Keeping Your 941 Report Accurate

Do not pay your payroll liabilities from the “Write Checks” window. If you use this window, QuickBooks will warn you to use the “Pay Liabilities” window, but will let you write the check. However when you print the 941, it will not reflect any payments that you made using the “Write Checks” window.

Use the “Pay Liabilities” window to create checks for all tax liabilities. Using this window will ensure that the payments are reflected accurately on the 941 report and that your liability accounts are properly reduced.

Recording of Barter Exchanges

If you have customers who are also vendors you may decide to trade some or all of your services / products in exchange for payment.

To record such a barter transaction, invoice the customer for the goods provided or services performed as you normally would. To record the “payment” use the “Receive Payment” function to apply the barter amount against the invoice the same as you would when receiving cash or a check as follows:

Go to Customers: Receive Payment. Payment Amount will be the barter amount (the amount of the invoice you received from your vendor). Pmt. Method will be Barter. Check the radio button for “Group with other undeposited funds”. Save this transaction.

Go to Banking: Make Deposits. The payment you just received will come up in the Payments to Deposit screen. If there are also other payments to deposit, make sure you select only the payment(s) being recorded for the barter exchange. When you hit OK the Make Deposits screen will come up with the barter deposit(s) showing. Before recording the deposit make a negative deposit entry on the next blank line below the barter deposit for the amount of the barter as follows:

Deposit To is your normal operating checking account. Date is the date you would have normally paid your vendors invoice. Memo should be changed from Deposit to Barter.

If you have entered the vendors invoice as a bill for payment, Received From is the vendor name and From Account is Accounts Payable.

If you have not entered the vendors invoice as a bill for payment, leave Received From blank. In the From Account column select the expense account you would charge the vendors invoice to, the same as if you were entering it for payment. In the Memo column note the vendors invoice number.

In the Amount column enter the vendors invoice amount with a negative sign first. This negative amount should exactly offset the deposit amount above, resulting in a “Zero” deposit transaction. Save the “deposit” and the transaction is complete.

Recording Infrequent Transactions in QuickBooks

Day-to-day transactions like receiving payments from customers or paying vendors occur so frequently that most QuickBooks users do them automatically. However, from time to time you may encounter an infrequent transaction that will stop you in your tracks. In this article we’ll discuss several common tricky transactions and offer advice on how to handle them.

5 Ways To Audit Your QuickBooks Activity

In the past QuickBooks had an optional Audit Trail feature that you could choose whether or not to enable. However, recent versions of the program automatically enable Audit Trail, so every change made to a transaction in QuickBooks is logged automatically.

Although this may seem Orwellian, you may find that you sometimes need to carry out forensic research on a particular QuickBooks transaction. In layman’s terms, this means looking into who changed or deleted a transaction, determining what date the transaction changed, and how the transaction looked before it changed.

In this article we’ll discuss five different audit reports that QuickBooks provides, as well as show you some easier ways to mine the data within these reports.

Minimize Your Exposure to Fraud

Do you know how to detect and protect yourself from fraud? Most of us want to naively believe it will never happen to us. In reality, fraud impacts small and mid-size businesses far more often than large corporations. Why? Smaller businesses tend to take fewer precautionary measures to prevent fraudulent behavior.

Also, fraud is often perpetrated by a family member, long time employee, or friend that’s been given too much freedom with too few controls. However, you must not be naïve when it comes to your business. Fraud is very much a reality that can happen in your business.

In this article we’ll discuss how fraud happens, how to identify if fraud is happening, and what to do if you discover fraud has happened. We’ll also discuss some measures that you can take within QuickBooks to limit your exposure.

16 Bank Reconciliation Tips and Tricks

Although it may seem like drudgery, reconciling your bank account is a critical accounting task that you should carry out each month. Doing so helps ensure the integrity of your financial reports, since most of your accounting transactions ultimately affect cash in some fashion.

Further, QuickBooks is a much more powerful tool for your business if you use it to its fullest extent. Most likely you’ve been reconciling your bank account all along, so in this article we’ll discuss the tricks and techniques you need to know to streamline the process.

Ten Overlooked QuickBooks Reports That You Should Use

Just about every QuickBooks user relies on the Report Center and Reports menu, but if you’re like most, you have a small handful of reports that you tend to rely on. In this article we’ll go off the beaten path and explore ten reports that many users overlook. Even if you are using some of these reports, we’re sure you’ll find a few more to add to your repertoire.

QuickBooks Payroll Runs: Easy, Fast, Accurate

It’s not just a catchy ad slogan: It’s true. Unless you have dozens of employees or numerous exceptions each payday, you can literally process a payroll run in just a few minutes using the employee compensation tools in QuickBooks.

No matter which version of desktop QuickBooks you’re using, payday chores are similar. Even if you’ve subscribed to Full Service Payroll and are having most of the work done by Intuit, you still have to enter the number and type of hours worked for each pay period.

If you’re doing payroll manually or through a payroll service, you might be surprised at how quickly and easily your payroll tasks can be completed once you’ve finished entering information about your company and its employees, taxes and deductions.

Use QuickBooks’ Tools to Prevent Financial Fraud

Whether your accounting tasks are done on a single PC or you have multiple users working on different screens, it’s critical that you make use of all that QuickBooks offers in terms of internal controls.

10 Tips to Perfect Check-Printing in QuickBooks

If you used small business accounting products in the early days, you know how frustrating it was to print checks correctly from your software. Pre-printed checks weren’t cheap, and you probably printed at least a few that didn’t line up right or were otherwise unusable.

25 Accounting Terms You Should Know

QuickBooks is intuitive, easy to use, and flexible, but it is not an accounting manual or class or tutorial.

If your business is not particularly complicated, you might get by without knowing a lot about the principles of bookkeeping. Still, it helps to understand the basics, so let’s take a look at some terms and phrases that are helpful for you to understand.

Using Statements in QuickBooks: The Basics

Sending invoices to your customers to bill for products and/or services is probably one of the more enjoyable parts of your job–second only to recording payments received. And thanks to the company file you’ve built in QuickBooks, creating invoices is generally a very simple process that requires no duplicate data entry.

QuickBooks Reminders Prevent Problems

How many calendars do you maintain? Many businesspeople have more than one. Maybe you use a web-based or desktop application like Google Calendar or Outlook for meetings, task deadlines, travel dates, etc. Your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) might have another. Perhaps you still have a paper calendar as back-up.

But where do you keep track of bills that need to be paid, invoices that have to be sent, inventory items that must be ordered, etc.? Do you include that information in your general business calendar(s) and hope they don’t get lost in the shuffle?

QuickBooks has a better solution. The software contains a dedicated set of tools that automates the process of setting up and displaying reminders. Once you’ve created them, they can be the first thing you see when you open QuickBooks in the morning.

Receiving Customer Payments: What are your Options?

QuickBooks was designed to make your daily accounting tasks easier, faster, and more accurate. If you’ve been using the software for a while, you’ve probably found that to be true. Some chores, of course, aren’t so enjoyable, like paying bills or reconciling your bank account…Or anything else that has the potential to reduce the balance in your checking accounts.

The process of receiving customer payments is one of your more enjoyable responsibilities. You supplied a product or service that someone liked and purchased, and you’re getting the money due you.

Depending on the situation, you’ll use one of multiple methods to record customer payments. Here’s a look at some of your options.

Tracking Jobs in QuickBooks

Job-costing is not just for contractors. While that’s probably the most common understanding of this concept in QuickBooks, you can also use the software’s jobs tools to track income and expenses for any related group of items and/or services.

Think of them as projects. If you’re an expert in business promotions, for example, you probably have multiple projects going on simultaneously that consist of materials you might need to order for your client (like special paper) and the actual work you do (design, content-creation, etc.). You could also have to track expenses like mileage, and you may price your services by the hour.

QuickBooks can handle all of this. If you’re conscientious about documenting all of the pieces that go into every job, you’ll be able to run reports that show you how much you spent and took in on each. This information can help you better price your services and manage your time to maximize profitability.