Accounting Software & QuickBooks Help

QuickBooks Keyboard Shortcuts

Ashley — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:26:06 +0000

I can’t tell you how many times I get asked “how do you move through transactions so fast?” Here’s a little hint…

Unpaid Bills report – Why do $0.00 balances still show on this report?

Ashley — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:16:42 +0000

I have gotten this question a few times now in the past couple of months so you know when that happens – it’s time to create a blog post. When you run the Unpaid Bills Detail report in QuickBooks, it’s supposed to show you a listing of any bills that are unpaid and therefor still open. Sometimes when people run this report, they notice that although the vendor has a total of $0.00 balance, a listing of bills and credits still show up on the report. Why does this happen? Well many people don’t realize that just because you enter in a vendor credit to wipe out a bill, it doesn’t mean that the credit is actually being used against that open bill. When you go to Vendors>Enter bills and choose the Credit button, the system creates a vendor credit which does effect the balance that is owed to the vendor. So if you were to go to the Vendor Center, the balance for the vendor will be reflective of the total of all the bills and subtract out all the bill payments and credits. Unfortunately, unless you set the credit against a specific bill, the bill itself will still show on an Unpaid Bills Detail report.

How do we get this to go away? Once you create the vendor credit, go to Vendors>Pay Bills. Check off the bill you want to use the credit against and choose the button at the bottom that says “Set Credits.” Check off the credit you want to use and click ok. Now you just have to click Pay Selected Bills and this will set the credit against the bill and therefor take the bill off the Unpaid Bills Detail report. Just as a little side note, this process is the same for the Open Invoices customer report. If you see any invoices on the report that have an offsetting credit, just go into the credit and tell it to apply to the actual invoice. The invoice will then fall off the Open Invoices Report.

Resolved Question: QuickBooks 2012 Invoice problem.?

CIAS QuickBooks ProAdvisor's Answers - Yahoo! Answers — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:56:39 +0000

Tracking Pre-Payments on inventory purchases in QuickBooks

Ashley — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:29:19 +0000

I recently received a call from a client with an issue in buying/paying for inventory. Basically he needs to have a way to pay an inventory item bill before the items are actually received and then have that payment apply to the bill that gets created once the items are received. Although it requires a few extra steps, here are 2 suggestions on how to handle this particular issue.

A) Using Accounts Payable:

From the QuickBooks Banking menu, choose Write Checks.
Fill out the top part of the check with the vendor name and the amount of the payment.
On the Expenses tab, enter Accounts Payable in the Account column. The amount should fill in for you.
Enter the vendor name in the Customer:Job column, and then click OK.
When the items arrive, either enter an item receipt without a bill (you will enter the bill later), or receive the items on a bill.
When you are ready to pay the bill, from the Vendors menu, choose Pay Bills.
You may want to choose Vendors in the Sort Bills By drop-down list, and select the option to Show all bills. This will allow you to see the
credit and the bill together.
Select both the credit (negative) and bill amounts. QuickBooks will create a bill payment check for the balance due. If the prepayment equals the bill amount, a check will not be created, but the prepayment and the bill will be linked.

B) Create an Asset Account for tracking prepayments:

From the QuickBooks Lists menu, choose Chart of Accounts.
Click New.
From the Type drop-down list, choose Other Current Asset.
Enter a name, such as Prepaid Inventory.
Click OK.
From the Banking menu, choose Write Checks.
Fill out the top part of the check with the vendor name and the amount of the payment.
On the Expenses tab, enter the asset account you created in step 1 in the Account column. The amount should fill in for you.
Click OK.
When the items arrive, from the QuickBooks Vendors menu, choose Enter Bills. On the Expenses tab, select the asset account, and enter the amount of the prepayment as a negative value.
On the Items tab, enter the items. The bill will equal the balance owed after deducting the prepayment. Recording the bill will reduce the asset account.
Click OK

As always, if you need help getting this setup or have any QuickBooks related questions, do not hesitate to give us a call.

Undecided Question: Help with quickbooks pro enter and tab key?

CIAS QuickBooks ProAdvisor's Answers - Yahoo! Answers — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:17:55 +0000

Point of Sale Transactions missing in QuickBooks Financial.

Ashley — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:27:38 +0000

For those of you using QuickBooks Point of Sale integrated with QuickBooks Financial software, you may notice from time to time that QBF is missing some POS transactions from a prior period. Although this doesn’t happen often, you need to know how to handle it if it does. What could cause this problem? Well according to Intuit, it can be caused by one of the following:

-A backup was restored in QuickBooks after a POS – QB Exchange

-Transactions were manually deleted in QuickBooks

-You are in a different QB file than the one that has the transactions.

What they don’t mention is that sometimes, weird things just happen. If you run into this issue, here are two steps you can take to fix the issue.

1) You can go into POS sales history and search for the receipt #’s that you know are missing. Once you are on the receipt that needs to be resent, click “I Want To” > “Show Financial Data.” Select the checkbox that says “Resend this document during the next financial Exchange.” Do that to all the missing receipts and then do a financial exchange.

2) If you have a whole lot of receipts that are missing and it would take forever to set each one manually to resend, you can choose the option to recover QuickBooks. To do this, go to Point of Sale and in the “Financial” dropdown, choose “Recover QuickBooks.” Click continue on the warning message and enter the date range that was covered by the original financial exchange. Type “YES” in the confirmation window and click Continue to resend the transactions to QuickBooks.

As always, if you have questions or concerns, feel free to contact your CIAS rep for assistance.

Resolved Question: quickbooks simple start?

CIAS QuickBooks ProAdvisor's Answers - Yahoo! Answers — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:42:26 +0000

Resolved Question: How do you void checks in Quickbooks 2010?

CIAS QuickBooks ProAdvisor's Answers - Yahoo! Answers — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:18:58 +0000

From Paper to Progressive – Duplicate Names

Travis — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:42:09 +0000

While working with my client who is switching to a computerized system, we came across an issue with duplicate customers in our database. These duplicates happened mostly from a lack of users understanding of best practices when entering data. After reviewing and assisting with the clean up, I came up with some tips that makes data entry more uniformed which should lessen the amount of duplication and make it easier to find customers in the future.

Use ‘and’ instead of ‘&’ – This one I saw happen a lot. A customer by the name of “A & A Contracting” was listed with the following variations:

A & A Contracting
A&A Contracting
A& A Contracting
A &A Contracting

All these different variations make it hard to locate the customer when doing a search, forcing users to scroll through the name list to find the name they are looking for. By following the rule everyone would have entered “A and A Contracting”. While possible, I doubt that many users would ever enter “AandA Contracting” as the name as it doesn’t look readable.

No abbreviations with periods – I recommend that when a company has abbreviations or initials in their name to exclude the use of the period and spaces. Some people use it, others don’t, and in a database that can cause people not to be able to find the name they are looking for. A common example that I use is “W.B. Mason”. I would recommend that the name entered would be “WB Mason”. First, this simplifies the data entry. For people that are new to computers, the less typing the easier it is for them. This also eliminates issues where someone might enter “W. B. Mason” by putting spaces, and another person not entering spaces. The more room that users have to change things, the more likely you will get duplicate names.

Don’t use shorthand – (unless it’s VERY common). A lot of the companies that my client deals with are contractors and construction companies. This lead to some people using shorthand for these words, “const.” or “cont.”, and sometimes as “con.”. Not only can this be confusing (is ‘con.’ short for construction, contractor, continental?) and makes it harder to search.

Enter as much information as you can get – This one started popping up when the owner wanted to make the employees enter client information instead of just using a generic customer. We ended up with multiple customers with just the name of “Mike” and a phone number. With 8 “Mike”s on the list, it was near impossible to tell which is which. Adding even a last name would have helped out a lot, but adding the address would also make it easier in case there are multiple people with the same first and last name. This is one of the hardest to overcome as it is because employees get lazy and don’t want to enter all the information.

By following these few guidelines, your customer list should become less cluttered with garbage, be faster and easier to locate existing customers, and make the information you collect much more valuable.

Sales Orders, Work Orders, Layaways in QuickBooks Point of Sale

Ashley — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:11:35 +0000

QuickBooks Point of Sale offers the ability to process Sales Orders, Work Orders and Layaways, which are technically non-posting transactions that promise your customer something in the future. Sales Orders are used when a customer has ordered something that is currently not in stock, or a special order that you normally don’t stock. Work orders are generally used for service work that has not yet been provided and Layaways are created when a customer has purchased merchandise but is paying incremental payments.

You set up the ability to process these Customer Orders and choose the initial deposit requirements in Company Preferences. Although you may use them for different purposes, the procedures are generally the same in creating customer orders, receiving deposits and finally selling the item(s). From the home page click on Make a Customer Order and then choose which type of order you want to create. You must always include a customer name and may be required to enter an initial deposit. If you are processing a layaway, it is important that you remove the merchandise from the floor, since POS does not remove it from inventory until you actually sell it, and another sales associate may think you still have the item in stock.

Any deposits you accept from customers will be entered in QuickBooks Financial in the Unearned Revenue account. This account should either be zero or include only customer deposits for merchandise and work that has not yet been completed. When the merchandise has been received (Sales Order), the work has been performed, (Work Order) or the customer has picked up their merchandise (Layaway), it is important that you complete the sale and remove the product(s) from inventory.

Go back to the original Sales Order, Work Order or Layaway by choosing the “Sell From Order” button on the home scrren. Choose the type of order to see the list of orders that you want. Click to select your order and and select “Sell Item”. Enter the quantity of the item or service you want to sell. This will create a sales receipt, pull the merchandise from inventory and allow you to collect any additional funds that are owed. After you have generated the sales receipt, the customer sales order, work order or layaway is marked closed.