Accuracy

If you have customers who are also vendors, you may decide to trade some or all of your services/products in exchange for payment.

To record such a barter transaction, invoice the customer for the goods provided or services performed as you normally would. To record the "payment" use the "Receive Payment" function to apply the barter amount against the invoice the same as you would when receiving cash or a check.

Day-to-day transactions like receiving payments from customers or paying vendors occur so frequently that most QuickBooks users do them automatically. However, from time to time you may encounter an infrequent transaction that will stop you in your tracks such as:

• Security deposits
• Refunds from utility companies, insurance companies, and others
• Owner contributions
• Distributions to owner
• Loans to the company
• Company loans to other entities
• Loan payments
• Petty cash

You may sometimes need to investigate a particular QuickBooks transaction. This means, looking into who changed or deleted a transaction, determining what date the transaction changed, and how the transaction looked before it changed. The four different audit reports that QuickBooks provides are:

1. Audit Trail Report
2. Voided/Deleted Transactions Summary and Detail Reports
3. Closing Date Exception Report
4. Customer Credit Card Audit Log

Some measures that you can take within QuickBooks to limit your exposure are:

• Payroll – Hand-deliver paychecks, and use this as an opportunity to thank your employees for their work. This will help identify any "false" employees, as well as foster good will among your team.
• Theft of cash or merchandise – Separate duties to the extent possible. Ideally, those who receive money should be different from those who generate invoices.
  Unauthorized discounts – Track discounts given to customers.
• Selling private information – This is particularly difficult to guard against. One level of defense is to require employees to sign confidentiality agreements at the time of hire that discuss what the company considers confidential and the consequences of violating said agreement.
• Expense Reports – Always require receipts on all reports for reimbursement with no exceptions. You should also establish guidelines so that employees know when to seek approval so that they avoid the risk of unreimbursed expenses.

Most likely you've reconciled your bank account already, but here are a few tricks and techniques to streamline the process or solve some of the issues you may have in reconciling:

1. Locate discrepancies
2. Confirm your beginning balance
3. Don’t forget interest and fees
4. Double check your ending balance
5. Look for transpositions
6. Pick a side between deposits and withdrawals
7. Clear the decks
8. Enter missing transactions
9. Check undeposited funds
10. Hide unnecessary transactions
11. Void old transactions
12. Clear voided transactions
13. Bank online
14. Use your keyboard
15. Click the Leave button and then resume the reconciliation tomorrow
16. Reconcile more frequently

We'll go off the beaten path and explore 10 reports that many users overlook. Even if you are using some of these reports, we're sure you'll find a few more to add to your repertoire.

1. Profit & Loss Summary Previous Year Comparison
2. Balance Sheet Previous Year Comparison
3. Statement of Cash Flows
4. Collections Report
5. A/P Aging Summary
6. Trial Balance
7. Voided/Deleted Transactions Summary
8. Audit Trail
9. Previous Reconciliation
10. Transaction History

Unless you have dozens of employees or numerous exceptions each payday, you can literally process a payroll run in just a few minutes using the employee compensation tools in QuickBooks.

No matter which version of desktop QuickBooks you're using, payday chores are similar. Even if you've subscribed to Full Service Payroll and are having most of the work done by Intuit, you still have to enter the number and type of hours worked for each pay period.

If you're doing payroll manually or through a payroll service, you might be surprised at how quickly and easily your payroll tasks can be completed once you've finished entering information about your company and its employees, taxes, and deductions.

Whether your accounting tasks are done on a single PC or you have multiple users working on different screens, it's critical that you make use of all that QuickBooks offers in terms of internal controls.

• Use the audit trail – A very large report that displays every addition, deletion, and modification of every transaction. In older versions of QuickBooks, you could turn it on and off, but it's permanently on now.
• Run the right reports – Check registers and review these regularly: Closing Date Exception, Voided/Deleted Transactions, and Expenses by Vendor Detail.
• Adhere to best practices – Password-protect your QuickBooks company file and change the password regularly, especially if you are the entire accounting department.

1. Create standard checks, not paychecks.
2. Maximize on the options for check creation.
3. Customize the appearance of your checks.
4. Be sure that your printer has enough ink or toner before you begin a job.
5. If you print a lot of checks, consider dedicating one printer to that task.
6. Make sure your printer processes pages in the correct first-to-last-page order.
7. QuickBooks supports batch printing.
8. Printing a batch of checks and realize that you've set something up wrong? Hit the Esc key to halt it.
9. Double-check to make sure that your numbers match before you launch a print job.
10. Ruin a check or an entire page of them? If your accounting protocol allows you to skip check numbers, just start over by changing the First Check Number so that it corresponds with the starting number on a fresh batch of check blanks.

Where do you keep track of bills that need to be paid, invoices that have to be sent, inventory items that must be ordered, etc.? Do you include that information in your general business calendar(s) and hope they don't get lost in the shuffle?

QuickBooks contains a dedicated set of tools that automates the process of setting up and displaying reminders. Once you've created them, they can be the first thing you see when you open QuickBooks in the morning.

Depending on the situation, you'll use one of multiple methods to record customer payments. Here's a look at some of your options:

• Cash check
• Credit/debit (A specific card type may be shown here if you've indicated the customer's preferred payment method in his or her record.)
• e-CHECK
• Instant Sales

Though QuickBooks makes the mechanics of receiving payments simple enough, you still should understand the entire process involved in getting income into the correct accounts. If you need assistance with this or any other areas of QuickBooks, just give us a call.