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.

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.