How to Back Up Your Important QuickBooks Data
- Click on File
- Click Back Up
- Complete the location where the file will be backed up (i.e. floppy disk in A: or other disk)
- Click the Back Up button
Seven Ways to Search QuickBooks
Over time, your QuickBooks company can grow in size to the point that it becomes difficult to find specific transactions. For instance, let’s say that you hire a new employee, and want to order another desk to match the ones in your office.
You vaguely remember the last time that you ordered a desk, but can’t remember which vendor, or how much you paid. In this article we’ll discuss seven ways that you can search QuickBooks to find transactions such as this, or when necessary, determine if a transaction was deleted.
Fast Access to Company Files You Have Used Recently
Use the Open Previous Company option found on the File menu to give you fast access to company files you have used recently.
Deleting Invoices Off the “Select Invoices to Print” Window
Here’s how you delete some of those old invoices that have been hanging around. This is a common problem in QuickBooks. Here’s the fix – for each entry that is showing up in your Reminders list under “Invoices to Print”, double- click on it. This action should take you to the invoice itself. Once here, remove the check mark in the box in the lower left hand corner that says “to be printed”, then click “Save and Close”. This invoice should no longer show up in the “Invoices to Print” list.
Filtering a Report – Selecting most of the items from a list
When filtering reports in QuickBooks you may want to select most of the items on a particular list, but not all items to appear on your report. First choose the “selected” option from the list (selected accounts, selected names, etc).
Normally you would check each item that you want to appear on your report. However, if you want to check all the items on the list, click the first item and do not release the mouse button. While holding down the mouse button, slide the mouse pointer down just below the list.
When QuickBooks is done all of the items on the list will be checked. Release the mouse button. Now you can manually click the items to remove the ones that you do not wish to include in your filter.
Hiring Summer Employees? QuickBooks Can Track Their Time
QuickBooks offers capable tools for tracking the items you sell, but it’s also quite a competent time-tracker. If you pay employees based on the hours they work, QuickBooks can ease your bookkeeping burden. Tracked time can flow to both invoices and payroll, helping you pay employees and collect on services provided to customers.
Save Time for Summer by Memorizing Transactions
Unfortunately, your work with QuickBooks doesn’t end just because it’s summer, the weather’s great, and school’s out. But there are ways to minimize your time spent managing your money and maximize your time at the beach. Memorizing transactions is one such way. When you memorize a transaction, QuickBooks remembers all of the relevant details and either processes it automatically or reminds you that it’s due.
A memorized transaction could be bills that show up in the same amount every month, like your Web-hosting payment, or obligations that change regularly, like your utility bill. You can specify the amount due if it’s static, or leave the amount open if it regularly changes, making this feature very flexible and easy to set up.
Is It Time to Adjust Your Pricing? How QuickBooks Can Help
Changing the prices of your company’s services and inventory items can solve one of two problems, depending on why you’re looking for a solution. Say your materials suppliers have upped their prices. You may choose to increase your affected products to maintain your profit margin. Or maybe an item or service has not been moving well. A drop in price might trigger improved sales.
Those examples, of course, are simplifications of what needs to be a thoughtful, studied process. They’re critical business decisions that should be made with the guidance from your trusted ProAdvisor. We’re not experts in just QuickBooks – we also understand the flow of profit and loss, and we can be valuable allies in your battle for continued growth.
We’ll explore the tools that QuickBooks offers to help simplify price changes once your decisions have been made. They’re not overly difficult to use, but we want to ensure your intentions are carried out accurately. And there are related inventory issues that may be impacted by your modifications.
Turn Over a New Cliche: Adopt Best Practices
Turn over a new leaf. Make a New Year’s Resolution. Make a fresh start. Get your ducks in a row. All familiar cliches, but their message is valid: At this time of year, you probably feel like renewing your commitment to running a more successful, productive business.
There are numerous ways to do this, but you might consider adopting the concept of best practices (if you haven’t already). Most industries have them, primarily larger businesses. Best practices are a set of operational guidelines that are expected to produce a favorable outcome. Run your business using these techniques or methods, and you’re likely to be more successful.
Accounting has best practices. While they’re not carved in stone, sticking with some tried-and-true, common-sense procedures will likely lead to increased efficiency. Perhaps adopting some or all of them will make a difference in your business. QuickBooks can help.
Using the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries Feature
Data entry and modifications in QuickBooks can be tedious. Beginning with QuickBooks 2010 Pro Edition and above, that job got a lot easier. The Add/Edit Multiple List Entries tool does just what its name implies: It lets you add entries to your lists of customers, vendors, services, inventory parts, and non-inventory parts. It also makes changing one or several of them quick and easy.
Tracking Bills in QuickBooks, Worth the Effort
Next to payroll, paying bills is probably your least favorite task in QuickBooks. You don’t have to use this feature — you can keep stacking bills on your desk, scrawling the due dates on a paper calendar, and writing checks.
Classes or Types? When To Use Them in QuickBooks
QuickBooks’ standard reports are critical to understanding your company’s past, present, and future. But the program also offers innovative tools that can make them significantly more insightful and comprehensive.
QuickBooks offers two simple conventions that let you identify related data: classes and types. Classes are used in transactions. Types are assigned to individual customers, vendors, and jobs.
For example, you might use classes to separate transactions that relate to different departments, locations, or types of business. A construction company might want to track classes using New Construction, Remodel, and Overhead. Your customer types might help you isolate groups by characteristics like Industry or Geographical Location.
QuickBooks Tips And Tricks: Make it Yours
No matter which version of QuickBooks you’re using, there are always ways to make your workday easier. As with any software, we tend to learn the features we need and not much more. But small changes in the way you operate can add up to significant time savings and more accurate files. If you jumped into QuickBooks without a thorough introduction, consider these tips.
Modifying Reports: Better Insight Into Past, Future
If you make one resolution about improving your accounting procedures in 2012, it should be this: Make extensive use of the tools that QuickBooks offers for report modification. Comprehensive, meticulously-shaped reports that flow out of your carefully-constructed records and transactions are your reward for pounding on the keys every day, conscientiously recording income and expenses.
QuickBooks supplies you with a wide variety of pre-formatted reports whose modification options can help you do focused, critical analysis of your financial data. The right set of numbers will help you understand your history and plan for the future more effectively.
Portable Productivity: Smartphones Do Invoices, Expenses, Time Billing
Accounting in the cloud is closer than you might think. In fact, it’s here, in some cases. QuickBooks Online, of course, is entirely cloud-based, but it does not yet offer all of the features found in Intuit’s top-of-the-line products, Premier and Enterprise.
In the meantime, Intuit itself, as well as third-party developers, have built online apps that fill in some of the gaps. These add-on solutions exist on websites, but they can collect data and synchronize it with desktop QuickBooks. So can that iPhone or Android that’s sitting on your desk right now.
Backup or Portable Company File? How to Decide
When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that Intuit is able to pack the lion’s share of your financial data into one giant company file. Certainly makes it easier to separate from QuickBooks and move when necessary.
There are actually three options for saving and relocating that file. You know about backups, since you should be producing them religiously. You generate them so that if QuickBooks — or your computer itself — stops working or your file becomes corrupt, you can re-create the entire environment. Portable company files are more limited, and are best used when you want to save your file to a temporary location and/or email it to someone else.
Zero In On Key Report Figures
You’ve undoubtedly created reports that were so lengthy that you got tired of scrolling up and down to find totals for each individual section. QuickBooks lets you collapse and expand reports to see primary totals only, but this command affects the entire report.
Receiving Payment from Customers in Quickbooks
Undoubtedly, there are some QuickBooks tasks that are more enjoyable than others. It’s no fun paying bills, for example, and making collection calls on unpaid invoices can be downright unpleasant.
But you probably don’t mind recording payments after all of your hard work creating products or providing services, sending invoices or statements, and generating reports to make sure you’re on top of it all.
QuickBooks offers more than one way to document customer remittances, and it’s important that you use the right one for the right situation.
5 Ways to Accelerate Your Receivables in QuickBooks
If you asked five small business owners to name the top three roadblocks they face in their quest for ongoing profitability, it’s likely that all five would point to slow payments.
It’s everyone’s problem. Accounts receivable requires constant monitoring. As satisfying as it can be to dispatch a group of invoices, you know that it’s going to take some work to bring in payment for at least some of them.
By using QuickBooks’ tools and complying with accounting best practices, you’ll be more confident during the invoicing stage that what you’re owed will actually be in your bank account in a reasonable amount of time. Here are five things that we suggest.
Spring-Clean Your QuickBooks Company File
Come spring time, most people are eager to throw open the doors and windows, and do some spring cleaning. It’s a good time to “spring clean” Quickbooks as well.
8 QuickBooks Reports You Should Run Regularly
You send invoices because you sold products and/or services. Purchase orders go out when you’re running low on inventory, and there are always bills to pay, it seems like. All of this activity is, of course, important in itself, but all of your conscientious bookkeeping culminates in what’s probably the most critical element of QuickBooks: your reports.
Reports can tell you how many navy blue sweatshirts you sold in March, what you paid for health insurance premiums in the first quarter, and how much you bought from your favorite vendor last month. They’re very good at drilling down to get the precise set of numbers you need.
But carefully customized and properly analyzed reports can do more than tell you how many golf clubs to order and when it’s time to switch phone services. They can help you make the business decisions that will help you take your growing company to the next level. There are several that you should be looking at regularly, some of which you can interpret easily and use in your daily workflow. We’ll help you with the interpretation of the more complex financial reports.
5 Ways You Can Use QuickBooks’ Income Tracker
One of the reasons that QuickBooks appeals to millions of small businesses is because it offers multiple ways to complete the same tasks, which accommodates different work styles.
Billing for Time in QuickBooks: An Overview
If your small business sells products, you know how precisely you must track your starting stock numbers, ongoing inventory levels, and your reorder points. QuickBooks provides tools to help with this process, but human factors can sometimes throw off your careful counts.
Fortunately, QuickBooks is remarkably flexible when it comes to recording the time your employees spend on customers and jobs. You can enter information about a single activity — either billable or unbillable — and/or document hours in a timesheet. A built-in timer (the “Stopwatch”) helps you count the minutes automatically; you can also type them in manually.
Depositing Payments in QuickBooks: The Basics
Satisfying though it may be to enter all of those customer payments manually on a paper deposit slip, it can also be tedious and time-consuming. The more successful in business you are, the more time and care it takes.
Whether you accept cash, checks, or credit/debit cards, QuickBooks has tools that help you streamline the process of moving the funds into your physical bank accounts. In fact, part of your job is done when you enter the payments on the Receive Payments or Sales Receipt screens.
Receiving Payments in QuickBooks
There are numerous ways to prioritize your workday. Do the most difficult things first. Get important phone calls out of the way. Respond to customer emails.
But it’s likely that one activity takes precedence when you see that it needs to be done: recording payments. While you’re probably very careful with this process, it’s critical that your actions here are accurate. If they’re not, you could either lose money that you’ve earned or anger customers by requesting payments they’ve already made.
How QuickBooks Helps You Accelerate Receivables
You’re meeting your sales goals. Keeping inventory balanced. Making sure that every billable hour gets invoiced. Taking advantage of vendor discounts. Basically, doing everything in your power to keep cash flow humming.
What QuickBooks’ Calendar Can Do for You
These days, some of us find ourselves updating multiple calendars. There’s the Outlook calendar or other web-based solution for scheduling and task management. Or, maybe a smartphone app to track a “to-do” on the road with a paper calendar as backup.
But where do you keep track of your everyday financial tasks? Including these in your scheduling calendars and/or task lists will make for very crowded screens, not to mention how inconvenient it can be to keep switching between applications.
Creating Customer Statements in QuickBooks
Let’s say you have a regular customer who used to pay on time, but he’s been hit-and-miss lately. How do you get him caught up?
Or, one of your customers thinks she’s paid you more than she owes. How do you straighten out this account?
Both of these situations have a similar solution: QuickBooks Statements. QuickBooks’ statements provide an overview of every transaction that has occurred between you and individual customers during a specified period of time. They’re easy to create, easy to understand, and can be effective at resolving payment disputes.
5 QuickBooks Reports You Need to Run in January
Getting all of your accounting tasks done in December is always a challenge. Besides the vacation time you and your employees probably took for the holidays, there are those year-end, Let’s-wrap-it-up-by-December-31 projects.
How did you do last month? Were you ready to move forward when you got back to the office in January? Or did you run out of time and have to leave some accounting chores undone?
Besides paying bills and chasing payments, submitting taxes and counting inventory in December, there is another item that should have been on your to-do list: creating end-of-year reports. If you didn’t get this done, it’s not too late. It’s important to have this information as you begin the New Year. QuickBooks can provide it.
Tracking Time in QuickBooks
When you sell a product to a customer, you know it. It goes away, and your inventory count in QuickBooks is reduced by one. This tracking helps you know what is selling and what is not, and it signals when a reorder is due.
If your business provides services to customers, though, you are selling your employees’ time and skills. There’s no inventory count; you can sell as many hours as you have workers to fill them. Tracking time accurately and comprehensively, though, is as important as knowing how many hard drives or tote bags you’ve sold.
QuickBooks contains tools to help you record the hours employees spend doing work for customers, so you can bill them for services rendered. You can also use these same features to enter employee time for payroll purposes. The software offers two options here: single-activity records and timesheets.
5 QuickBooks Online Reports You Should Run Regularly
QuickBooks Online’s Dashboard, the first screen you see when you log in, provides an effective overview of your company’s finances. It contains at-a-glance information about your recent expenses, your sales, and the status of your invoices. It displays a simple Profit and Loss graph and a list of your account balances. Scroll down and click the See all activity button in the lower right and your Audit Log opens, a list of everything that’s been done on the site and by whom.
Why QuickBooks Should Be on Your Desktop
If you’re still doing your accounting manually you are at a competitive disadvantage–even if you’re a very small business. You might be managing just fine using Microsoft Word for invoices and records and Excel for reports, but keep in mind that many of your rivals manage their financial data digitally.
Some of your competitors likely use QuickBooks; it’s the market leader, and it’s on millions of desktops. While you might feel that the products and/or services they use are not necessarily superior to what you are using, they have an edge because managing their financially data digitally enables them to run their businesses more efficiently. Furthermore, when you use software like QuickBooks your customers perceive you as someone who is technology-savvyâ??and it could help you build better customer relationships. Just maybe it’s time to update your accounting system too. Here’s what your competition has learned about managing their financial data digitally and what you, too, can experience when you use QuickBooks.
How to Use Memorized Transactions in QuickBooks
Last month’s Quick Books article explored the benefits of having QuickBooks on your desktop. Among those listed were three that impact every business.- save time, save money, minimize errors.
There are numerous examples that could be used to illustrate how this software accomplishes this but for this month the topic is using memorized transactions. These are templates you set up that contain most if not all the information that could be repeated at specified intervals, eliminating the need for you to enter the same repetitive data regularly and reducing the chances that you will make a mistake.
You can create these transaction models for both sale and purchase transactions. For example, you might have wireless service bills that remain the same every month or vary by just a bit. Or, you have customers who have monthly standing orders for the same products, or services, or subscription fees.
QuickBooks makes it very easy to set up transactions for repetitive use and you will see how it works in more detail below. We recommend you use one of QuickBooks’ sample files for this tutorial.
Paying Bills in QuickBooks: The Basics
Last month, we explained that the process of paying bills in QuickBooks requires two separate sets of actions. We went over what’s required to enter bills and to set up reminders, so they don’t get overlooked. This month’s column will walk you through the second step: paying the bills.
You’ll remember you must first click Enter Bills on the home page (or open the Vendors menu and select Enter Bills), which opens a graphical representation of a bill. Select a Vendor from the drop-down list and complete the remaining fields in the top box. Make sure the Amount Due carries over to the lower part of the screen under either the Expenses or Items tab and that the rest of the fields there are completed and correct before you save the bill.
Applying Finance Charges in QuickBooks
There are myriad ways to bring in customer payments faster and improve your cash flow.
Create Assemblies to Bundle Products in QuickBooks
Let’s say you run a home improvement retail outlet, and one of the things you sell is doors. You might sell their parts — door frames, hinges, doorknobs, etc. — individually, in case a customer needs to replace a piece. You may also want to sell all of the individual components as a kit and give your buyer a price break for purchasing them all together.
QuickBooks calls these assemblies; sometimes they’re referred to as kits. Just as you’d create an individual inventory part, you can group related parts together and create an item that you would sell as a package.
A couple of caveats here: You can only build assemblies in QuickBooks Premier and above. If you need this feature and are using QuickBooks Pro, talk to a QuickBooks professional about upgrading. Second, not all of you are using the latest versions of the software so will use QuickBooks Premier 2018 in the examples here.
Using Bill Tracker in QuickBooks
Bill-paying may be your least favorite accounting activity. You definitely know how those checks and online payments affect your account balances, but it’s more than that. Staying up to date with your bills and paying them on time (but not too early) takes a supreme organizational effort.
If you’re using a manual bookkeeping system, you know how difficult it is to keep up. QuickBooks offers several options for helping you with this. You can set reminders and/or put the due dates on your calendar. If you’re using QuickBooks 2016 or later, you have access to another tool: Bill Tracker.