Rodman & Rodman, P.C. > QuickBooks
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Your Chart of Accounts
The Backbone of Your Accounting System
Your chart of accounts is the backbone of your accounting system, whether your using QuickBooks, Peachtree, or any other accounting system. Here’s a brief explanation of how to setup, number and understand your chart of accounts more thoroughly! Your chart of accounts is KEY to reporting and understanding your financial information.
Be on the lookout for our upcoming blog on QuickBooks 2012! QuickBooks 2012 will be released before you know it and we’ll give you our take and what’s new and how the new features can help you run your business better.
Leah
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Top Ten Time Saving QuickBooks Tricks
By: Leah Schlegelmilch
Rodman & Rodman QuickBooks ProAdvisor Team
1.) Memorize Memorize Memorize: QuickBooks will memorize your most common reports and transactions for quick access in the future. Memorize transactions you do repeatedly as well as reports you regularly reference.
2.) Batch Invoicing: Invoicing the same amounts to a multitude of customers every month? New in QuickBooks 2011, you are now able to invoice multiple customers at once for the same item. This works great for company’s that charge subscriptions, service fees etc. Also, create batch invoicing groups that you can save for future monthly billings. For company’s where this applies, it can save hours every month!
3.) Find: The find feature in QuickBooks is a tool us accountants use constantly, and I am always surprised to realize how many of my clients don’t even know it exists. The find feature in QuickBooks can help you do a quick search for transaction amounts, check numbers, accounts, items, etc. The combinations are endless and will get you where you want to be much faster than scrolling through an account register.
4.) Add/Edit Multiple List Entries: New in QuickBooks 2010, this view lets you quickly add/edit multiple customers, vendors and items. You can quickly review account mappings for items to make sure all are assigned to proper accounts, review costs and sales prices, change zip codes, change active/inactive status, etc. Also you can copy and paste additional items, customers and vendors in bulk from excel. Be sure to customize the columns for quick viewing of only the information you want.
5.) Group Items: Use group items on invoices to quickly include individual items you regularly sell together as a group, for example, a computer, monitor, keyboard and mouse. You can select whether you want each part of the group to print on the invoice or whether you want them to show up as just one item with the total sales price associated.
6.) Customized Icon Bar: Customize your icon bar to have one click access to your most frequently used reports, transaction types and reminders.
7.) Collections Center: New in QuickBooks 2011, you can quickly review all your overdue or almost due invoices and follow up with all customers at once using a template e-mail you customize for your specific business. If there’s one thing people running a business dread it’s collections, this will help ensure prompt payment and sharply reduce the amount of time you spend printing individual invoices and emailing individuals to follow up regarding payments. A few minutes to setup your email for the first time, then two minutes every couple weeks and you will be on top of all your slow paying customers.
8.) Online Banking: If you aren’t using online banking yet, you are missing an opportunity if your bank is a participating institution. With online banking you eliminate significant amounts of data entry and all those recurring monthly charges will automatically default to the correct accounts, you just review and post. Even if you print checks from QuickBooks it is still well worth your time. Online banking automatically matches up these transactions to ensure you aren’t double posting anything.
9.) Emailing Invoices: Still printing, addressing, and stamping all those invoices? Many customers these days prefer to have paperless billing and it can save you hours! Simply click the to be emailed box on your invoices as you enter them, enter all your invoices, then send the whole batch in just a couple of clicks. The invoices are automatically attached to each individual email as a PDF document, and you can customize the template email however you like. In the customer center, setup the preferred send method to specify which customers prefer paper or emailed invoices for quick processing.
10.) Price Changes: Want to increase your prices on a number of your items? Don’t change each one individually; use the change item prices tool to change selected items by a % or an amount. Don’t waste time editing individual items when you can process them all in a fraction of the time.
Leah
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QuickBooks 2011, What’s new? What’s actually useful?
By: Leah Schlegelmilch
Rodman & Rodman QuickBooks ProAdvisor Team
As always the latest version of QuickBooks has many new and improved features for 2011 and as always some are more practical and useful than others.
Batch Invoicing: The new batch invoicing feature is probably the most useful new feature of QuickBooks 2011. This enables users to create invoices for multiple customers that are billed for the same services at once. This is perfect for clients who invoice many customers the same amount each month, monthly service fees, etc. You can also set up batch invoicing groups, so each month, in a few clicks, you can create a multitude of invoices.
New Search Feature: Similar to the QuickBooks FIND feature, QuickBooks 2011 added a search feature which unlike like the find feature is not a defined field. You can search for numerical/text data and QuickBooks will search customer/vendor/employee/item records, reports, all QuickBooks fields, as compared to the find feature, which only searches on a transactional basis. For most users, this is a much simpler way to search QuickBooks data.
Collections Center: They’ve added a new COLLECTIONS CENTER in the CUSTOMER CENTER. This new addition lets you quickly see all overdue invoices, create and edit emails to one, some, or all overdue customers at once, with their respective invoices attached. You’ll need to do some finagling of the template email for overdue invoices to fit your business, but once you have this setup, this new feature could really help streamline your collections process.
Balance Sheets by Class: QuickBooks will now be able to run a balance sheets by class. This deson’t represent a great need for most users, but for users who have a need for a classed balance sheet, it is exciting news. It is important to be careful when setting classes up for balance sheets. When not done correctly you may end up with classed balance sheets that don’t balance. You must have a solid understanding of what retained earnings is, and how it works, in order to have each classed balance sheet in balance at the end of the day. This might be something you want to call us about before jumping in.
Email Integration with Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail: Invoices emailed directly from QuickBooks will now integrate directly with email servers other than Outlook. It’s about time and will be a useful improvement for non-Outlook users.
There’s a number of other small improvements you’ll notice as you start working in QuickBooks 2011, but these are the ones that will most affect our clients. If you’d like to know more, email me or any of our QuickBooks Team members at Rodman and we’d be happy to discuss any of these in further detail.
Leah
