Quickbooks

There’s something very satisfying about turning our calendars to January. It always feels like a fresh start. We resolve to develop new, better ways of using our work and leisure time. We reflect on what we accomplished in the last 12 months, and we look forward to achieving even more in the next 12.

But sometimes we have a nagging feeling that we forgot something. And it often has to do with our finances, both personal and professional.

You can take steps now to make the new year less worrisome. Doing some extra work in QuickBooks now will ensure that you start the new year ready to move ahead, rather than scrambling to see what you missed on come January.

Thinking Ahead

Where to start? Depending on how conscientiously you entered transactions and ran reports, you might need to set some extra time aside in the midst of your other year-end and holiday-related commitments.

For example, did you instruct QuickBooks to “close your books” at the end of the year? QuickBooks will automatically make year-end adjustments if you entered December 31 as a closing date inPreferences. However, it is not required, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to doing so. We can help you decide if this is the best decision for your company.

Figure 1: If you set a closing date of December 31 in QuickBooks’Preferences, you need to prepare your company file for this deadline in advance.

Prior to this, though, there’s another important task you should complete before the end of the year. It is common sense, but not everyone thinks of it during the December rush: Make sure you have entered all transactions and payments that should be included in your QuickBooks file for 2015.

If anyone else on your staff works in QuickBooks, make sure they know that you are trying to wrap up the year. If they are holding anything back because of questions and comments, now is the time to confer with you.

Taxes and Accounts

You may already be working with us on tax planning, but if you are not, then it is never too early to project your incoming and outgoing funds for the new year.

Figure 2: Use QuickBooks to make decisions about income and/or expenses to reduce your tax obligation next year.

Talk to us about your tax situation if you think this may be necessary. We may not be able to prepare your taxes just yet, but we can create financial reports and projections that help you prepare for filing.

Odds and Ends

How do you back up your QuickBooks company file? Is it on a local drive or in the cloud? How often do you do this? Archiving your data is critical. Think about what would happen if you lost your customer records or a month’s worth of transactions or multiple payments. This is an area where we can provide guidance. Is there a better, safer way to ensure data security? Are there special backup activities you should do at year’s end?

Some companies wait until the end of January to do a physical inventory count. Rather than being surprised, you may want to consider doing this now if it is feasible.

And when you think you have entered everything but payments or transactions that may come in at the end of the year, all accounts should be reconciled.

Figure 3: By late December or early January, you should do a final reconciliation of all accounts for the previous year.

QuickBooks makes it easy to do this regularly, but if you need assistance, we can help you ring in the New Year on a more confident note.

• By Leon Clinton
• January 29, 2016

Small businesses that sell products have to do a constant balancing act. Keep too much inventory on hand, and you’re sitting on potential profits. If you don’t order enough and you run out, your customers may go to a competitor. QuickBooks provides tools and reports that can help you manage this ongoing challenge.

Selling time and services is a different story. There’s no real inventory tracking involved — except in terms of knowing how much manpower you have available at any given time. But just like you wouldn’t want customers to walk off with merchandise they haven’t bought, you don’t want any billable minutes or hours to be ignored. Both scenarios eat into your profits.

Gone are the days when you had to count on employees to fill out detailed timecards and hope that they remembered to document everything. QuickBooks can help ensure that you’re getting paid for all time and services rendered.

Building Your Records

Before you can ask employees to start tracking the hours they put in, you need to create a record for every time-based activity so that QuickBooks knows how much to charge when billable time is entered. The software creates and stores these, in the same way, it builds records for physical inventory items.

Start by clicking on the Items & Services icon on the home page (or go to Lists | Item List). Click the down arrow next to Item in the lower left of the screen that appears, and then select New from the menu (or right-click in the main part of the screen and select New).

Figure 1: Once you’ve created a record for a service item, you can use it throughout QuickBooks.

A list of options will drop down under TYPE. Select Service. Type in theItem Name/Number and click in the box to the left of Subitem of if the time item should be grouped under another. In this example, the relationship is Labor/Removal (labor). U/M Set is not an option in your version of QuickBooks.

Note: If you will be working with subcontractors, let us help you set up these services. It’s a little more complicated.

Enter a description for your service and a rate, then click on the drop-down arrow and select a tax rate if appropriate (click on to create one on the fly). Select an Account from the list. It should be some kind of income; in this case, it’s Construction Income. Click OK when you are done and this service will appear in your Item List.

Tracking Time

When you want to create a record for a work session, click the arrow to the right of Enter Time on the home page and select Time | Enter Single Activity (or open the Customers menu and select the same). Make sure the date for the activity is correct; you can click on the calendar and select if it’s not. Click on the arrow in the field below to select the correct employee.

Figure 2: You can either start the timer to record an activity’s duration or simply enter it in the box.

Click the arrows next to the CUSTOMER:JOB and SERVICE ITEM fields to open those drop-down menus and select the desired options. If you want to time the activity, use the Start, Stop, and Pause buttons below the duration box, or simply enter the amount of time it took. The CLASSand NOTES fields are optional.

If the time spent is billable, be sure that there’s a check in the box next to Billable in the upper right corner. If it’s not, click on the box.

Data you enter here will automatically appear on timesheets. You can enter time directly on timesheets by clicking Enter Time | Use Weekly Timesheet.

When you start an invoice for a customer who has accumulated billable time, you’ll see this message:

Figure 3: If you’ve entered billable time for a customer, this message will appear the next time you create an invoice for him or her.

Make sure that your employees understand the importance of documenting every billable minute. Lost time can eat into profits, and that has an impact on everyone in the company.

• By Leon Clinton
• November 30, 2015

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 Listsmenu and select Templates to open this window:

Figure 1: QuickBooks’ Templates window shows you what forms can be customized and provides tools for working with them.

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 Invoiceand 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 Customizationwindow.

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.

Figure 2: The Basic Customization window displays options for modifying your copy of the Intuit Product Invoice template.

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, andProject/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.

Figure 3: QuickBooks gives you tremendous control over the content in your forms.

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.

• By Leon Clinton
• October 30, 2015