Have you been able to create records for all of your products and services? If you have a large inventory, this can be quite a time-consuming process. But we highly recommend that you build complete records, even when you create them as you need them. This is critical if you plan to track inventory items.
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You’ll use your product and service records in several areas of QuickBooks, including invoices and estimates, purchase orders, and sales receipts. There’s also an entire set of reports dedicated to products and inventory.

This is one of the reasons we recommend that you let us help you set up QuickBooks Online, even if you’re making a transition from the desktop version of QuickBooks. If you don’t visit every area of Company Settings and designate your preferences, you may get frustrated as you start working, thinking that the site isn’t capable of doing everything you need.

Using Your Records
You’ll see why it was so important to build a thorough set of product and service records when you start to enter data in transaction forms. Assuming that you’ve also created records for your customers and vendors, filling out an invoice, for example, is mostly just a matter of selecting the correct options from drop-down lists.

Of course, even if you have a comprehensive set of records, you’ll certainly take on new customers and vendors, and start offering additional products and services down the road. When this occurs, or if you didn’t complete your setup work because you absolutely had to start entering transactions, you can add items as you need them.

Once you’ve selected a customer and either accepted the default terms and dates or edited them to reflect your needs, you’ll click on the arrow to the right of the first field in the body of the invoice, as pictured in the example above. You can scroll down and find the item that the customer wants to purchase in the list that drops down or click on +Add New.

If you do the latter, the Product/Service information panel will slide out from the right. You can then create a record for the product or service, like we wrote about last month.

A Running Tally
Here is another reason why it’s so important to be conscientious about completing product records. When you enter that number in the Initial quantity on hand field, QuickBooks Online uses that as a starting point for tracking your inventory levels. Every time you process a form indicating that you’re selling x number of widgets, the site subtracts that from the most recent total.

When you click in the Quantity field, a small cartoon bubble opens above it, telling you how many units are currently available. This keeps you from selling items that you don’t have. It also indicates when you may have too much of a product, and it’s not selling quickly.

Unless you have a very small product list, you may not recognize overstocks. So QuickBooks Online offers several reports that can help you track your inventory. Click on Reports in the left vertical tab, then All Reports, then Manage Products and Inventory to see what’s available.

Setting up QuickBooks Online for a successful launch can be challenging. So can the concepts involved in tracking your inventory of products. We’re always happy to help with either process – or both.

If you started small with your business, keeping track of your product inventory was probably pretty easy. Maybe you kept your stock in a few boxes or a closet, and it was easy to tell at a glance what needed replenishing.
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As you grew, the process of inventory-tracking started to get unwieldy. You were selling too many products in too large a volume; a casual look at your inventory no longer sufficed. And  physical inventory counts took a lot of time. So you found yourself with too many of some items and not enough of others.

Keeping inventory items at financially-responsible levels is a delicate balance. If you have too much on hand, you tie up money. Too little in stock, and, well, you know what happens: you wind up with unfulfilled orders and unhappy customers. QuickBooks Online can help.

Building Inventory Records

​QuickBooks Online’s inventory-management tools help you:

• Create thorough records for each product and service that you sell.
• Fill out sales and purchase forms — like invoices and purchase orders — quickly and accurately using these item records, and,
• Generate reports that provide the real-time status of your inventory.

Here’s how to get started. Click on the gear icon in the upper right, next to your company name, and select Products and Services. Once you start adding records, this screen will display a table containing critical details about your inventory and non-inventory items as well as the services you sell.

Click New in the upper right corner. A vertical pane will slide out of the right side of the screen, asking you what type of item you want to describe. Select Inventory item, and the Product/Service information window opens. Enter the name of your item in the first field and its SKU (optional) in the next. You can upload an image if you’d like, too.

The line below this information reads Is sub-product or service. You should only click in the box in front of it if you have already created a parent product or service and want to put this item in a sub-category of it. In the example above, Writing tools is the parent category and 3 4×6 journals, multi-color is one member of that product category. (Questions? Ask us.)

​As you can see, you can modify some options here without completely starting over. If this item should have been classified as a Non-inventory item, click Change type and select the correct one. You can also delete your image or replace it with another.

How many units of this item do you have right now? Enter that number in the field and then choose today’s date from the calendar that’s available in the As of date field. Your Inventory asset account should be pre-selected to Inventory Asset. Account designations must always be correct in QuickBooks Online.

Warning: If you are unfamiliar with assigning items to accounts, let us walk you through the early stages of setting up your inventory records. We can help you understand the Chart of Accounts and how it relates to various tasks you’ll be doing.

Enter the description you would like to appear on sales forms in the Sales information field. Then complete the Sales price/rate box. This is the price that you will charge customers for the item. If sales tax will be applied, click in the box in front of Is taxable to create a check mark. Sales of

Product Income will probably already appear in the Income account field.

​Go through similar steps in the Purchasing information fields, keeping in mind that the Cost field should reflect your cost to buy the items you sell, if indeed you do purchase and resell inventory. When you’re done, click Save and close or Save and new.

This is a lot of work, but it’s important work. You’re building the foundation for your inventory management system.

Next month, we’ll look at how you will be using your item information in transactions and reports.

What do you do when you need to get information in QuickBooks about customers or about payments they’ve made in QuickBooks? You have several options. You could, for example:

• Create a report
• Go to their Customer pages
• Click on Receive Payments on the Home Page and use the Find arrows (not very elegant or fast, but would be an easy way to find recent payments).

One of QuickBooks’ strengths is its flexibility. It helps you find the exact information you’re looking for in a variety of ways.  Which one you choose at any given time depends on what screen you’re working on at the moment and precisely what slice of data you need.

A Home Base
The desktop version of QuickBooks doesn’t have a “dashboard,” like web-based financial applications do. Dashboards are like home pages on steroids. Rather than just providing navigational tools and menus, Snapshots display charts and grids and lists representing the data that you’d most likely want to see when you first log on, like account balances, summaries of income and expenses, and high-priority tasks, with links to related activity screens. You can usually customize these.
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QuickBooks’ Reminders tell you what needs to be done either today or very soon. But they don’t reveal anything about your financial status. Snapshots do. There are three versions: Company, Payments, and Customer.

Many Sections
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Let’s look at the Customer Snapshot to see how these work. To find it, click on Snapshots in the left vertical navigation pane. When the window opens, make sure that the Customer tab is active; if not, click on it. Click on the arrow next to the CUSTOMER field in the center of the very top to select a customer.

You’ll see three columns of information here. The left pane displays some commonly sought numbers (like Total Sales) and some numbers that you might have trouble finding any other way (Average days to pay, etc.). In the middle, you’ll see Recent Invoices and Recent Payments. And the right section (not shown in the screen shot) includes two customizable graphs, Sales History and Best Selling Items.

This is the default layout, the information boxes you’ll see when you first open the Company Snapshot. To remove any of them, click on the X in the upper right corner. You can restore them at any time by clicking the arrow next to Add Content in the upper left and then clicking the +Add button next to the one you want.

You can also move the blocks into different positions on the page. Grab one by clicking on its header and holding it, dragging it to the preferred position, and releasing it.

Personalized Pages

Users who have been assigned access to the data that each Snapshot contains can customize their own views by adding or deleting sections and rearranging them. So each employee can have his or her own unique-looking Snapshots, though the real-time data in all of them will be the same.

Note: If you’ve given employees besides yourself access to QuickBooks, it’s important that you assign permission levels to them. You probably don’t want everyone to be able to see and modify everything in your file. We can help you set these up.

Other Snapshots
The other two Snapshots are more complex, containing more data options. They can, however, be customized in the same ways that you personalized the Customer screen. The Payments Snapshot can give you a quick update on things like Recent Transactions and A/R by Aging Period.

The Company Snapshot lets you display up to 12 lists and charts, including:

• Account Balances,
• Customers Who Owe Money,
• Expense Breakdown, and,
• Vendors to Pay.

This would be a good page to use as your dashboard (home page), especially since it can also show you your Reminders. With the Company Snapshot open, go to Edit | Preferences | Desktop View | My Preferences and click on the button in front of Save current desktop. Remove the checkmark in front of Show Home page when opening company file if one is there.

​QuickBooks’ Snapshots can get you up to speed quickly on critical elements of your accounting file, but there are other reports that you should run regularly, including complex standard financials reports that require expert analysis. We can help you interpret these, which in turn will help you make smarter, more informed business decisions.

These days, some of us find ourselves updating multiple calendars. There’s the Outlook calendar or other web-based solution for scheduling and task management. Maybe a smartphone app to track to-do’s on the road, and a paper calendar as backup.
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But where do you keep track of your everyday financial tasks? Including these in your scheduling calendars and/or task lists will make for very crowded screens, not to mention how inconvenient it can be to keep switching between applications.

So consider adding one more tracking tool: the QuickBooks calendar. This graphical screen isn’t designed for data entry (except for to-do’s). Rather, it’s designed to give you a quick overview of your financial activity, both historically and in the future.

Before you start using the QuickBooks calendar, you should designate your display and content options. Open the Edit menu and select Preferences | Calendar. Make sure that the My Preferences tab is active.

Click on the arrows to the right of every field to open the menu that displays your choices. The first of these are:

• Calendar view. Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Or do you want QuickBooks to remember the last view that was open?
• Weekly view. Should the calendar only display the primary workdays or all seven?
• Show. What items would you like to have displayed on the calendar? It defaults to All Transactions, but you can filter it by transaction type.

​You can also specify whether you want past due and upcoming entries to be included, and for how many days.

The QuickBooks calendar also offers tools for creating to-do’s of several types (call, fax, email, meeting, appointment, or task).  These will appear on the calendar unless you filter them out.
Tip: The link that opens the to-do window is rather hard to find. It’s in the lower right corner of the graphical calendar.

Click on Add To Do to get started. The window pictured above opens. Click the arrow to the right of the field under TYPE and select the type of to-do that you want to define. You can also select a PRIORITY level if you’d like.

Below those two fields is a small box to the left of WITH. If you want to connect that activity to a customer, vendor, or employee, click in the box and select the type. Then click the arrow next to the field below it and choose the correct individual or company.  

​You aren’t required to create this link; you can simply designate your to-do type and enter a DATE, TIME, and DETAILS. The activity will still appear on your QuickBooks calendar. But if you do associate it with a specific entity, like a customer, it will appear in that customer’s record when you click on the To Do’s tab.

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. All entries for that day appear in a list below. To see the original form, you’d double-click on the one you want to see.

​Using Reminders in conjunction with the QuickBooks calendar can help you stay current with sales and purchases – if you have you due dates established in a way that will be good for your cash flow. Let us know if you want some help scheduling incoming and outgoing payments in a way that will work to your advantage.

If you’ve only been on the receiving end of a paycheck, you may not know just how much prep work went into your neatly-organized paystubs. Those official-looking columns of numbers that described how much you earned and how much was taken out – and for what purpose – were the result of a tremendous amount of data entry when you were hired.
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Now it’s your turn to discover how complex that recordkeeping task is. QuickBooks Online was designed for small businesspeople who weren’t schooled in the intricacies of double-entry accounting, so it simplifies the process of preparing for payroll as much as possible. Still, it will probably be the most challenging element of your web-based bookkeeping.

We can help you navigate these sometimes-choppy waters so that you’ll be ready to run your payroll with confidence. Here’s an overview, though, of one of the most critical steps: creating employee records comprehensively and accurately.

Just the Facts
The left vertical toolbar in QuickBooks Online contains a link for Employees. This is where you’ll add and edit staff records. Once you’re set up and have begun running payrolls, the page that this link opens will display your current year’s payroll cost totals. There will also be a list of employees and their pay rates and payment methods; you’ll be able to click on their entries to view and edit their record details.

To get started, though, you’ll click on Add Employee. This opens a page that asks for the individual’s:

• Full name,
• Withholdings (you’ll enter W-4 information here),
• Pay frequency,
• Pay type and amount (multiple options are available here besides salary and hourly),
• Deductions (retirement, health care, etc.), and
• Pay method (check or direct deposit).

Some of these requests for information have a small pencil icon next to them. This means that there are additional screens where you can provide the needed details. In the example above, you’re defining pay types that will be available to the employee, like sick pay and vacation pay.

Depending on your company’s benefits, entering deduction information may be the most detailed and time-consuming task. QuickBooks Online first lets you choose between entering a deduction/contribution or garnishment. If it’s health insurance, for example, you’ll have to indicate how much money will be deducted from employees’ earnings each pay period (in dollars or a percentage) and what the company-paid contribution will be (if any). If there’s an annual maximum, you’ll also enter it here, and you’ll indicate whether the premium amount is taxable or pre-tax.

A sample check is displayed in the right column of this page. As you enter information, the check will be filled in with the correct amounts. If you don’t have a particular detail at hand, you can save what you’ve done and come back later to finish the record. And you can always return to edit data you’ve supplied.
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When you’ve completed all of this and clicked Done, you’ll be back at the Employees screen. Click on the name of the staff person whose records you just created, and you’ll see something like this:

There will undoubtedly be times when you’ll want to see your employee data in report form rather than clicking through numerous individual records. QuickBooks Online offers several report templates that accommodate this. You’ll click on Reports in the left vertical toolbar, and then All Reports | Manage Payroll. The most relevant here in terms of viewing employee-related information are:

• Vacation and Sick Leave,
• Employee Details,
• Payroll Deductions/Contributions,
• Workers’ Compensation, and
• Employee Directory.

Running your first payroll can be daunting. We hope you’ll let us help you prepare for it.

QuickBooks Online has grown tremendously since its introduction more than a decade ago. It’s not quite as mature as the top-of-the-line desktop versions, but it’s not far behind anymore.
No matter which version of QuickBooks you first used, there may be elements of Windows functionality that you miss in the application, like:

• The traditional file menus,
• Keyboard shortcuts, and
• The ability to open the software and let it stay open all day, minimizing it when you didn’t need it.

The recently released QuickBooks Online for PC (and Mac) App offers all of those features. It may also be faster than the browser-based version because it loads the whole application at once and keeps the pages cached. It’s free; here’s the download link.

Getting started is easy. You click the download link and then install the app like you would any Windows or Mac software. When the download is complete, you’ll find a new shortcut icon on your desktop’s home screen. Click on it, and you can either sign into an existing account or register for a new one.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it still looks like QuickBooks Online – because it is. But if you look at the upper left of the screen, you’ll see what looks like a series of Windows desktop menus – because it is. But the menu options don’t match Windows desktop menus. Instead they’re designed to mirror the navigation tools in QuickBooks Online. You can use either or both.
Note: Windows that open when you click on one of these menu options can act in one of two ways.

They can either replace the current window, which is the default in QuickBooks Online, or they can open in a new window. To change the current setting, open the Window drop-down menu and check or un-check Menu Items Open New Windows.

Multiple Updated Windows
It’s not difficult to switch screens in the browser-based version of QuickBooks Online. But it’s time consuming if you need to consult two or three different pages. You find yourself switching back and forth and probably having to make notes about what you learned from the other screen(s).
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The new QuickBooks Online for Windows App makes this process easier and faster. Some navigation links now have a small arrow-in-a-box icon to their right, called a Detach icon. Click on one of those, and the item opens in a new window. Any changes you make in one window are automatically reflected in the other open windows.

This new functionality isn’t available everywhere in the app. You’ll see the Detach icons when you hover over transaction types by clicking on the + sign at the top of the screen, with the exception of Pay Checks, Single Time Activity, Weekly Timesheets, Pay Bills, and Statements. To open a transaction form in a new window, you must click directly on the icon. You can also open most reports in new windows; the new icons appear when you open a list of them.

So if you’re looking at a report that you don’t want to close and you want to enter a related transaction, you’d simply click on the + sign and select the transaction type by clicking directly on the Detach icon. The new window opens; you fill out the form and save it, and you’re back at your report, where you can see the new entry in the report.

If you have a transaction open and you want to consult a report, though, you’d need to select it from the Reports menu at the top, after making sure that the Menu Items Open New Windows entry in the Window menu was checked.

And if you’re still a fan of keyboard shortcuts and miss them in QBO, you’ll find them active in the app.

The QuickBooks Online for Windows App is totally optional; you can keep using the browser-based version if you prefer. The ability to keep the app running without signing in and out all day may appeal to you – if there’s no chance someone else could access your computer while you’re away from your desk.
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You may or may not experience faster performance, depending on your system configuration. And the app’s other capabilities are a matter of personal preference. Let us know if you need help working with this new option – or if you have other questions about QuickBooks Online.

You probably don’t get as many paper forms in the U.S. Mail as you used to. But when you do, do you draw conclusions about the business that sent them based on what their forms look like?
Whether or not you think you do, most people make judgements on businesses based on collateral materials. You might notice that there’s no company logo, or that there are unnecessary blank fields. Maybe the print is very light or blurry, and there’s no message at the bottom thanking you for your business and your payment.

How you present yourself on paper does matter. There’s a lot of competition out there, and you need to use all of the tools available to you to stand out. QuickBooks provides one way to do so with its simple forms customization features.

Getting Started
To see what forms are available for customization, open the Lists menu and select Templates to open this window:

Before you try your hand at customizing a form, make a copy to work with first. Highlight Intuit Product Invoice. Click the down arrow next to Templates in the lower left, and select Duplicate. A small window will open, displaying your options. Select Invoice and click OK.

QuickBooks will then take you back to the Templates window, and you’ll see a new entry labeled Copy of: Intuit Product Invoice. Right-click on it and select Edit Template from the menu that opens. This will open the Basic Customization window.

There are two parts to this screen. The editing options for the template you selected will appear on the left, and a preview of your invoice will display on the right. As you make modifications to the template, the preview will change to reflect them.

​The best, most noticeable thing you can do to customize your invoice is to add a logo. Click the box in front of Use logo, and locate the file in the computer directory that opens. Double-click it. You logo will appear to the left of your company name and address in the upper left corner of the preview.

You can make numerous changes to your template in this window, like:
•        Selecting a new color scheme,
•        Changing fonts,
•        Deciding how much of your contact information should appear, and
•        Indicating whether the Print Status Stamp (PAID, PENDING, etc.) should appear where appropriate on your invoices.

Note: You can choose to use the same modified design on multiple types of forms. This is a little complicated; let us help you.

More Customizing Options
The changes you just made were fairly superficial. However, QuickBooks offers tools that let you go much further, modifying the actual content of the invoice itself, its columns, and its fields. To get started on this, click the Additional Customization button at the bottom of the screen. The window that opens displays a preview of your invoice on the right side, just like in the previous window.

Your customization options appear on the left side, divided into five different sections. You’ll work primarily with three of them for your invoice:

Header. This includes all of the information that appears on about the top third of the form, like Bill To, Terms, Due Date, and Project/Job.

Columns. What are you billing the customer for? Item, Description, Quantity, Rate, etc.

​Footer. What information will you want to enter after you’ve completed the invoice’s product or service content? You’ll likely want fields like Total, Balance Due, and Payments/Credits, perhaps a Message.

As you can see in the above image, QuickBooks lets you choose whether specific fields and columns will appear on your invoices onscreen and/or in print. You can also change field labels if you’d like. And if you have overlapping fields or want to further modify the appearance of the invoice, you can use the Layout Designer. It’s a simple tool, but it requires some design skills.

Of course, you may not be printing many invoices at all if you’re set up to email them and accept payments online. But your customers, of course, will still see how carefully you’ve crafted your forms, which will feed into their overall perception of you. Let this impression be a good one.

It’s probably one of your favorite QuickBooks activities. Be sure you understand the mechanics of recording payments. There are numerous ways to prioritize your workday. Do the most difficult things first. Get important phone calls out of the way. Respond to customer emails.
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But it’s likely that one activity takes 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. To see your list, open the Lists menu and select Customer & Vendor Profile Lists, then Payment Method List. This window opens:

To make changes to this list, click the down arrow to the right of Payment Method. By selecting items from this menu, you can add, edit, and delete payment methods. You can also make one temporarily inactive if for some reason you’re not going to support that option right now but don’t want to delete it, either. Click in the box next to Include Inactive if you want it to remain on the list (an X will appear next to it). When you want to reinstate it, open the Payment Method menu again and select Make Payment Method Active.

To search for every transaction that used a specific payment method, highlight it in the list and select Find in Transactions. QuickBooks will open the Find window with that filter already applied.
When you’re done working with that window, click the x in the upper right to close it.

Applying the Funds
Ideally, you or someone on your staff will be working frequently with the Receive Payments screen frequently. To get there, open the Customers menu and select Receive Payments, or click Receive Payments on the home page. This is the screen you will work with if you’re recording a payment that is to be applied to an invoice that you sent.

First, select a customer by clicking on the down arrow in the field to the right of RECEIVED FROM. If there are outstanding invoices, they will appear in the table below. Enter the PAYMENT AMOUNT in the field below, and change the date if necessary. Click on the icon representing the payment method. If you don’t see it there, click the down arrow below MORE and add it or select it. Your chosen icon will turn green. Then:

• For cash or e-checks: Just enter any REFERENCE #
• For checks: Enter the CHECK #.
• For credit/debit cards: If you’ve saved the customer’s preferred payment method in his or her record, the number will fill in automatically. If not, or you need to change it, enter it manually. As you know, you need a merchant account in order to accept credit/debit cards and e-checks. If you haven’t set one up and want to, let us help.

If the payment amount equals the total of all outstanding invoices, there will be a check mark in the first column of every line in the table. If the payment is for any less than the CUSTOMER BALANCE in the upper right, QuickBooks automatically pays the oldest invoice(s) first. You’ll also see an UNDERPAYMENT box in the lower left corner. Click the button in front of your preference here (leave as underpayment or write off the extra). When you’re done, click one of the Save buttons.

Other Types of Payments
You’ll also use the Receive Payments window to record down payments and overpayments. And there are situations where you’ll have to complete other forms to document the incoming money. For example, if a customer makes a partial payment for products or services that haven’t yet been invoiced, you’d use a Payment Item. A customer who pays for a product at the time it is received would get a Sales Receipt.

This may all sound a little confusing. But it won’t be if you gain a thorough understanding of the right way to record different types of payments. We can go over all of this with you to ensure that your incoming money is documented correctly, which will take less time than trying to retrace your steps when a mistake has occurred.

Intuit discontinued its own QuickBooks mobile app a while back, but there’s still plenty of processing power available for your smartphone or tablet. In days gone by, running a company was a 40 hour per week proposition. You might have taken work home some evenings or gone into the office on weekends.
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Those days are over, thanks to the internet and mobile technology. This fundamental change in the way we do business means that it’s now hard to get away from work.  Your smartphone and tablet are usually within easy reach, and they’re always tempting you to check in.

On the flip side, that kind of 24/7/365 accessibility has numerous benefits. There are, for example, apps that can be integrated with your desktop QuickBooks company file, which enable you to:

• Make sales wherever you are,
• Document expenses as they’re incurred, and
• Monitor employee time for payroll purposes.

Let’s take a look at these in more detail.

Payment-processing on smartphones has become commonplace these days. You’ve probably seen merchants accepting credit cards on mobile phones in one of two ways: by swiping the card on a small card reader that attach to their device or by entering bank cards numbers directly.
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Intuit’s GoPayment lets you do either. You can download the free app and process a customer’s payment on your smartphone. However, you still have to download it into QuickBooks and either create a sales receipt or match it to an open invoice. This isn’t a difficult process once you understand it, but you must be sure to do it correctly from the start. We can do some practice runs with you. Benefit: Improved sales that aren’t dependent on location

One of the smartest, most useful apps that has ever been created is the expense reporter – particularly when used by your road warriors for on-the-go expenses. There are a handful of these. Travelers can record expenses in two ways: they can either enter the information directly or snap a picture of a receipt with a smartphone. When your employees get back to the office, they’re able to prepare complete expense reports, whose approved data can be transferred into QuickBooks.

Concur is one of these apps. When you set it up, it imports Account Codes, Customers, Jobs and Classes, and Vendor and Employee Records from QuickBooks so that these can be assigned for each expense entry. Credit card transactions can be imported directly. When an expense report is completed, it can be sent to a manager for approval, and reimbursement is then deposited in the employee’s bank account.

Tallie works similarly. It can automatically categorize expenses and alert approvers to expense policy violations. Used in conjunction with Bill.com and SmartVault, it can accommodate a sophisticated, seamless accounting workflow. We’ll see more multi-app integration as cloud-based financial solutions mature, but if you’re going to attempt such a setup, let us help you with the initial mechanics.

Benefit: More accurate, policy-compliant expense reports

Time-Tracking and Timesheets
If all of your employees walk through the office door every morning and stay there, you don’t need a mobile app for time-tracking. But for businesses whose cash flow depends on recovering and recording every minute of billable time, a smartphone time-tracker is ideal.
TSheets Time Tracker can help improve your bottom line in numerous ways. This particular app:

• Accommodates real-time mobile data entry,
• Tracks employee locations using GPS, and
• Creates timesheets that can be synchronized with QuickBooks, tracking billable time by customer, job, employee, etc.

Benefits: Employee accountability; recovery and correct classification of all billable hours; and less time required to create timesheets.

Moving Toward Integration
Given the size limitations of smartphones, some mobile apps contain only a subset of the features found in their desktop counterparts. But that subset is chosen based on the needs of mobile users.

Fewer features mean that your learning time for the mobile apps that integrate with QuickBooks will be minimal. But the steps to sync with QuickBooks must be followed to the letter, and you may not be familiar with such a process. We want you to experience the benefits that these smartphone solutions can offer without compromising the integrity of your QuickBooks company file. Let us introduce you to these forward-looking, beneficial tools.

Let’s go over this…You send invoices because you sold products and/or services. Purchase orders go out when you’re running low on inventory, and it seems there are always bills to pay. All of this activity is important in itself, but what’s probably the most critical element of QuickBooks… is “reports”.

Reports can tell you how many forest green sweatshirts you sold in April, what you paid for health insurance premiums in the first quarter of this year, and how much you bought from your favorite vendor last month. They’re very good at drilling down to get the precise set of numbers you need.

But reports – carefully customized and properly analyzed – can do more than tell you how many items you have/sold, and if you are starting to pay too much for your phone bill. They can help you make the business decisions that will help you take your company to the next level. There are several that you should be looking at regularly, and we can help you with the interpretation of the more complex financial reports.

So… The below listed reports, are the ones you’ll want to run often:

Who Owes Money? This is a big one!
That’s probably a question you ask yourself every day. You don’t have to run the A/R Aging Detail report every day, but you will want to run it frequently. It tells you who owes you money and whether they’ve passed the due date (and by how many days). See the example picture below:

As with any report, you can modify it to include the columns, data set and date range

Figure 1: By running the A/R Aging Detail report, you can see whether you need to follow up with customers who have past due invoices.
As with any report, you can modify it to include the columns, data set and date range you want by clicking the Customize button. When you create a report in a format that you think you might want to run again, click the Memorize button. Enter a name that you’ll remember, and assign it to a Memorized Report Group.

Getting There… Help:
There are two ways to find the reports you want to see. You can open the Reports menu and move your cursor down to the category you want, like Customers & Receivables, which will open a slide-out menu of options there.

Or you can open the Report Center, which lets you explore reports in more depth. Each is represented by a small graphic with four icons under it. There, you can:

• Run the report with your own data in it
• Open a small informational window
• Designate it as a Favorite, and
• View QuickBooks help.

Figure 2: If you access QuickBooks reports through the Report Center, you’ll have several related options.

Other accounts receivable reports that you should consult periodically include Open Invoices and Average Days to Pay.

** Sound like too much to remember or go through? Relax… we are here to help you with these or any related tasks with QuickBooks! We can either handle it ALL for you, OR we can teach you how to become proficient and effective while doing your own bookkeeping: 972-495-8877

Tracking What You Owe
Reports can also keep you up-to-date on money that you owe to other people and companies. An important one is Unpaid Bills Detail, accessible through the Vendors & Payables menu item. Though you can modify its columns, this report basically tells you who is expecting money from you, the date the bill was issued,  its due date, any number assigned to it, the balance due, and relevant aging information.

Vendor Balance Detail is critical, as well. This report displays every transaction (invoices, payments, etc.) that contributes to the balance you have with each vendor.

Figure 3: We hope you’ll let us help you by running and interpreting these standard financial reports for you!

QuickBooks report categories include one labeled Company & Financial. These are reports that you can run yourself, but they’re critical for understanding your company’s financial status. We can customize and analyze these for you on a regular basis so you’ll know where you stand, to make it easier for you. They include:

• Balance Sheet. What is the value of your company? The balance sheet breaks out this information by account (under the umbrella of assets, liabilities and equity).
• Income Statement. Often referred to as Profit & Loss, this shows you how much money your business made or lost over a specific time period.
• Statement of Cash Flows. How much money came in and went out during a specified time range?

Reports can only generate information about what you’ve entered in QuickBooks and exactly where it’s been entered. So it’s crucial that you follow standard accounting practices as you proceed through your daily workflow. We’re always available to answer questions you have about QuickBooks’ structure and your activity there. Your reports – and your critical business decisions – depend on it… So we can teach you how to operate these effectively, OR we can simply take care of it all for you!