Fresh off teaching at the QuickBooks Connect conference in San Jose, California last month, I am spending the Thanksgiving holiday in the island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles, teaching at On Boot Camp, the 6th International QuickBooks Conference. I have the fortune of traveling with my wife and son, affording me the pleasure of spending the holiday with family, regardless of destination!
QuickBooks Connect is the largest gathering of QuickBooks accounting professionals, end users, and software developers in the world. On Boot Camp in the Netherlands Antilles is the largest gathering of QuickBooks professionals and end users in Central America, the Caribbean and South America.
I thank my colleague and business partner Aubrey Pasial of Class NV for the continued confidence in the teaching opportunities. I have been a facilitator at every one of the International QuickBooks Conferences since inception in 2010. This year I was invited to produce and lead these sessions: “Adventures in QuickBooks Desktop Inventory”, “Inventory Beyond the Desktop”, “QuickBooks Action Reporting”, “QuickBooks for Accounting Professionals”, “What’s New in QuickBooks 2017”, and a “Stump the Experts” panel.
On Boot Camp gives me another opportunity to teach and learn – teach what I have gained from years of experience in QuickBooks consulting; learn some of the challenges that my colleagues in the Caribbean encounter when implementing and using QuickBooks.
QuickBooks Desktop is a U.S.-centric accounting and business management software. But management and operations functions of the software as well as 3rd-party add-ons work across any country locality. Case in point, inventory management, job costing, and reporting work very well virtually in any country situation. That is why we have had great success implementing QuickBooks anywhere in the world, from Asia to Africa to the Americas, where we have a footprint (local office) in several countries.
Many could say that accounting is accounting, regardless of country. That is true when it comes to accounting principles and concepts. But there are subtle differences… For example:
- Financial statements vary in language and order of presentation depending on a country’s tongue and historical (colonization) influence
- Sales Tax and Value Added Tax vary significantly from country to country and sometimes from region to region within a country (as we know well from the myriad of jurisdictions across the United States alone!)
- Payroll and Taxes are very “domesticated”
- Tax withholdings on income and expense transactions, something to which we are not used to in the States
- Fiscal reporting of transactions – several countries’ federal jurisdictions mandate the electronic reporting of all financial transactions in real time – IE, invoicing, payments, tax withholdings / retentions, and more
QuickBooks Online Global handles most of the differences in accounting from country to country. There are local versions of QuickBooks Online for several countries, and for those without a local version (yet), there are usually 3rd-party add-on apps that handle the unique requirements of each country. We are rapidly gaining the expertise in global QuickBooks that you have come to expect from us.
Immediately after QuickBooks Connect, we participated in the Intuit Reseller Program’s “Dream Big” conference, where we were honored as an International Reseller of the Year finalist – for our work on adapting QuickBooks Desktop as well as our involvement in QuickBooks Online Global. I invite you to connect internationally with us!
…MARIO
