QuickBooks???

[eddie]

I'm a new chef and i am very excited that we are getting Quickbooks for our establishment. The front of the house manager is to put it mildly "a little slow" so i will have to input everything my self, more or less and fix a lot afterward. Anyway as chefs what tips/ books can you guys pass on. I have an excell spread sheet that I inherited from the chef before me and i have some basic common sense/ computer skill.

Thanks for the help

[Patchouli]

I love QB
I have used it for years and for a number of different businesses. I love the reports I can get out of it, but what you get out is all in the way you enter the info.
Do you know which aspects you will be using (ie payroll?) and which version?

[eddie]

"they" say that we will be getting the newest version (they say a lot of things).I will be using it as much as i can being that we are using 98 spread sheets and our "payroll" is just managing time cards and not much else.

Do you know about an application called "fishbowl" for inventory?

What do you recommend as far as POS goes?

Any good books to read. I'm a big reader.

Thanks for the help

Ed.

[Patchouli]

What are you hoping to do with QB once you have it?
What kind of info are you hoping to get?
What kind of spreadsheets are you hoping it will replace?
You've got to be careful that you don't expect it to do 'everything', because it would be just huge.
What are you expecting it to do as far as 'inventory'?
Some things are better left to spreadsheets to play with, with only the balances being transferred into QB on a daily/monthly basis.
As far as I can see, Fishbowl is like any other inventory program, and perhaps not necessarily geared to the restaurant industry. How far are you wanting to go with the inventory thing, ie are you wanting to enter the purchase of a tray of brownies and then have them sold on a per brownie basis? Are you wanting it to track a bag of flour, deducting a pound when you make a recipe? Tell me what you're hoping to track.
I love the stuff that restaurantowner.com has to offer, but it requires a membership ($). Lots of (IMHO) good reading, samples, templates, etc. in there. Lots of the stuff they have to offer can be used as a starting point to make your own stuff from.
I can't recommend anything as far as a POS, our POS was not integrated with our QB (however you can get that option if you want). I took the daily cash register reports (which were already broken down into the categories I wanted to keep separate), and entered them into QB as daily figures.
You should make a plan (in writing) ahead of time, outlining the kind of information you will want to get out of it. Then when you get QB, you will know precisely what you want to track and you can set it up right, right from the start.
Will you be the one entering stuff into QB or does your company have a bookkeeper?
Be very careful if you are the one who will be setting up QB, especially when it comes to the payroll settings. Huge errors can be made in the setup, which will follow through to make everything wrong, forever (until you discover the error, where the error is coming from, and how to fix it, and sometimes it's difficult to trace where exactly it's coming from).
If you are the one who will be entering data, will you be allowed access to everything (ie payables, bills, sales, overhead)? Or just certain parts?

Once you have your plan of what you want to get out of it, it can be determined how it will need to be accomplished, and from there you might have to cut back somewhat. It can become quite unwieldy if you get carried away.