Hello, I'm in the IT business, and am hoping to help out a client. He's an insurance agent, whose primary need is to do cash flow projections (to help him decide how much money he can take out of his business and still meet upcoming operating expenses).
He has scheduled monthly commissions from various insurance companies, but the actuals can differ based on what/when the client pays.
I looking into QuickBooks for this, which may be workable, but it will be clumsy, because (for example) its cash flow forecast report is based on individual invoices, not estimated monthly commissions.
Does anyone know of a solid accounting package which is somewhat tailored for insurance agents and/or investment brokers? Any opions are appreciated. Thanks.
I might suggest you download a free-trial copy of A-Systems Visual Bookkeeper from the website:
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When you get the download, you can login to either The Small Business Advantage Edition or the Preferred Edition. Both Editions have a Projections/Modeling function under the General Ledger icon. If you need instructions on how to run this relatively intuitive process, go to the website training:
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to the General Ledger heading and choose Projections/Modeling. At the request of one of our marketing partners, we created this powerful function to allow a user to do "what if" forecasting and modeling. The process allows the user to start "from scratch" or to do "from where we are now" forecasting. This function sounds like what you are looking for.
In creating a forecast, the user can forecast income, line by line, month by month for 36 months. Similarly, the user can forecast expenses, line by line, month by month for 36 months. After all of the forecasted items are entered, Visual Bookkeeper will create a monthly forecast of cash flow, reconciling starting and ending cash, for each of
36 months and a monthly income statement for each of 36 months. In addition, Visual Bookkeeper will create pro forma balance sheets at 12,
24, and 36 months, all tied back (reconciled) to the cash flow statement and the income statement.
This is a very powerful, but easy to use function. It is built into A-Systems Visual Bookkeeper (our general accounting software) and it is built into A-Systems JobView (our job cost accounting software.) Both programs are full-featured, fully-integrated, accounting programs. Visual Bookkeeper includes General Ledger, Payroll, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, a Report Generator, a fully integrated Contact Manager, Forecasting/Modeling, Automated Bank Reconciliation, etc. For companies with additional needs, add-ons include Inventory, Purchase Orders, Job Costing, and more.
In order to make this available to small businesses that often cannot afford full-featured accounting software, A-Systems worked with the United States Small Business Administration (the SBA for short). The Small Business Advantage (SBA for short) retails for $79.95. The Preferred Edition of Visual Bookkeeper had a base price of $995. Unlike some accounting software companies, the Payroll tax tables are user definable and may be updated for free when tax tables change. One more thing, Visual Bookkeeper has a bullet-proof audit trail. Source documents, one posted, cannot be altered. Changes and corrections require journal entries to correct errors and make changes. The audit trail cannot be turned off.
At A-Systems, we compete with the biggest software companies in the nation by providing accounting software that does more, does it easier, and we charge less. Our software is quick to learn and easy to use too.
Sure. It's pretty simple. QuickBooks' cash flow projector shows upcoming income based only on invoices. We don't want to create a "dummy" invoice to represent each monthly insurance commission - we'd rather specify, for example, that we expect a $200 commission every month this year for a given customer, and have that reflected in the cash flow projection.
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