Accounting in MAS

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Cathal Walsh on January 8, 2009 at 12:48pm

I use MAS to track all student activity and sales for revenue. MAS is a great accounting program but I chose to do my bookkeeping/payroll/tax paying etc...) externally through Padgett Business Services. For $150/month they handle everything and it allows me to focus strictly on my school opoerations, student services, and growth and I leave bookkeeping and accounting to people who do that for a living. Having said that, MAS is a very robust program capable of managing your schools revenues and expenses

Cathal Walsh

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Permalink Reply by Rob Pendergrass on January 8, 2009 at 1:05pm

Thanks for the reply. If you don't mind me asking how do you get the information to the 3rd party company handling the accounting? I'm just a small 45 student base school right now. Looking to grow and expand and just thinking ahead.

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Permalink Reply by Franz Shihan on January 8, 2009 at 1:19pm

We use Quickbooks Pro and I prefer it since MAS accounting is not a full suite for reports, tracking and etc.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Pendergrass on January 8, 2009 at 1:28pm

Thanks for the info. If you have any other words of wisdom I would definitely love to hear them. I've got a lot to learn.

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Permalink Reply by Cathal Walsh on January 8, 2009 at 2:30pm

Rob,

As I mentioned, I track all my sales through MAS. So, at the end of the month I just generate a P & L report (from MAS) and send it over in a envelope complete with bank statement, cc statement, receipts etc...) They do the tedious job of inputting and producing my monthly statement. They also handle payroll, gov't remittances, taxes, etc...)MAS also has the ability to download directly to quickbooks if you prefer to do it yourself. For me, it's not about can I do it. I just don't feel it's the best use of my time. I would encourage you to think about this if you are in a growth stage. Where do you want to focus your energy? becoming an outstanding bookkeeper!? (kidding) or building a successful school?

Cathal Walsh
www.shakumartialarts.com

Rob Pendergrass said:

Thanks for the reply. If you don't mind me asking how do you get the information to the 3rd party company handling the accounting? I'm just a small 45 student base school right now. Looking to grow and expand and just thinking ahead.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Pendergrass on January 8, 2009 at 5:38pm

I really do appreciate the insight. It makes perfect sense what your saying. I'll definitely keep this in mind. Prioritizing I guess is the key. Accounting doesn't exactly sound like fun to me, haha!

Cathal Walsh said:

Rob,

As I mentioned, I track all my sales through MAS. So, at the end of the month I just generate a P & L report (from MAS) and send it over in a envelope complete with bank statement, cc statement, receipts etc...) They do the tedious job of inputting and producing my monthly statement. They also handle payroll, gov't remittances, taxes, etc...)MAS also has the ability to download directly to quickbooks if you prefer to do it yourself. For me, it's not about can I do it. I just don't feel it's the best use of my time. I would encourage you to think about this if you are in a growth stage. Where do you want to focus your energy? becoming an outstanding bookkeeper!? (kidding) or building a successful school?

Cathal Walsh
www.shakumartialarts.com

Rob Pendergrass said:

Thanks for the reply. If you don't mind me asking how do you get the information to the 3rd party company handling the accounting? I'm just a small 45 student base school right now. Looking to grow and expand and just thinking ahead.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Pendergrass on January 9, 2009 at 9:47am

So, do you use this solely instead of MAS. If so, do you feel like your duplicating your efforts with inputing revenue from tuition (billing direct and such). I honestly don't know enough about Accounting in MAS to really know the difference. From what little bit I've looked at MAS Accounting it don't see a way of tracking when bills are due and so forth. Any additional thoughts and opinions would be greatly appreciated about using one or the other.

Franz Shihan said:

We use Quickbooks Pro and I prefer it since MAS accounting is not a full suite for reports, tracking and etc.

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Permalink Reply by Brian Bui on January 9, 2009 at 10:06am

Mr. Cathal Walsh summarized it best. What are your priorities? Learning and spending time doing accounting to save a few hundred dollars paying a bookkeeper where you will invest at least 100 hours to learn the software and do all the tedious monthly tasks which has at least 10 hours of work. Or would you rather use that time and grow your school?

In a previous life with an accounting software company and working with the bookkeeper and accounting channel, you will still need to have an accountant involved to take care of all of your taxes and government filings. From your perspective, focus on what you do best in your business.

Hire a part-time or outsource a bookkeeper for proper bookkeeping. This will save you lots of headaches and money compared to having your accountant charging you 5 times more for the same amount of work. Let your accountant review the financial results, sign and approve the filings.

Now to answer some general questions about MAS' accounting. MAS has:
- Contact Management
- Accounts Receivable
- limited Accounts Payable
- Inventory and Point Of Sale
- Calendar
- integrated payment processing (cc & EFT)
- Financial Reports

This is really all you need as a small business owner to operate your academy. The lack of a payroll module and built-in government tax filing documents may be necessary for some owners but not entirely critical to your daily operations. Payroll is best kept at the helm of a bookkeeper or accountant to ensure government payroll taxes are up to par. Trust me, it is a horrendous maze to keep track of all the states and federal government regulations, updates and changes.

That said, assume for a moment that MAS is integrated with Quickbooks. Then all your transactions from all the modules will flow into Quickbooks. This in turns saves you or your bookkeeper time to re-enter the same transaction into Quickbooks. Then the time spent with your bookkeeper or accountant is mostly of a verification nature rather than data entry.

Overall, as a growing business owner, it is best to keep it simple and use MAS initially. It just depends on how many staffs are on hand and where your business is at. As a successful business owner, hire staffs to do all the work for you. This helps the economy!

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Permalink Reply by Rob Pendergrass on January 9, 2009 at 12:28pm

Thanks for the detailed description. One of things I was really hoping for was some tracking mechanism to be able to enter in and visually see when bills are due, etc....

Brian Bui said:

Mr. Cathal Walsh summarized it best. What are your priorities? Learning and spending time doing accounting to save a few hundred dollars paying a bookkeeper where you will invest at least 100 hours to learn the software and do all the tedious monthly tasks which has at least 10 hours of work. Or would you rather use that time and grow your school?

In a previous life with an accounting software company and working with the bookkeeper and accounting channel, you will still need to have an accountant involved to take care of all of your taxes and government filings. From your perspective, focus on what you do best in your business.

Hire a part-time or outsource a bookkeeper for proper bookkeeping. This will save you lots of headaches and money compared to having your accountant charging you 5 times more for the same amount of work. Let your accountant review the financial results, sign and approve the filings.

Now to answer some general questions about MAS' accounting. MAS has:
- Contact Management
- Accounts Receivable
- limited Accounts Payable
- Inventory and Point Of Sale
- Calendar
- integrated payment processing (cc & EFT)
- Financial Reports

This is really all you need as a small business owner to operate your academy. The lack of a payroll module and built-in government tax filing documents may be necessary for some owners but not entirely critical to your daily operations. Payroll is best kept at the helm of a bookkeeper or accountant to ensure government payroll taxes are up to par. Trust me, it is a horrendous maze to keep track of all the states and federal government regulations, updates and changes.

That said, assume for a moment that MAS is integrated with Quickbooks. Then all your transactions from all the modules will flow into Quickbooks. This in turns saves you or your bookkeeper time to re-enter the same transaction into Quickbooks. Then the time spent with your bookkeeper or accountant is mostly of a verification nature rather than data entry.

Overall, as a growing business owner, it is best to keep it simple and use MAS initially. It just depends on how many staffs are on hand and where your business is at. As a successful business owner, hire staffs to do all the work for you. This helps the economy!

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Permalink Reply by Brian Bui on January 14, 2009 at 3:14pm

Hi Rob,

Within the realms of MAS, I suggest you use the Planner and create a recurring reminder task that you will edit initially stating which supplier/vendor/utility you need to pay. If you spread out multiple dates, then create multiple recurring reminder tasks.

In Quickbooks, Peachtree or Simply Accounting, you can create a recurring transaction reminder to reprocess at the frequency level but all 3 assume you already paid.

You can combine the above two approaches and get it done!


Rob Pendergrass said:

Thanks for the detailed description. One of things I was really hoping for was some tracking mechanism to be able to enter in and visually see when bills are due, etc....

Brian Bui said:

Mr. Cathal Walsh summarized it best. What are your priorities? Learning and spending time doing accounting to save a few hundred dollars paying a bookkeeper where you will invest at least 100 hours to learn the software and do all the tedious monthly tasks which has at least 10 hours of work. Or would you rather use that time and grow your school?

In a previous life with an accounting software company and working with the bookkeeper and accounting channel, you will still need to have an accountant involved to take care of all of your taxes and government filings. From your perspective, focus on what you do best in your business.

Hire a part-time or outsource a bookkeeper for proper bookkeeping. This will save you lots of headaches and money compared to having your accountant charging you 5 times more for the same amount of work. Let your accountant review the financial results, sign and approve the filings.

Now to answer some general questions about MAS' accounting. MAS has:
- Contact Management
- Accounts Receivable
- limited Accounts Payable
- Inventory and Point Of Sale
- Calendar
- integrated payment processing (cc & EFT)
- Financial Reports

This is really all you need as a small business owner to operate your academy. The lack of a payroll module and built-in government tax filing documents may be necessary for some owners but not entirely critical to your daily operations. Payroll is best kept at the helm of a bookkeeper or accountant to ensure government payroll taxes are up to par. Trust me, it is a horrendous maze to keep track of all the states and federal government regulations, updates and changes.

That said, assume for a moment that MAS is integrated with Quickbooks. Then all your transactions from all the modules will flow into Quickbooks. This in turns saves you or your bookkeeper time to re-enter the same transaction into Quickbooks. Then the time spent with your bookkeeper or accountant is mostly of a verification nature rather than data entry.

Overall, as a growing business owner, it is best to keep it simple and use MAS initially. It just depends on how many staffs are on hand and where your business is at. As a successful business owner, hire staffs to do all the work for you. This helps the economy!

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Permalink Reply by CSRjr on May 7, 2009 at 8:49am

Does anyone have information on synching MAS reports with Quickbooks? Is there a file output suffix we should note?

Brian Bui said:

Hi Rob,

Within the realms of MAS, I suggest you use the Planner and create a recurring reminder task that you will edit initially stating which supplier/vendor/utility you need to pay. If you spread out multiple dates, then create multiple recurring reminder tasks.

In Quickbooks, Peachtree or Simply Accounting, you can create a recurring transaction reminder to reprocess at the frequency level but all 3 assume you already paid.

You can combine the above two approaches and get it done!


Rob Pendergrass said:

Thanks for the detailed description. One of things I was really hoping for was some tracking mechanism to be able to enter in and visually see when bills are due, etc....

Brian Bui said:

Mr. Cathal Walsh summarized it best. What are your priorities? Learning and spending time doing accounting to save a few hundred dollars paying a bookkeeper where you will invest at least 100 hours to learn the software and do all the tedious monthly tasks which has at least 10 hours of work. Or would you rather use that time and grow your school?

In a previous life with an accounting software company and working with the bookkeeper and accounting channel, you will still need to have an accountant involved to take care of all of your taxes and government filings. From your perspective, focus on what you do best in your business.

Hire a part-time or outsource a bookkeeper for proper bookkeeping. This will save you lots of headaches and money compared to having your accountant charging you 5 times more for the same amount of work. Let your accountant review the financial results, sign and approve the filings.

Now to answer some general questions about MAS' accounting. MAS has:
- Contact Management
- Accounts Receivable
- limited Accounts Payable
- Inventory and Point Of Sale
- Calendar
- integrated payment processing (cc & EFT)
- Financial Reports

This is really all you need as a small business owner to operate your academy. The lack of a payroll module and built-in government tax filing documents may be necessary for some owners but not entirely critical to your daily operations. Payroll is best kept at the helm of a bookkeeper or accountant to ensure government payroll taxes are up to par. Trust me, it is a horrendous maze to keep track of all the states and federal government regulations, updates and changes.

That said, assume for a moment that MAS is integrated with Quickbooks. Then all your transactions from all the modules will flow into Quickbooks. This in turns saves you or your bookkeeper time to re-enter the same transaction into Quickbooks. Then the time spent with your bookkeeper or accountant is mostly of a verification nature rather than data entry.

Overall, as a growing business owner, it is best to keep it simple and use MAS initially. It just depends on how many staffs are on hand and where your business is at. As a successful business owner, hire staffs to do all the work for you. This helps the economy!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Brian Bui on June 26, 2009 at 8:59am

Hi,

I am unsure I fully understand your question but let me give it an interpretation.

If your goal is to read reports related to transactions that occured in MAS that you then synchronized with Quickbooks, then you can use all the Quickbooks reports. The financial reports in Quickbooks are more advanced than MAS (after all, we're not an accounting software company).

If your goal is to read for example MAS attendance data in the form of reports, then no, you can't. That data is does not relate to financial transactions and Quickbooks is not built to handle that data.

Hope I answered your question!


CSRjr said:

Does anyone have information on synching MAS reports with Quickbooks? Is there a file output suffix we should note?

Brian Bui said:

Hi Rob,

Within the realms of MAS, I suggest you use the Planner and create a recurring reminder task that you will edit initially stating which supplier/vendor/utility you need to pay. If you spread out multiple dates, then create multiple recurring reminder tasks.

In Quickbooks, Peachtree or Simply Accounting, you can create a recurring transaction reminder to reprocess at the frequency level but all 3 assume you already paid.

You can combine the above two approaches and get it done!


Rob Pendergrass said:

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