TimelyBill and QuickBooks
Many of our customers use both TimelyBill and QuickBooks.
Organizations typically manage billing and invoicing using TimelyBill as the centralized source of truth for product catalogs, pricing, and customer data. QuickBooks is used for accounting and expenses.
QuickBooks for Accounting & Expenses
QuickBooks is an excellent tool for expense tracking, financial reporting, and supporting accounting teams. However, most service providers need more functionality. For example, QuickBooks is not capable of rating and billing for usage or determining telecom tax charges. It also cannot look at company-wide operational data such as help tickets, commissioning, or workflows↗️.
TimelyBill for Product Catalog, Billing & CRM
TimelyBill offers a comprehensive billing and CRM solution tailored for telecommunications service providers:
- Automated Billing and Customized Invoicing: TimelyBill's billing engine supports various billing methods, including subscription, usage-based, one-time, recurring, and hybrid billing.
- Scalable Usage Rating: Our platform imports and rates usage data from multiple sources, ensuring accurate billing for voice calls, VoIP, SMS/MMS, and IoT-based data usage.
- Tax Management: TimelyBill integrates with multiple tax engines to handle complex telecom taxes.
- Advanced Reporting: TimelyBill enables detailed reports with deep insights into customer behavior, patterns, and trends.
TimelyBill / QuickBooks Integration
QuickBooks is often used upstream from our billing system, and financial data flows from accounting to TimelyBill and vice versa. We can import and export accounting data via Intuit Interchange Format (IIF), CSV, or XLS files. Typical data exchanges include invoices, payments, and adjustments.
Example Scenario:
A telecom provider introduces a new "5G Business
Internet" package.
- Setup in TimelyBill: The package, including its pricing, discounts, and tax rules, is created in TimelyBill.
- Billing: When a customer subscribes, TimelyBill generates the invoice, tracks payment status, and logs the transaction.
- Accounting Sync: TimelyBill invoice and payment data are imported into QuickBooks for accurate financial records.
Key Benefits:
- Reduced Data Duplication - By managing products, pricing, and customer data in TimelyBill, you can eliminate the need to replicate these details in QuickBooks or other systems.
- Elimination of Manual Entry Errors - Data imports ensure data flows correctly from TimelyBill to QuickBooks, minimizing human errors associated with manual data entry.
- Improved Efficiency - Your staff focuses on managing data in a single system (TimelyBill) without worrying about system discrepancies.
In Conclusion
QuickBooks is a powerful and user-friendly accounting tool widely recognized for its ability to manage invoices, expenses, and financial reporting. However, it falls short in handling the unique needs of the telecom industry, particularly when it comes to calculating and charging usage-based telecom taxes. These taxes often involve complex regulations and dynamic rate structures that require specialized solutions beyond the scope of general accounting software like QuickBooks.
TimelyBill delivers a more specialized and scalable platform for service providers with complex billing needs than QuickBooks. However, using QuickBooks and TimelyBill effectively can achieve cohesive financial management that enhances accuracy and operational efficiency.
Read the related article: "Accounting vs. Billing Software."
Disclaimer: QuickBooks is a registered trademark and copyright of Intuit Inc. All rights reserved. Any references to QuickBooks or its features are for informational purposes only and are not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit Inc.
