We’re one month into 2023.  Are you ready for what may come the rest of the year? QuickBooks can help.

Now that the holidays are over and you’ve settled back into a normal work pace, it’s a good time to assess where you are with your finances and consider where you’d like to be. We hope you’ve been able to use the guidance we offered last month about how to make sure your accounts receivable and payable are up to date. Running related reports and communicating with your customers and vendors can go a long way toward meeting those obligations.

But there’s more you can do in QuickBooks to prepare for the coming year.

If you’ve set sales goals, for example, QuickBooks can help you track them.

Looking to bring in new customers by telling them in advance what you can do for them and for how much? Brush up on QuickBooks’ estimate tools.

Uncertain about the status of your inventory? QuickBooks can tell you what you need to know.

We like to see our clients using as many of QuickBooks’ features as possible. That habit can go along way toward making 2023 a more productive and prosperous year than perhaps 2022 was.

Are You Using QuickBooks’ Sales Tools?

Do you create sales goals for your company? Many business owners don’t. We understand that. You spend so much time just running your operation that it’s sometimes hard to makes plans for upcoming months. And you may not be comfortable making educated guess about future sales.

QuickBooks can help you look ahead by helping you look behind, primarily through its sales reports. One approach is to identify your best customers, since they may be some of your best prospects for 2023. You’ll find this information by going to the Company Snapshot. Click Snapshots in the toolbar and make sure the Company tab is highlighted. Find the Top Customers by Sales chart and set the date range for a past period. lick the Customer tab to find more information about historical sales.

Your best customers may be the ones you already have. QuickBooks can help you identify them. You can find other sales reports in the Report Center. Go to Reports | Report Center and click on Sales. Customizable reports here include Sales by Customer and Sales by Item, as well as Sales by Rep. There’s even a Pending Sales report, which would signal that some follow-up might be needed.

Should You Be Creating Estimates?

This, of course, will depend on the type of work your company does. If you do lawn work or computer repair, for example, giving prospects an estimate will help them determine whether they want to go ahead with the product or service. It can also be a starting point for negotiations.

If you’ve created invoices in QuickBooks already, estimates will be easy. Open the Customers menu and click Create Estimates. Select a Customer: Job and verify the Date and Estimate # and give it a Due Date, so the customer knows when the estimate expires. Enter the products and/or services and their proposed quantities and prices, then save and send or print the estimate.

TIP: Would you rather have the Due Date field read something like Expires? We can shows you how to modify labels on forms.

How Much Inventory Do You Have?

This information is critical whether you sell one-of-a-kind items on Etsy or dozens of the same product. When you create an item record in QuickBooks to use in invoices, estimates, etc., you should be using the software’s inventory-tracking tools so you always know when you’re running low (or out).

You’ll always know how many items you have in stock when you complete these fields in item records.

Open the Lists menu and select Item List. Open the Item menu in the lower left and click New. Select Inventory Part under Type. In the window that opens, fill out the top part of the form with information about the product. At the bottom of the screen is a section labeled Inventory Information, as pictured above. Complete the following fields:

Asset Account. This should be set to the default, Inventory Asset.

Reorder Point(Min)and(Max).

QuickBooks reduces the number of items in stock every time a sale is made. At what point(s) do you want to be warned that you’re running low?

On Hand. How many do you have right now?

Total Value. QuickBooks calculates this field.

As of. Make sure the current date is the one you want.

If you let yourself run out of a particular item, or if you try to sell more than you have on hand, you’ll get a warning when you try to create an invoice or sales receipt for the product that says You don’t have sufficient quantity on hand to sell item.

Make It A Good Year

There are certainly other QuickBooks tools you can use to improve your financial outlook. We’ll be exploring them throughout the year. In the meantime, let us know how we can help you broaden and improve your use of QuickBooks. We can expand on what we covered in this column and also introduce you to features you need but don’t know about.

Your time as a business owner is valuable. Don’t waste any of it doing duplicate data entry. Accounting takes time. And the last thing you need when you’re working with your company’s finances is activity that takes unnecessary minutes. If you’ve created a record or transaction once, you don’t want to have to enter the information a second or third time. That’s why using QuickBooks Online is so far superior to manual accounting. It remembers everything, so you can use data again when you need it. But sometimes you have to give it a little guidance. That’s the case with recurring transactions. If you have forms that you create repeatedly, with very few changes (like utility bills), you can “memorize” the transactions. When the bill comes around the next month, you can modify any details necessary and dispatch it again. Here’s how itworks.

Three Options

To get started, enter a transaction that you want to save and be able to use again (with changes).Let’s say it’s an invoice that you send to a customer once a month who has a service contract for network maintenance. When you’ve completed the form, look toward the bottom of the screen and click Make recurring. The screen will now read Recurring Invoice, with new content as pictured below.

You can specify transactions as recurring and add details like frequency and start/end dates. If you want to change the Template name to something that will remind you of its purpose, you can do so. In the field beneath Interval, select Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly, and then indicate what day of the month the transaction should occur. Enter a Start date and End [date]or select None if the length of service is open-ended. In example above, you would receive a reminder from QuickBooks Online three days before the invoice is scheduled to go out. The service contract has no ending date, so you’d continue to get reminders until you change the template.

Next to the Template name is a field labeled Type. QuickBooks Online gives you three options for taking action on the recurring transaction. It can be:

Scheduled. This is an automated option that should be used with caution. If you select this, your transaction will go out as scheduled with no intervention from you. Only the date will change.

Reminder. QuickBooks Online will send you a reminder ahead of the scheduled date. You can specify how many days ahead you should receive it. Then it’s up to you to make any necessary changes and send it out.

Unscheduled. QuickBooks Online will do nothing except save your template. When you’ve completed all of the required fields, click Save template in the lower left.

Using Recurring Transactions

If you’ve chosen the Scheduled option for any transactions, you don’t have to do anything more with it until you want to change its content or status. To find your list of recurring transactions so you can process any that are you earmarked as Reminder or Unscheduled, click the gear icon in the upper right of the QuickBooks Online screen. Under Lists, click Recurring transactions.

The Recurring Transactions table

The screen that opens displays a table containing all of your recurring transactions. You can learn just about everything you need to know about those transactions here: Template Name, Type, Txn (Transaction) Type, Interval, Previous Date, Next Date, Customer/Vendor, and Amount.

The last column in the table, labeled Action, opens a menu that displays different options depending on the type of transaction. For our Reminder example, you can:

Edit (edit the template, not the transaction)

Use(opens the original transaction that you can edit, save, and send)

Duplicate(duplicate the template)

Pause(stop sending reminders temporarily)

Skip next date

Delete

Looking Ahead

We’re a month into 2023 now. What does this year look like for you? Is QuickBooks Online doing everything you need it to do? If you’re starting to outgrow your version, we’d be happy to consult with you about upgrading to another service level (Essentials, Plus, or Advanced).Or if you know the version you’re using is supposed to do something you need but you can’t quite figure it out, let us know. We want 2023 to be a good year for you, and we’d like to make your accounting work as painless and productive as possible.

If you haven’t checked out QuickBooks Online free mobile app, you might be surprised at how much it can do.

There was a time when leaving the office meant you were done with work for the day. These days, many homes are the office. And easy mobile access has made it difficult to get away from work.

That can be a good thing, especially if you’re a small business owner who must keep a close eye on what goes on outside of regular hours. Many productivity websites have mobile companion apps that make it possible to pick up where you left off when you were sitting at your laptop or desktop.

QuickBooks Online is one of them. Its mobile apps (iOS and Android, which look and work similarly) can’t replicate absolutely everything on the website. For example, you can’t work with projects or pay contractors or define sales taxes or run most reports. But they do a good job of providing the tools you’d most likely need when you’re away from your regular workspace. Let’s take a look at them.

A Terrific User Experience

Intuit did a great job designing its mobile apps to be easy to use on small screens. It takes very little time to learn how to navigate around, and individual working screens are clean, attractive, and understandable.

When Should You Use the Apps?

There are only two things that QuickBooks Online apps can do that the desktop version can’t: track mileage and snap photos of receipts. There are other situations when it’s very convenient to have the apps available, like creating a sales receipt or invoice for a customer in person, adding basic details for a new customer or vendor, or checking your account balances. It’s probably best to do the bulk of your work on your desktop or laptop when you can, to avoid errors caused by small—and abbreviated—screens.

Navigation Icons

The apps open to a screen called Today, which is their version of a desktop application’s Dashboard. There are links to actions like creating an invoice and looking up a customer, as well as a to-do list, the QB Assistant (a support tool),your account balances, a link to recent transactions, and real-time information about the status of your invoices and bills.

The other three icons at the bottom of the screen serve as navigation tools. The one on the far right labeled Menu opens two screens that can be toggled back and forth. One is Shortcuts, pictured below, a series of links to common actions. The other, All, opens a more traditional, comprehensive menu of links to individual app functions, like a Profit and loss report, Sales receipts, and Products & services.

The QuickBooks Online app’s Shortcuts screen Besides those functions, there are links to other financial activities on the All screen. The ones you’d be most likely to use remotely are:

● Transactions. The ones you’ve imported from your banks are available via this shortcut, as well as any you’ve entered manually on your desktop or phone. You can also get to the list by clicking on an account name on the Today screen.
● Receipt snap. Using your phone’s camera, you can take a picture of a receipt. The app will pull some of its data and deposit it on an expense form that’s accessible on the app and the desktop version, where you can fill in the blanks and see the picture.
● Invoices and Estimates. View, modify, and add them.
● Customers and Vendors. Abbreviated versions of your records.
● Expenses and Bill Pay.
● Mileage. Enter trip data manually or automatically, through your phone’s location services

How QuickBooks Can Get Your Finances In Order for 2023

Put 2022 behind you by wrapping up those unfinished accounting tasks in QuickBooks.

You meant to clean up your accounting data by the end of 2022, but December is so busy. It was hard to do much beyond managing each day’s high-priority QuickBooks work. You’d catch up in January, you told yourself in December.

Now that it’s January, it’s time for a fresh start in a lot of ways, including your bookkeeping. But you can’t look ahead very effectively if you’re not sure where you are now. We recommend you take stock of the state of your QuickBooks company file. Are you caught up on bills? Do customers need to be invoiced? Are any of them past due on their payments to you?

QuickBooks is great at customer and vendor management, transaction processing, and reports. It can also serve as a barometer of your overall financial health. Let’s take a look at what you can do to update your company file and get ready for the challenges coming in 2023.

Who Do You Owe?

It’s easy to let some bills slip at the end of the year. Extra expenses in December may have caused you to run short on funds. Maybe you simply forgot, or you didn’t have a chance to deal with your payables. Whatever the reason, you can easily find out what bills you need to pay using QuickBooks.

The first thing you should do is run an A/P Aging Detail report. Open the Report Center(Reports | Report Center) and click Vendors & Payables. Locate the report and click the green arrow button. When the report opens, click Customize Reporting the upper if you want to change the Dates. Then look to see if any bills are past due. Double-click on any row to see the original bill and pay it. You can also run the Unpaid Bills Detail report.

The Unpaid Bills Detail report

You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s important: If you’re past due on any bills, contact the vendors and let them know when they might expect payment. It makes a difference.

Who Owes You?

Just as you may have missed some bills in December, your customers might have let invoice payments slip. You need to find out who is in arrears. There are two reports that can help you here. Open the Report Center again and click Customers & Receivables. Run the A/R Aging Detail report and look at the Aging column to see if any customers have gone past due on payments. Open Invoices, too, can alert you to those customers.

How Should You Approach Past-Due Customers?

This is a problem for every small business. You don’t want to come on too strong and threaten the goodwill you’ve built up with your customers, but you have your own cash flow to consider. Here are some approaches:

• Set up payment reminders so you’ll remember to send follow-up emails. Go to Edit | Preferences |Payments | Company Preferences. Answer the questions under Payment Reminders.
• Automate reminders. Open the Customers menu and select Payment Reminders| Schedule Payment Reminders. This is a little complicated, so you may want our help with it. You’ll be creating schedules to automate the sending of invoices or statements at intervals you define. So you might dispatch an invoice to All customers when their payments are15 days after the due date, for example. Click Add reminder to see the default text for the email accompanying the invoice and edit it.

QuickBooks Online provides numerous ways for you to know which customers owe you money–and who is late.

There are so many financial details to keep track of when you’re running a small business. You have to make sure your products and services are in good shape and ready to sell. You have to stay current with your bills. Orders need to be processed as quickly as possible, as do estimates and invoices. And you may have numerous questions from customers and vendors that must be addressed.

Your number one priority, however, is ensuring that your customers are paying you. Whether you accept credit cards or bank transfers or issue sales receipts for cash and checks, you need to always know where you stand with incoming payments. “Are my receivables current?” should be a question you’re asking yourself or your staff frequently.

QuickBooks Online offers numerous ways to know whether you’re being paid for your products and/or services and who might be falling behind. That information is critical to your understanding of how your receivables are stacking up against your payables. You should be able to gauge whether you’re making a profit, staying even, or losing money. Here’s a look at the tools you can use.

Learning When You Launch QuickBooks Online provides a good overview of your current cash flow as soon as you log into the site and see your two-pronged Dashboard. The first thing you see when you click the Business overview tab is a cashflow forecast that goes up to 24 months. Other content includes a profit and loss graph and charts showing expenses, income (including open and overdue invoice totals), and sales. Your account balances are there,too.

This is helpful data, but it’s broad. To get far more detailed information, hover your mouse over Sales in the toolbar and select All Sales. The horizontal bar across the top displays dollar and transaction totals for estimates, unbilled activity, overdue (invoices), open invoices, and (invoices) paid last 30days.When you click one of the bars, the list changes to show only that particular set of transactions.

The table of transactions is interactive. That is, there’s an Action column at the end of each row. Click the down arrow next to any of the activity listed there, and you’ll see a menu of options. Depending on the status of each, these options include commands like Receive payment, Send reminder, Print packing slip, Send, and Void.

Running Reports

The Sales Transactions page provides more of your receivables nuts and bolts than the Business overview screen does. But to get the most in-depth, customizable, comprehensive view of who owes you, you’ll need to run reports. Click Reports in the toolbar and scroll down to Who owes you.

There are three columns here. You’ll land on Standard, which is a complete list of all of the pre-formatted reports that QuickBooks Online offers. Click Custom reports to see the reports you’ve customized and saved. Management reports opens a list of three reports that can be viewed by a variety of date ranges: Company Overview, Sales Performance, and Expenses Performance. You can view, edit, and send these, as well as export them as PDF and Microsoft Word files.

There are five reports listed under Who owes you that you should be creating on a regular basis. How regularly? That depends on the size of your business. The greater your sales volume, the more frequently you should run them.

When you select A/R Aging Summary, you’ll see at a glance which customers have current balances and those that are 1-30, 31-60, 61-90, and 91+ days past due. A few customization options appear at the top, like Report period, Aging method, and Days per aging period. To really zero in on the precise data set you want, click Customize. The panel that slides out from the right contains option in several areas: General, Rows/ Columns, Aging, Filter(by customer),and Header/Footer.

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QuickBooks Online helps you target the data set that you want. There are four other reports that can help you track your receivables:

Open Invoices displays a list of invoices that still contain a balance.

Unbilled Time tells you about any billable time that hasn’t been invoiced.

Unbilled Charges lists billable charges that haven’t been invoice.

Customer Balance Summary simply provides all open balances for you customers.

These are all very simple reports that you shouldn’t have any trouble customizing and running. They can give you a complete picture of where your receivables stand. But there are other reports that will require our help. These are standard financial reports that should be created monthly or quarterly, including Statement of Cash Flows, Profit and Loss, and Balance Sheet. You’ll need these critical financial statements if, for example, you’re applying for a loan or trying to attract investors. Please let us know if you want us to run and analyze these so you can get a detailed, comprehensive view of your financial health.

Now that you’ve created some Items and Jobs in QuickBooks, what can you do with them? Last month, we talked about creating Item and Job records in QuickBooks. You can think of a Job as a project your company is doing for a customer, like a marketing campaign or a series of landscaping tasks. Once you set one up, you can assign all related transactions to it and eventually gauge its profitability.

We went over the steps required for managing Item and Job information. These actions allow you to:

Create Product and Service Records (Lists | Item List | Item | New)that make up each Job.

Create the Jobs themselves(Customers | Customer Center | New Customer & Job |New Customer or Add Job).

This month, we’re going to explain how you can use Jobs in QuickBooks to keep track of all the income and expenses attached to each one.

You can assign expenses like products you purchase, billable time, mileage, overhead (ask us how you can calculate this), freight charges, postage, etc., to specific Jobs. And of course, you’ll want to assign payments received to Jobs.

Creating Billable Time Entries

If you are using QuickBooks Payroll and you’re going to be tracking hours for an employee so that he or she will be paid for their time, make sure the worker is set up for this first. Go to Employees | Employee Center and double-click the name of the employee. Click Payroll Info and check the box in front of Use time data to create paychecks, then click OK to close the window. When you want to enter hours worked on a specific Job, open the Employees menu again. Click Enter Time |Time |Enter Single Activity. Complete the fields in this window as pictured below.

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You can create a record of billable time that will be used to both pay the employee and invoice the customer in this window.

If you don’t see the Enter Time option in the Employees menu, you haven’t turned on time-tracking in QuickBooks. Go to Edit | Preferences | Time & Expenses and click Company Preferences. Click the Yes button under Do you track time? There are other options in this window. You can mark all time entries as billable, for example, and set a Default Markup Percentage. If  you want to move time and expense entries into customer invoices automatically, check the box in front of Create invoices from a list of time and expenses. When you’re done, click OK.

Questions on this window?  Just ask us.

Assigning Jobs to Other Transactions Any transaction in QuickBooks that can be assigned to a customer can be assigned to a job. In all cases, be sure to assign the Job itself, not just the customer. And where appropriate, there will always be a Billable column or checkbox. Here are some examples of the transactions you can use:

Checks. This one’s easy. When you write a check, simply assign it to a CUSTOMER:JOB, whether it’s for Expenses or Items.

Sales Receipts. Say you’re doing a one-off task like tree and shrub trimming(as part of a larger Job)and the customer wants to pay you on the spot. In this case, you’d create a Sales Receipt. Go to Customers | Enter Sales Receipts. Select the CUSTOMER: JO Band fill out the rest of the fields, then save the transaction.

Bills. If you’ve ordered items to use for a specific Job and enter/pay the bill in QuickBooks, be sure to attribute it to the CUSTOMER:

JOB. Credit Card Charges. If you put an expense for a Job on a credit card, be sure to select the CUSTOMER:

JOB when you enter it in QuickBooks. Invoices. It’s likely that you’re going to invoice customers for multiple transactions that you’ve assigned to a Job–that’s the reason you’re setting it up as a Job in the first place. There are at least four ways to do this.

Start an invoice at the beginning of the Job and keep adding products and services and expenses to it until you’re ready to bill the customer. This is probably the least elegant way to do it, since you’ll have to keep remembering the invoice number, for one thing.

Enter your billable items as individual entries as you go along. When you’re ready to bill the customer, open an invoice form and select the CUSTOMER | JOB. This window will open:

When you create an invoice for a customer who has outstanding billable time and expenses, QuickBooks will display this window.

Open the Customers menu and click Invoice for Time & Expenses. QuickBooks will display a list of Time, Expenses, Mileage, and Items. You select the date range and template type, and the software will create an invoice for the transactions you check.

Use Progress Invoicing. Enter products and services on an estimate, and you’ll be able to invoice them in batches. We can show you how to do this.

Of course, you’ll eventually want to know how profitable all your Jobs are so you can adjust as needed. QuickBooks can help you determine this, and we’d be happy to show you how. Let us know if you want to schedule a session to talk about this–or about any other element of QuickBooks.

With gas prices so high, you need to track your travel costs as closely as possible. Consider getting a tax deduction for your business mileage.

If you drive even a little for business, it’s easy to let mileage costs slide. After all, it’s a pain to keep track of your tax-deductible mileage in a little notebook and do all the calculations required. If you do rack up a lot of business miles, you probably forget to track some trips and end up losing money.

QuickBooks Online offers a much better way. Its Mileage tools include simple fill-in-the-blank records that allow you to document individual trips. You can either enter the starting point and destination and let the site calculate your mileage and deduction or enter the number of miles yourself.

If you use QuickBooks Online’s mobile app, it can track your miles automatically as you drive (as long as you have the correct settings turned on). Here’s a look at how all of this works.

Setting Up

To get started, click the Mileage link in QuickBooks Online’s toolbar. The screen that opens will eventually display a table that contains information about your trips, but you need to do a little setup first. Click the down arrow next to Add Trip in the upper right corner and select Manage vehicles. A panel will slide out from the right.  Click Add vehicle.

You’ll need to supply information about your vehicles before you can start entering trips. You’ll need to supply the vehicle’s year, make, and model. Do you own or lease it, and on what date was the vehicle purchased or leased and put into service? Do you want to have your annual mileage calculated by entering odometer readings or have QuickBooks Online track your business miles driven automatically? When you’re done making your selections and entering data, click Save.

Entering Trip Data

You can download trips as CSV files or import them from Mile IQ, but you’re probably more likely to enter them manually. Click Add Trip in the upper right corner. In the pane that opens, you’ll enter the date of the trip and either the total miles or start and end point. You’ll select the business purpose and vehicle and indicate whether it was a round trip. When you’re done, click Save. The trip will appear in the table on the opening screen, and your current possible total deduction will be in the upper left corner, along with your total business miles and total miles.

If you want to designate a trip as personal, click the box in front of the trip in that table. In the black horizontal box that appears, click the icon that looks like a little person, then click Apply. Now, the trip will appear in the Personal column and will not count toward your business tax-deductible mileage.

Personal Trips Can Count, Too

If you use your vehicle(s) for personal as well as business purposes, tracking some of those miles can also mean a tax deduction. For tax year 2022, you can deduct 18 cents per mile for your travel to and from medical appointments. Note: Medical mileage is only deductible if medical exceeds a certain percent of AGI. Be sure to check with the IRS yearly tax code, as they update the mileage amounts annually.

And if you do volunteer work for a qualified charitable organization, the miles you drive in service of it can be deducted at the rate of 14 cents per mile. You can also claim the cost of parking and tolls, as long as you weren’t reimbursed for any of these expenses. Obviously, the IRS wants you to keep careful records of your charitable mileage, and QuickBooks Online can provide them.

QuickBooks Online doesn’t track these deductions, but you’ll at least have a record of the miles driven.

Auto-Track Your Miles

The easiest way to track your mileage in QuickBooks Online is by using its mobile app. You can launch this and have it record your mileage automatically as you’re driving. Versions are available for both Android and iOS, and they’re different from each other. They also have more features than the browser-based version of QuickBooks Online, like maps, rules, and easier designation of trips as business or personal.

In both versions, you’ll need to click the menu in the lower right corner after you’ve opened the QuickBooks Online app and select Mileage. Make sure Auto-Tracking is turned on. Your phone’s location services tool must be turned on, too. There are other settings that vary between the two operating systems. You can search the help system of either app to make sure you get your settings correct if the onscreen instructions aren’t clear enough.

Of course, you won’t see the fruits of your mileage deductions until you file your 2022 taxes. But you can factor these savings in as you’re doing your tax planning during the year. Please let us help if you’re having any trouble with QuickBooks Online’s Mileage tools, or if you have questions with other elements of the site.

JUNE 2022

Does your company do projects or jobs for customers? Let QuickBooks keep all related data in one place.

Before QuickBooks came along, tracking jobs or projects for your business probably involved file folders and paper invoices and bank statements and lots of sticky notes. You hoped that you didn’t forget to bill a customer or record a payment. And calculating the profitability of a job was quite a challenge.

QuickBooks makes these tasks easy. You can attach multiple jobs to customers and assign expenses to them when you enter a purchase. You can also assign estimates and invoices to specific jobs, then
do the same when payments come in. QuickBooks allows you to create individual records for each job based on all this data, and run reports that gauge profitability and unbilled costs, for example.

Transaction and reports templates are all ready for you to fill with your own data, but if you haven’t yet created records for the products and services you sell to complete your jobs, we suggest you do so before you start building your first one. You’ll need to be able to add those sales to your records. We’ll start there.

Creating Item Records – It’s always a good idea to make your item records as comprehensive as possible. But it’s especially important when you’re going to be creating and tracking jobs. We’ll create a service that might be used by a landscaping service as an example.

To get started, open the Lists menu and select Item List. Click the down arrow next to Item
in the lower left so you can familiarize yourself with the options available there. Click New.

In the window that opens, select Service from the drop – down list that opens below Type. Give your service an Item Name/Number and click the box if it will be a Subitem of another account.

Before you can start building job records, you should create records for the products and services that will be used for them. If you’re using a version of QuickBooks that says Enable under Units of Measure
and you want to designate one, click the button and walk through the wizard to define it. If you’re using a version of QuickBooks that doesn’t offer it, d0n’t worry about it. Enter a brief Description
in the appropriate field and then a Rate.

Open the list in the Tax Code field and select either Tax or Non. You may want to meet with us before you start creating items to go over the Tax Code and Account fields, or the question about assemblies or contractors – especially if you’re new to QuickBooks. They have to be correct, and you may have more questions if you have to create records for inventory parts, as this process is more complicated.
If you’re sure of the information you entered here, though, click OK.

Creating Jobs – To start creating jobs, you need to open the Customers menu and click Customer
Center. The Customers & Jobs tab on the left should be highlighted. Click the down arrow next to the field in the upper left and select New Customer & Job if you need to create a customer record first. If you already have a customer record, click once on the customer’s name in the list and then click

Add Job. Either way, you’ll see a window like the one displayed below when you click the Job Info
tab.

At the very top of this screen, above the window, you’ll see a field for Job Name, which you’ll need to enter. If this is a new customer, there won’t be an Opening Balance[dollar amount] As Of
[Date].

If the customer owes you money from previous work, you’ll need to supply the balance owed, which you can find by looking in the Balance Total column back in the Customer Center’s customer list.

You’ll enter a Description, of course. If your company offers a variety of summer landscaping packages, you might want to be more specific (like Weekly and Monthly Summer Landscaping ) so you can differentiate among them.

You need to consider what kinds of Job Types you want to create. Click the down arrow in that
field and select .

Job Types provide a way for you to categorize different jobs. Select your Job Status from the drop –
down list, and then choose your Start Date and Projected End Date using the calendars provided. Yo
u’ll eventually be able to fill in the End Date field. When you’re done, click OK. Your new job will appear in the Customers & Jobs list, under the related customer.

Next month, we’ll talk more about how jobs are used in QuickBooks. If you have questions before then, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We want you to get the most you can out of the software and
are happy to help you learn new features.

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS – Have you explored QuickBooks’ Jobs feature? You can create records for jobs and keep related transactions in one place. Jobs in QuickBooks are like mini- projects. You can add them to customer records and track their total financial activity. Before you can create Jobs in QuickBooks, you must add records for products and services. We can help you get started. Once you’re tracking
Jobs in QuickBooks, you can run reports that automatically gauge their profitability. Ask
us about this.

Too Many Transactions in QuickBooks Online? Create Rules

It’s important to categorize transactions, but it takes time. If every day brings several dozen into QuickBooks Online, you can automate this process.

One of the cardinal rules of accounting is this: Go through your new transactions every day. If you wait until there are too many of them, you’re likely to give them short shrift. You may miss problems, just as you might skip categorizing some of them because it simply takes too long.

But correct categorization is essential. Your income taxes and reports will not be accurate if you fail to assign the right category to all of your transactions. QuickBooks Online makes this easy.The site also provides a way for you to accelerate the process by automating it. It allows you to create Rules. That is, if a transaction contains a specific piece of information, a name or an amount, QuickBooks Online allows you to indicate how it should be categorized. This kind of automation will save you time and may even prevent errors–as long as you use it carefully. Here’s how it works.

Defining Your Rules

We’ll use an easy example to explain how QuickBooks Online’s Rules work. Let’s say your shipping cost shave started to increase lately, and you want to make sure you’re seeing any UPS transactions that go above a specified dollar amount, and that they’re categorized accurately. Hover your mouse over Transactions in the toolbar and click on Banking(assuming you’re downloading your bank transactions). Select an account to work with by clicking on it, and make sure the For review bar is highlighted.

Click on a transaction to open it. (If you’ve never explored what you can do with a downloaded transaction, study this box carefully while you’re there, and contact us with any questions.) On the bottom line, you’ll see a link labeled. Create a rule. Click on it, and a panel slides out from the right, as pictured below:

The upper half of the Create rule panel

This portion of the Create rule panel is fairly self-explanatory. Give your rule a descriptive name(we entered UPS 25 Plus) and indicate whether it should be applied to Money in or Money out. If you want to select a specific bank account or card, click the down arrow in the field to the right and select it. Otherwise, choose All bank accounts. Next, decide whether a transaction has to meet Any of the conditions you’re going to specify or All of them. In this case, we want All.

Now you have to describe the conditions under which a transaction will be affected. We want transactions whose Description Contains The UPS Store. We also want to identify purchases from The UPS Store whose total is more than $25. So you’d click+ Add a condition. In the row that opens, click the down arrow in the Description field and select Amount. Click the down arrow again in the next field and choose Is greater than. The final field in the row should contain 25.00.

You could keep adding conditions, but that’s all we need for this rule. You can click Test rule if you want to find out how many transactions in your For review list would meet your specifications.

Next, you want to Assign attributes to the transactions selected. Your options here are Transaction type, Category, Payee, Tags, Class, and Memo. The first two are required and the third is recommended. The last three are optional. If you want QuickBooks Online to automatically confirm transactions this rule applies to, click the Auto-confirm button so it’s showing green. If you choose this option, your matching transactions will be modified to meet your criteria and moved directly into the Categorized queue. You won’t see them in For review. So consider this carefully.