This guide walks through the steps if you are also switching to Quickbooks Online as part of your Clubspot implementation.
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We recommend obtaining a Quickbooks online subscription a month or two before your scheduled go-live date with Clubspot. You can review the different Quickbooks plans here. Clubspot is supported in all Quickbooks plans, so you can review the different features that may be applicable to your club. Most clubs on our platform end up going with the Plus plan.
Prior to uploading your chart of accounts into Quickbooks, it is worth reviewing some of the features supported by Quickbooks for classifying transactions as well as considering the structure of your chart of accounts.
While not always the case, clubs often have chart of accounts that are overly complicated and contain far too many accounts. Clubspot contains a multitude of reports showing granular data plotted over time, and the ability to filter and refine your queries. This often results in clubs using Clubspot shifting from using their monthly accounting data for the bulk of their business intelligence and insights, to instead looking at the income transactional data within Clubspot. This often allows clubs to simplify their COA, eliminating complex or overly specific accounts accounts.
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If you are opting to simplify your chart of accounts, we recommend doing so either before setting up your Quickbooks account or after entering and validating your starting balances and data. That way you can easily validate one-to-one that your starting balances were correctly entered into the system. If you edit accounts mid process it can become difficult to validate that your current system’s trial balance matches your QBO trial balance.
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Important to consider for your implementation are the class and department attributes supported by Quickbooks and Clubspot.
Any accounting transaction from Clubspot to Quickbooks will contain an account, but it can also optionally contain a class and/or department. Classes and departments help to segment your accounting data in Quickbooks so that you can for example pull a P&L by class, or by departments. These attributes can also be useful in simplifying or better organizing your chart of accounts!
Also known as locations in Quickbooks, departments are best used as static grouping of accounts. For example, you can group your income accounts for food, beverage, beer, wine, and your food and beverage related expense accounts into a department called F&B. Clubspot can assign departments based on the income account used in a transaction, or you can opt to dynamically assign a department at the item-by-item or POS location level. Reach out to your onboarding manager if you would like your departments structured in this way.
Departments are typically the most straightforward way to generate a “Departmental P&L” in Quickbooks, a commonly used report in the private club space.
Classes in Quickbooks allow you to apply dynamic relationships for your transactions. For example, your income accounts will be applied at the item or subtype level, but you have the ability to assign an accounting class based on the POS location where an item is sold. You could also assign a class based on the context of a sale, like whether it was through an event signup, or through the banquets section.
What this allows clubs to do is have a clean and simple chart of accounts, where you might have a single income account for “food”, and then the class can be set to Pool, if that food item is sold through the Pool POS. If that exact same item is sold through the banquets section, that could be set to “Private Events” class, or if sold through main dining it could be assigned the “Dining” class.
Utilizing classes in this way can help provide more visibility in terms of your operations and can save from unnecessary duplication of products and income accounts. You for example would not need a separate account for “Food-Pool”, “Food-Dining”, “Food-Private Events”. With Clubspot in quickbooks you can gave a single burger sold out of all three places, all going to a “Food” income account but picking up the class based on the context of the sale.
Many clubs also use classes to run event-level P&Ls. They do this by assigning a class to a social event in Clubspot, and all expenses related to a certain event get classed accordingly in the Quickbooks AP platform.