QuickBooks is a very versatile and affordable accounting software package. It can be used to record the income and expenses of firms of many industries. This blog focuses on some benefits for those who are event planners.

Class Tracking (Sub-Classes) – In QuickBooks you could use class tracking to determine which marketing events are most profitable to you. For example, you could create a main class called Schools and then make a sub-class with the school’s name and even make another sub-class for the event and another one for the year of the event. It would look like Schools:Duke University:Graduation:2011. That way you could tag income and expenses to that particular sub-class to see if your marketing efforts were successful. If you made a profit at the Duke graduation event in 2011 you would consider trying to land a 2012 graduation event, but if you lost money you may consider other schools to target.

Customer Jobs (Events) – You can set-up jobs for specific customers to see if they are profitable. For example, let’s say you had a corporate client called Jamie’s Sparkling Floors. This customer had an employee appreciation party and a brand marketing party. You would set-up a main customer called Jamie’s Sparkling Floors and then create two jobs under that customer called Employee Appreciation Party and Brand Marketing Party. You would then tag income and expenses to the particular job to see if that event was profitable. In addition, you could set-up a budget for both of the jobs to see if your costs were below what you expected, right on target, or if you overspent on the event. That would help you price out future events for other customers and help you maximize your profit.

Customer Type – In the customer set-up screen, you could indicate the type of customer in the Type field so you could analyze which type of customer generated the greatest amount of sales. For example, one type might be “Corporate”, one type might be “Individual”, and one type might be “Non-Profit”. By generating a sales report by “type” you could decide where your marketing funds would be spent best.

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