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.

In these days of supply chain issues, you need to keep track of your vendors. QuickBooks has this covered.

If you buy and resell products, or if you need to purchase materials to create your own items, good management of your company’s vendor records is critical. Maintaining a physical card file is way too inflexible. You can’t find or edit individual records quickly or easily. They get lost, or they’re illegible because you’ve updated the cards too many times.

Sometimes, you have to spend money on your customers. Make sure you’re billing them for it.
Usually, money flows from your customers to your business. But there may be times when you have to
purchase items for a job whose costs will eventually be reimbursed. Or you, or an employee, might spend time providing services for customers and get paid for those hours by your company before you receive payment from the responsible party. If you’re a sole proprietor with no payroll and no reserves, of course, you just have to wait to be paid for your work.

In the first two cases, you’re spending money upfront that will eventually be paid back. In all three cases,
QuickBooks Online calls these billable expenses and billable time, and it does a good job of tracking these transactions – much better than if you were scribbling notes on a receipt or a paper timecard.

Did you resolve to pay bills on time in 2021? Here’s how QuickBooks can help.

Managing your paper bills manually is a dangerous practice. It’s too easy to lose them, for one thing, and it’s impossible to keep all of those vendors and amounts in your head. Even if you keep them in a safe place, how do you track their due dates? You can write them on a paper calendar, but it’s easy to miss them considering everything else that is probably scribbled there.
So what’s the solution? You need a system that will keep you from paying bills late, which can lead to finance charges and bad relationships with your vendors.

QuickBooks provides that. You can enter bills as they come in and designate them as paid when you send the check or authorize a credit card payment or bank transfer. Besides making these records available, the software offers other way