Efficiency

1. Registers – QuickBooks maintains a register for each account on your balance sheet, which includes bank accounts, inventory, accounts receivable, and other assets. There are also registers for accounts payable, loan accounts, and owners' equity.
2. Simple Find – Think of the Simple Find feature as an expanded version of the Go To feature within a QuickBooks register.
3. Advanced Find – You can search QuickBooks based on any combination of dozens of criteria.
4. Search – Current versions of QuickBooks feature a Search command on the Edit menu. You may be prompted to enable Google Desktop the first time that you choose this command. Doing so will allow you to use the same search terms and conventions that you use on the internet to locate transactions within QuickBooks.
5. Customized Lists – By default, QuickBooks customer and vendor lists only display names and balance totals. You may not realize that you can add additional columns, such as phone number, and that each column is sortable.
6. Report Filters – Some QuickBooks reports are like a fire hose of data, giving you far more information than you really need. Fortunately, every report has a Modify Report button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, which enables you to pare down the results of the report.
7. Audit Trail - If you've exhausted all of the previous methods to find a transaction in QuickBooks, one final place to look is the audit trail. Someone could have deleted the transaction, either on purpose or accidentally.

Use the Open Previous Company option found on the File menu to give you fast access to company files you have used recently.

You can delete some of those old invoices that have been hanging around. This is a common problem in QuickBooks. Here's the fix: for each entry that is showing up in your Reminders list under "Invoices to Print," double-click on it. This action should take you to the invoice itself. Once here, remove the check mark in the box in the lower left-hand corner that says "to be printed," then click "Save and Close." This invoice should no longer show up in the "Invoices to Print" list.

When filtering reports in QuickBooks, you may want to select most of the items on a particular list, but not all items to appear on your report. First, choose the "selected" option from the list (selected accounts, selected names, etc.).

Normally you would check each item that you want to appear on your report. However, if you want to check all the items on the list, click the first item and do not release the mouse button. While holding down the mouse button, slide the mouse pointer down just below the list.

When QuickBooks is done, all of the items on the list will be checked. Release the mouse button. Now you can manually click the items to remove the ones that you do not wish to include in your filter.

QuickBooks offers capable tools for tracking the items you sell, but it's also quite a competent time-tracker. If you pay employees based on the hours they work, QuickBooks can ease your bookkeeping burden. Tracked time can flow to both invoices and payroll, helping you pay employees and collect on services provided to customers.

QuickBooks offers two ways to enter time. You can record hours on individual tickets or fill out weekly timesheets. No matter which you choose, the information is always available in the other form. You can switch methods at any time, and your work will be preserved. You can also use QuickBooks' timer if you're going to bill for a timed activity such as a phone call. And you can add notes that will be saved to the ticket.

There are ways to minimize your time spent managing your money and maximize your time at the beach. Memorizing transactions is one such way. When you memorize a transaction, QuickBooks remembers all of the relevant details and either processes it automatically or reminds you that it's due.

A memorized transaction could be bills that show up in the same amount every month, like your Web-hosting payment, or obligations that change regularly, like your utility bill. You can specify the amount due if it's static, or leave the amount open if it regularly changes, making this feature very flexible and easy to set up.

QuickBooks tools help simplify price changes once your decisions have been made. They're not overly difficult to use, but we want to ensure your intentions are carried out accurately. And there are related inventory issues that may be impacted by your modifications. Here are some of the important points to remember:

• Make sure that QuickBooks is set up to accommodate price levels.
• You can simply alter the cost of one item, or you can modify several at once. Your adjustments can be in the form of either percentages or fixed amounts.
• No existing transactions will be altered.

Best practices are a set of operational guidelines that are expected to produce a favorable outcome. Run your business using these techniques or methods, and you're likely to be more successful. Let's look at the three stages you'll encounter when you decide to apply best practices to your company.

1. Identify – Bring your employees in on this process. They're on the frontlines, and will have insight into where your systems are breaking down. They'll be pleased to be asked, and they may have ideas that will evolve into best practices.
2. Implement – Turn your ideas into policies, and formalize them. Make a big deal out of introducing them to all staff related to accounting, and explain the rationale behind them. They're intended to improve your company's financial bottom line, which should translate into a positive outcome for everyone.
3. Insure – Evaluate the effectiveness of the new best practices by scheduling follow-up meetings with employees.You might want to appoint a compliance officer who follows up with individual employees and departments. If your business is small and informal, you could bring in lunch one day a month for follow-up — and for the development of new best practices.

The Add/Edit Multiple List Entries tool does just what its name implies: It lets you add entries to your lists of customers, vendors, services, inventory parts, and non-inventory parts. It also makes changing one or several of them quick and easy.

Using this feature, you can:

• See customized views of your list data
• Enter missing information
• Create new entries from duplicates of existing ones
• Do a mass change of a whole column
• Copy and paste records from Excel

QuickBooks offers numerous tools to track your accounts payable, including the ability to:

• Enter bills as they come in
• Set reminders for bills due
• Pay bills easily
• Locate a bill or payment quickly
• Enter bills as (or after) you receive items
• Link bills to purchase orders
• Have instant access to a bill's status

No matter which version of QuickBooks you're using, there are always ways to make your workday easier. As with any software, we tend to learn the features we need and not much more. But small changes in the way you operate can add up to significant time savings and more accurate files. If you jumped into QuickBooks without a thorough introduction, consider these tips:

• Use the Open Window list
• Make account assignment mandatory
• Use the Account Prefill fields
• Use Pending Sales
• Set a closing date

Make extensive use of the tools that QuickBooks offers for report modification. Comprehensive, meticulously shaped reports that flow out of your carefully constructed records and transactions are your reward for pounding on the keys every day, conscientiously recording income and expenses.

QuickBooks supplies you with a wide variety of pre-formatted reports whose modification options can help you do focused, critical analysis of your financial data. The right set of numbers will help you understand your history and plan for the future more effectively.

Accounting in the cloud is closer than you might think. In fact, it's here, in some cases. QuickBooks Online, of course, is entirely cloud-based, but it does not yet offer all of the features found in Intuit's top-of-the-line products, Premier and Enterprise.

In the meantime, Intuit itself, as well as third-party developers, have built online apps that fill in some of the gaps. These add-on solutions exist on websites, but they can collect data and synchronize it with desktop QuickBooks. So can that iPhone or Android that's sitting on your desk right now.

There are actually three options for saving and relocating a giant company file. You know about backups, since you should be producing them religiously. You generate them so that if QuickBooks — or your computer itself — stops working or your file becomes corrupted, you can recreate the entire environment. Portable company files are more limited and are best used when you want to save your file to a temporary location and/or email it to someone else.

You've undoubtedly created reports that were so lengthy that you got tired of scrolling up and down to find totals for each individual section. QuickBooks lets you collapse and expand reports to see primary totals only, but this command affects the entire report.

Auto Outline is a very useful feature, but there's more than one way to implement it. And its availability and operation can vary in different versions of both Excel and QuickBooks. We can help you master this, as well as other QuickBooks-to-Excel tools

QuickBooks offers more than one way to document customer remittances, and it's important that you use the right one for the right situation. Here are some points to remember:

• Before you begin receiving payments, you need to make sure they will end up in the correct account.
• Probably the most common type of payment that you'll process will come in to pay all or part of an invoice or statement that you sent previously.
• There may be times when you receive payment immediately, at the time your products or services change hands. In these cases, you'll want to use a sales receipt.
• For partial, advance payments, before you've created an invoice or at the same time you're entering it, you'll have to create a payment item so that the money you've just received is reflected on the invoice.

By using QuickBooks' tools and complying with accounting best practices, you'll be more confident during the invoicing stage that what you're owed will actually be in your bank account in a reasonable amount of time. Here are five things that we suggest:

1. Let customers pay electronically
2. Keep a close watch on your A/R reports
3. Send statements
4. Send accurate invoices the first time
5. Offer discounts for early payment and assess finance charges

There are several reports that you should be looking at regularly, some of which you can interpret easily and use in your daily workflow. We'll help you with the interpretation of the more complex financial reports. These reports include:

1. A/R Aging Detail
2. Open Invoices
3. Average Days to Pay
4. Unpaid Bills Detail
5. Vendor Balance Detail
6. Balance Sheet
7. Income Statement
8. Statement of Cash Flows

1. Look up a specific invoice
2. View groups of transactions
3. Create a new transaction
4. Print multiple forms
5. Edit transactions

Whether you accept cash, checks, or credit/debit cards, QuickBooks has several tools that help you streamline the process of moving the funds into your physical bank accounts. In fact, part of your job is done when you enter the payments on the Receive Payments or Sales Receipt screens.

One activity should take precedence when you see that it needs to be done: recording payments. While you're probably very careful with this process, it's critical that your actions here are accurate. If they're not, you could either lose money that you've earned or anger customers by requesting payments they’ve already made.

QuickBooks comes with some helpful pre-defined payment types; however, you also have the flexibility to edit that list and add new types.

The QuickBooks Calendar is designed to give you a quick overview of your financial activity, both historically and in the future. It offers tools for creating a to-do list of several types (call, fax, email, meeting, appointment, or task). These will appear on the calendar unless you filter them out. The QuickBooks calendar is not really a reminder tool. You'll need to use QuickBooks' Reminders to get help with advance notice of due dates.

But the calendar will display the actual due dates for transactions. If you've entered a bill that's due on February 28, for example, the word Due will appear on that date in the graphical calendar; the number of transactions due will appear in parentheses after it.

Let's say you have a regular customer who used to pay on time, but he's been hit-and-miss lately. How do you get him caught up? Or, one of your customers thinks she's paid you more than she owes. How do you straighten out this account?

Both of these situations have a similar solution: QuickBooks Statements. QuickBooks' statements provide an overview of every transaction that has occurred between you and individual customers during a specified period of time. They're easy to create, easy to understand, and can be effective at resolving payment disputes.

Besides paying bills and chasing payments, submitting taxes, and counting inventory in December, there is another item that should have been on your to-do list: creating end-of-year reports. If you didn't get this done, it's not too late. It's important to have this information as you begin the New Year. Here are the reports we think you should run as soon as possible if you didn't have a chance to in December:

• Budget vs Actual
• Budget Overview
• Profit & Loss Budget Performance
• Income vs Expense Graph
• A/R Aging Detail
• Sales by Item Detail
• Balance Sheet
• Trial Balance
• Statement of Cash Flows

If your business provides services to customers, you are selling your employees' time and skills. There's no inventory count; you can sell as many hours as you have workers to fill them. Tracking time accurately and comprehensively, though, is as important as knowing how many hard drives or tote bags you've sold.

QuickBooks contains tools to help you record the hours employees spend doing work for customers, so you can bill them for services rendered. You can also use these same features to enter employee time for payroll purposes. The software offers two options here: single-activity records and timesheets.

QuickBooks Online's Dashboard, the first screen you see when you log in, provides an effective overview of your company's finances. It contains at-a-glance information about your recent expenses, your sales, and the status of your invoices. It displays a simple Profit and Loss graph and a list of your account balances. Scroll down and click the See all activity button in the lower right and your Audit Log opens, a list of everything that's been done on the site and by whom.

Once you get going, you'll discover a whole range of benefits that you may not have even considered, such as:

• Minimized errors
• Faster payment from customers
• Real-time account balances
• Instant data access
• Efficient time tracking
• Improved customer relationships
• More contemporary company images
• Flexible features
• Time and money savings

The bill-pay process in QuickBooks has a lot of moving parts, some of which may need prep work before you can dispatch bills. If you're planning to use this element of QuickBooks, please call to set up a consultation. Although beneficial, it's one of the more complicated processes in the software, and it must be carried out with extreme accuracy. When you're ready to get started, please call us for assistance.