slows down your financial visibility and creates the potential for costly human errors.
The answer is simple: RMH-QuickBooks Integration.
Here’s how integrating your Point of Sale (POS) and your accounting system can take the nightmare out of your month-end close and make it a streamlined and automated process.
1. Eliminate Manual Data Entry
The most labour-intensive part of the accounting process is re-entering data. You look at the sales report from RMH, compute the total, and re-enter it in QuickBooks. You do this for purchases, returns, and inventory.
With Integration:
You only need to do this once, such as setting up a mapping between RMH Sales Code and QuickBooks Income Account. From then on, every transaction entered in RMH is automatically entered in QuickBooks. What used to take hours is now done in the background.
2. Automate Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
Manually calculating your Cost of Goods Sold is a real pain. You must ensure that the inventory sold is matched with the exact cost at the exact time it was sold. If you are using averages or updating costs manually at the end of the month, your profit margins are probably wrong until the very last moment.
With Integration:
The integration reads the inventory movement and cost data from RMH and automatically creates the required journal entries in QuickBooks to adjust your inventory value and compute your COGS in real-time. Before you even sit down to close the books, your profit margins are already accurately calculated.
3. Streamline Reconciliation
When you’re trying to close the books, reconciliation with the bank is usually the last hurdle to overcome. But when the totals in your POS system don’t match the deposits in your QuickBooks system, you end up spending hours digging through the transaction logs trying to figure out what’s going on.
With Integration:
Because the information is being sent automatically and consistently, the totals in RMH will match the information in the QuickBooks system. The payment tenders such as cash, credit card, and gift cards will be sent to the correct GL account, making reconciliation with the bank much faster and less stressful.
4. Handle Sales Tax with Confidence
Compliance with sales tax is becoming increasingly complex. Trying to break down the difference between taxable and non-taxable sales and then sorting through the various jurisdictions is a recipe for an audit nightmare.
With Integration:
RMH has the exact information about the tax that is due on each sale. The integration sends the exact information about the tax due on each sale to the QuickBooks system, and you can generate your tax report with complete accuracy and confidence, knowing that the numbers match the information in your POS system.
5. Gain Real-Time Financial Visibility
The worst part of a slow month-end close process is that you are running a business based on outdated information. If you take 15 days to close the previous month, you are effectively flying half-blind during the first half of the new month.
With Integration:
Because of the daily, even real-time, flow of information, your QuickBooks company file will always be current. You can generate a Profit & Loss report at any time of day to see exactly where your cash flow, revenue, and expenses are going. You don’t have to wait until the “books close” to know exactly how your business is performing.
The Bottom Line
As a retailer, your time is precious. Every minute you spend manually entering numbers from one system into another is a minute you’re not spending on merchandising, marketing, or customers.
With the integration of RMH and QuickBooks, you eliminate the barriers between sales and accounting. You improve accuracy, ensure tax compliance, and most important, close your books in a fraction of the time.
Stop dreading the month-end close process. Automate the flow and start running your business again.
