Creative Financial Software

During the 1950's, the original authors of X-Men found a steadily growing reader base, especially among older children and teenagers.

As with many comics, the readership increased steadily over a period of time and then began to decline. Eventually, Marvel comics cancelled the comic due to financial losses.

However, the division of Marvel that published X-Men did not have timely financial reports - as with many companies in the 1950s and '60s. Computers were not widely available to compile financial information, so some companies or divisions within companies did not see any financial statements until weeks or even months after the fact.

When Marvel finally saw the financial reports related to performance of X-Men, they were surprised to find a sharp increase in sales for the last 6 months of operation. Armed with this "new" financial information, the author of X-Men convinced Marvel to renew the X-Men comic, and it continues to be a huge success decades later - ultimately inspiring a series of blockbuster movies.

The moral of the story: You must have both timely and accurate financial information to make informed decisions about your business. Our professionals at CFS can assist you with both needs.

If you find it difficult to keep your financial information up to date, we offer outsourced bookkeeping that provides you with real time financial data, just as if you had a bookkeeper in house daily processing transactions. We use online technologies when providing bookkeeping services, so we can share bookkeeping responsibilities with you (optionally) and so you can have anywhere, anytime access to your financial reports.

If you process all or some of your own bookkeeping, we offer financial analysis services to locate and correct data entry errors. We recommend monthly analysis services for at least the first 2-3 months. As you correct information based on our analysis reports and as your users become more experienced, we can reduce the frequency to quarterly analysis and eventually to semi-annual analyses.

Many small businesses can only rely on their QuickBooks information as of the end of each fiscal year - after their CPA or EA makes corrections to your data file as part of the tax preparation process. Though the adjustments from your CPA/EA are always necessary to record tax related events like annual depreciation expense, annual amortization expense, income/expense deferrals, etc., you cannot effectively manage your business unless your data is accurate throughout the year.

Our analysis procedures can help you to avoid the drastic mistakes like the one made by Marvel Comics. Read the panel to the left for more information about data file analysis services.

Marvel had the power to reverse their bad decision. That us a luxury many of us do not enjoy.

Creative Financial Software (CFS) specializes in analyzing QuickBooks data files. We have perfected and expanded our analyses over our combined 20 years of QuickBooks consulting experience. Recently, CFS published a streamlined version of our analysis procedures through Intuit, for use as part of Intuit's Advanced QuickBooks Certification training. Because of this publication, hundreds of QuickBooks consultants across the country use our data file analyses to troubleshoot their clients' QuickBooks data files.

It is frightening how many small businesses use QuickBooks reports to make significant business decisions without any reasonable confidence in the accuracy of their QuickBooks data. When working with small businesses, we often find errors in their files that cause critical balances like cash, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payment, Income, Cost and Expenses to be significantly incorrect. If these QuickBooks users had attempted to make decisions based on this information, they would have put their businesses at risk. See the real life scenario on the right for a great example of an owner who put his business in serious jeopardy due to a lack of correct and timely financial information. In the example in the right, the business owner didn't have timely information. Incorrect information will create the same problem. You must know both your financial position and your financial performance to steer your business toward long term growth.

Using our data file analysis procedures, we locate data entry errors and data file setup errors that cause your QuickBooks reports to be inaccurate. When we locate problems with your data file, we do not correct them as part of the analysis. Instead, we provide you with a data file analysis report detailing our findings. We then meet with you to discuss the report and to defer as many of the corrections to you as possible.

By taking this approach, we offer analysis services on a monthly or quarterly frequency without straining your budget. Though we do sometimes make some of the corrections for you (as a separate engagement), our preference is to do as little work as possible to keep our fees reasonable.

By helping you to correct mistakes with your data, we are slowly "working our way out of a job." Over time, your company will make fewer and fewer mistakes, allowing us to reduce the frequency of the analyses a semi-annual schedule.

At CFS, we view regular data file analysis to be as important as any other business expense you incur, including utilities, computer expenses and tax preparation expenses. Correct and timely financial information is not a want or a business luxury. In our opinion it is very much a need. If you will test us by scheduling a one time data file analysis, I have no doubt you will see the value. In all of our years of QuickBooks consulting experience, no professional at CFS has ever conducted a data file analysis without finding at least a few significant setup or data entry errors. If your file has never been analyzed, you probably have more than a few errors with which to contend.