Quickbooks Solutions

  Today's post is a guest blog post by Trevor Matheson. Trevor Matheson works for   Real World Training , the largest provider of QuickBooks Training in the U.S. Check out one of their upcoming classes in   New York ,   Miami   or other cities. When you set up QuickBooks, it asks whether you want to use certain features. If you answer yes, QuickBooks turns the feature on and puts the appropriate icons on the Home page. That means those features are now part of your workflow. Over time, your accounting needs might change. If they do, change the Home page so that the tasks and workflows match your current business model. Let’s make some changes to the home page. First, your company no longer uses statement charges or statements, so you want to remove these icons.  Next, you now use purchase orders and inventory, but there are no icons for these in the Vendors section of the Home page. You want to add the appropriate icons. 1. Let’s remove the Statements & Statements Charges icons

  Ever work so hard that you don't want to slow down to learn something new?  I hear this all the time "I'll look into that this evening or over the weekend."  That is usually the response when I ask a small business owner if they have explored all the reporting features in QuickBooks.  The response is a total blow off.  I get it, can't teach an old dog new tricks, right?  Hopefully pointing out a few reports that get overlooked can change that mantra. Expenses Not Assigned To Jobs Job Costing is a very important part of bookkeeping for general contractors, welders, excavators, subcontractors, etc.  A lot of time and effort is spent by the owner, office admin, bookkeeper, and even shop workers on the task of making sure all revenue, expenses, and time are tracked by each job.  Not knowing if a job is profitable can kill cash flow and possibly sink the business. Sounds simple to do but it gets seriously complicated when there are 5+ jobs happening at once.  Maybe s

  I was at a client's yesterday and noticed that there had been some questionable transactions happening in the QuickBooks file from the last time I was in there, sound familiar? Thankfully this was an easy one because we had setup usernames in QuickBooks for the various folks who interacted with the file. In under two minutes we figured out who it was, informed the employee of what they had done, and ensured we wouldn't have a problem again. No harm done, just a simple misunderstanding. Though this matter was a simple problem it could have proven to be much worse. What if your employee was undoing hours worth of CPA entries, undoing hours of QuickBooks reconciliations, making adjusting entries not approved by your CPA for previous periods, or even worse, what if your bookkeeper is stealing money from your business with QuickBooks? Would you have the procedures in place to do the investigative work needed to solve the mystery and implicate people involved? Let's review how

  Believe it or not, computers can make mistakes sometimes.  We live in an age where data entry for bookkeeping is getting faster and faster via downloading or importing transactions.  When the financial institutions communicate with QuickBooks a lot of information is exchanged and errors do occur.  This is why the reconciliation step is so important.  Every so often we will review a set of books and the credit card accounts are not reconciled.  'Why would they be off, I downloaded all the transactions' is the response we get when we point out the credit card balance is completely wrong.  This is when we always have to tell the client that downloading is not reconciling.  In addition to reconciling each time you download data you should look over renaming rules too.   Renaming Rules Errors When dumping data in QuickBooks via the bank import the user will get hit up with a lot of prompts and questions.  If you aren't careful and you are cutting corners your Renaming Rules ca

Performing some routine maintenance on your QuickBooks company file might save some major time and loads of money down the road.  Ignoring pesky corrupt file warnings and incomplete rebuild errors might mean there is a deep rooted issue that can really screw you at any given time.  QuickBooks has been around for 20 years now and dozens of versions, releases, updates, etc. have been rolled out.  A QuickBooks Enterprise technician told me that it's like taking care of your car.  Routine maintenance is great, but every 100,000 miles a few extra steps are needed for keeping the car healthy, and this is the same for QuickBooks. Don't Ignore Error Messages I've seen some long time users of QuickBooks run in to some odd situations caused by upgrades or updates they may have done several years ago in a different type of QuickBooks from what they run now.  A client from a few years ago ignored an Incomplete Rebuild message for several months and then was hit by a major bug in QB whe

  I’ll be the first to say I am all for new features and new products to help me become more efficient. However, QuickBooks Online (QBO) is a Trojan horse, not the White Knight Intuit says it is. I want to present a few bottlenecks of QBO and expose the surprise inside you won’t read about on the front page of Intuit’s big push. QBO works on the assumption that ALL users have great Internet access, EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME. That’s simply not true. Users are limited to their Internet speed. Some have a great Internet connection; some do not and become limited by the browser’s refresh speed. When you purchase QuickBooks Desktop (QBD) you are told what specifications your computer will need to have in order to run the program. I wonder, will intuit publish the Internet speed needed in order for QBO to operate properly or efficiently? My condolences if you are still using dial up 56K modem but many home-based businesses are on a basic Internet service. No streaming music while working for

  Every once in a while you may have to write off bad debt in QuickBooks. Bad debit is essentially money from customers that you are not able to collect. You can continue to chase customers that haven't paid or try using a collection agency. However, sometimes it is easier and more efficient to fire bad customers   and move on. Here is a short video on how to write off bad debt in QuickBooks. Set up Account and Item First you will need to set up a new expense account on your QuickBooks chart of accounts for bad debt. To create a new account, from the menu bar click lists, select chart of accounts, then click the account menu on the lower left and select new. Create a new expense account called bad debt. Next you will need to set up the QuickBooks item that you want to use for invoicing purposes. Go to lists/item list and select new item from the item dropdown menu in the lower left. Now select 'Other Charge' as the type and give it a name of 'Bad debt' and put whate

  Keeping your QuickBooks lists clean and current is always a good idea. Just like a chief will sharpen his knives and wash the dishes in preparation for the next meal, so should a bookkeeper keep their tools of the trade sharp and clean. In this blog I want to quickly show how easy and painless this can be. There are a few different name type lists in QuickBooks to look over and keep an eye on from time to time. Customer List Vendor List Employee List Item List Other Names List My focus will be to the Customer, Vendor & and Employee Lists. There are three things to do in the list, edit the item for current information, merge QuickBooks items and make inactive. For example, in the Vendor List start by changing the list from “Active Vendors” to “All Vendors.” Working the easiest task first, lets start with making vendor inactive. If this step has never been done you will just see a space in front of your vendors, if this has been done before you might see some bold X’s. Either way y

  At first glance you might wonder what’s so tricky about recording a vendor refund in QuickBooks. Why is this question being asked? Or, this seems simple, am I doing it right? Let’s back up and set up a scenario. You run a service based business that pays for some supplies. One week you pay a bill to your supplier for cleaning supplies. A few weeks ago you received the bill and  entered the bill in QuickBooks  correctly. Last week you properly went to Pay Bills. There you paid that bill and any others that needed to be paid. If you entered a bill and then wrote a check for the bill AND the bill still shows in your Accounts Payable, go to this  QuickBooks blog  where I explain how to correct that. So now your bill is paid and business goes on. Then one day you receive a check back from that vendor for any number of reasons: an unknown discount, price change, or whatever. A common mistake is to receive those funds back against the expense from the original bill; you might even go as far

  You have entered a bill into QuickBooks and you wrote a check for that bill. So, why is that bill still showing in your accounts payable report? It’s an easy and common mistake to make. Sure there may be a number of ways this can happen, let me give a simple example. You receive a bill from a vendor that is not due for a few weeks. You enter it and forget about it. A few weeks go by and the vendor sends a statement. You jump into QuickBooks and write a check to the vendor. Done. Being the savvy owner you are, you often look at you’re A/R, A/P and P&L thus you are wondering, “Why does that bill still show in my A/P?” From the perspective of QuickBooks, you didn’t pay the bill (from pay bills); you simply wrote that vendor a check. So, how do you fix this? You could delete the check, then go to Pay Bills and do it correctly, and adjust the check number to match the check that was mailed. But what if you found the issue after the checking account has been reconciled? Deleting the ch

  Have you ever accidentally ignored transactions in an upload to QuickBooks? Then later tried to upload the QBO (QuickBooks Importable file) again, only to have an  error code pop up saying that they cannot be downloaded ever again?  I have! Many times, while intending to batch add transactions, I have accidentally ignored/deleted all of them from bank feeds. This happened so often that one of our team members found a workaround for this common issue that is applicable to any version of QuickBooks Desktop with the Online Banking/Bank Feeds feature.  QuickBooks is a database that has the ability to download information in a few different formats. The program then remembers all of the transactions it has downloaded to a particular account. In the background of the software, it remembers whether or not transactions occurred on a particular date, so if you ignore the transactions, they can't be pulled in again. But, here are the  5 steps to beating this Bank Feeds Headache: 1.) Create

  I have been in the habit of reconciling QuickBooks on a daily basis for as long as I can remember. When I was a really small business (that is, working solo) it was easy to manage reconciling on a daily basis. As I grew, both I and my business found that maintaining the habit of reconciling every day became even more important. If you are confused by the phrase "daily reconciling," let me explain. Most financial institutions provide a daily ending balance at the end of each day's transactions. Some institutions, like Chase, provide a balance after every single transaction. What this allows you to do is reconcile QuickBooks to your actual bank balance every single day. Daily reconciling might seem like a pain or a waste of time. I will explain why I reconcile QuickBooks on a daily basis and what it allows for our small business.  Daily Reconciliation = Power Reconciling QuickBooks on a daily basis is extremely powerful. If you are reconciling all of your accounts on a da

  So you just made the switch to QuickBooks Online from QuickBooks Desktop and you're sending out invoices to customers; but when they receive them, there is no link to actually pay you. There is one more essential step after you go through the approval process and get your payment limits set, before you can receive payments. You have to change the invoicing settings to include the payment link. If you follow this detailed guide, you will ensure that your customers are getting the correct invoice the first time so you can collect on your A/R faster and make the process of paying for your services incredibly convenient.  Having Trouble Sending Invoices With A Payment Link?  Not to worry, this is an easy fix. This is a common problem we have been seeing lately. Sending invoices and receiving payments via QuickBooks Online is an easy way to stay on top of accounts receivable and build a solid invoicing system.  This is an invoice that doesn't have the payment link active.  1. Chan