Quickbooks 2010 has arrived!

The newest addition from Intuit offers some very interesting productivity tools to this award-winning accounting program.  One of the most exciting changes in Quickbooks 2010 is the addition of batch changes to lists. Previously, when you wanted to add to or edit  your customer list or vendor list with many changes, you had 2 choices. You could either go through your customers or vendors, one by one, and change them individually or you could export your list. open it in Excel, make your changes and import it back into Quickbooks.  However, Quickbooks 2010 now offers batch changes within a spreadsheet inside Quickbooks. You can even copy data from an Excel spreadsheet & paste it into Quickbooks spreadsheet. Batch editing is only available for lists – Customers, Vendors or Items . However, the Accountants’s version does offer some batch editing for transactions ( a great time saver when we’re cleaning up a client’s data).

Another addition I’m looking forward to is the new Document Management system in Quickbooks 2010. This feature allows you to attach a document to a transaction, vendor, customer or employee  inside  Quickbooks.  For example, when you receive a bill from a vendor, you can scan it and attach it to the transaction when you enter the bill in Quickbooks. When you’re sitting down to pay your bills, you can call up images of the attached bill with a click. Imagine how much easier it will be when trying to find a bill from a year ago – just clicking to pull up the digital image, rather than plowing through the box with last years bills in it. Likewise, you can attach a receipt to a check transaction or an employee form to the employee’s name in Quickbooks.

These are only a couple of the new features available in Quickbooks 2010. Intuit estimates a 15% – 20% increase in productivity with Quickbooks 2010. I’ll be writing about additional features in future blogs. Stay tuned…

Here Today, Gone … New Year’s Day

You may have heard the expressions “make hay while the sun shines” or “strike while the iron is hot.” These old proverbs are particularly relevant to current tax laws. More and more often, Congress is enacting tax breaks on a temporary basis—creating “limited time only” offers. 

Some of these temporary breaks may eventually be extended by Congress, but others may not be. So, where practical, you may want to take advantage of the breaks while they are available.  

• To help get you started, here are a few breaks that are currently set to expire in 2009. 
• If you claim the standard deduction for 2009, you may also claim an additional deduction for real estate property taxes.
   
• Whether you claim the standard deduction or itemize your deductions for 2009, you can deduct the sales tax you pay on a car or truck purchased by December 31, 2009 (but the deduction is phased out if your income is too high). 
   
• If you itemize your deductions for 2009, you can choose to deduct state and local sales taxes instead of claiming a deduction for state income taxes.
• If you buy a principal residence by December 1, 2009 and haven’t owned a home during the prior three years, you are entitled to a tax credit of up to $8,000 (but again, there is a phase-out if your income is too high).
• If you are age 70 ½ or over and own an IRA, you don’t have to withdraw any funds from your IRA in 2009 unless you wish to.

 There are other breaks scheduled to expire in 2009 and still others will expire in 2010. Click here for a complete list of all 22 Tax Breaks that expire in 2009.

Quickbooks -Thinking Outside the Box

I recently came up with a novel use of Quickbooks for something other than it’s intended purpose. I volunteer at my children’s school regularly. One of the projects I handle is a spreadsheet, tracking school & community service hours for each student, which involves several Excel workbooks with over 500 pages – one for each student. When they asked me to create spreadsheets to track textbooks assigned to students, I told them – no problem.

After mulling the task over for a few days, I was struck with what I thought was a novel idea – use Quickbooks to track each student. I could set up each student as a customer. An invoice for each student would track their textbooks. An inventory item could be set up for each textbook. I could also convert the clumsy spreadsheet workbooks and use Quickbooks to track their service hours – perhaps just using a running invoice that would total their hours (rather than dollar amounts). Service items could be set up for popular school service projects.

I’m very excited about setting up Quickbooks as a simple database. It will be simpler to maintain than a spreadsheet, with easier reporting capabilities. I’ll do a follow up blog after the start of the scholol year to let you know how it works out. I’d love to hear from anyone else currently using Quicbooks “outside the box” for non-accounting purposes.

Regular Quarterly Checkups Can Save You Costly Annual Dues

        A recent call I received from a law firm reminded me of the importance of having your Quickbooks data reviewed on a quarterly basis. The caller, a legal assistant who recently took over bookkeeping duties when the firm bookkeeper was laid off, couldn’t understand why their financial reports were way off. 

        A quick review of their Quickbooks data revealed that, for the last few months, she had been entering expenses twice in Quickbooks, once on the bill and again on the check. The resulting double entries were really throwing off their books. I discovered a few other issues, as well. For example, their checking account hadn’t been reconciled in 3 months.

        Had they waited until the end of the year to bring in outside help, their financials would be off the entire year and the clean up process would have become much more costly. The moral of this story: A few hours spent on a quarterly review by an experienced accounting professional, such as your CPA or a Quickbooks ProAdvisor, will pay big dividends for you in the long run.

Are you constantly playing catch up with Quickbooks?

       If you’re merely using Quickbooks  to record your business transactions after the fact (and usually about a week or 2 before you have to file your tax returns), you’re missing out on some of the great benefits of this program. Quickbooks offers a variety of extremely useful reports to see how your business is doing, as well as budgeting tools to help you reach future goals. However, Quickbooks reports and budgeting tools are only effective if you’re up to date inputing your business data.

 

       If you count yourself in the “Playing Catchup” category, with a few adjusments to your data entry routine, you can get your Quickbooks data up to date and really start taking advantage of Quickbooks reporting and budgeting abilities.  There are many techniques for speeding up data entry (Note: I’ve discussed some of these in previous posts – see Tips & Tricks). Also, bank and credit card info can be downloaded directly into Quickbooks. And many payroll providers offer Quickbooks downloads, as well.

 

     Don’t procrastinate! The sooner you get caught up, the sooner you’ll be using Quickbooks tools to improve and grow your business.

Setting Personal Preferences in Quickbooks

        You can greatly improve your Quickbooks experience by making a few changes to your personal preferences within Quickbooks. The preferences screen is reached by using the EDIT pull-down menu and selecting PREFERENCES. You will be making changes on the MY PREFERENCES page (which only take effect for the current user in Quickbooks). Each user can set up their own personal preferences in Quickbooks. Only the Admin can make changes on the COMPANY PREFERENCES page (which I’ll discuss in a future post).

      After opening Preferences, the first area in the left-hand box you should review is the GENERAL section. I prefer to check mark:

• “Pressing Enter moves between fields”
  • If “Pressing Enter” is unchecked, hitting the Enter key acts like “Save & New”, completing the current transaction & starting a new one. When it’s checked, hitting the Enter key takes you to the next field in your current transaction.
• “Automatically place decimal point”
  • Automatically placing the decimal point saves some typing entering data, but you have to remember that entering “100” will show $1.00, not $100 (I usually enter it as “100.”).

 A couple other items to look at on this page:

• “Automatically remember acct. or trans. Info” – this will remember the expense accts. Associated with vendor’s name
• “Default Date” – If you’re regularly entering transactions for prior dates, use last date entered, instead of today’s date, as default

        Next, let’s take a look at the “Desktop View” in the left-hand box. I like:

• Multiple Windows – allows several Quickbooks windows open on your desktop at the same time
• Don’t Save the Desktop
  • Save When Closing – will open all the same windows in Quickbooks that were open when you last closed the program
  • Save Current Desktop – If there are certain windows you always want open when starting Quickbooks, open just those windows and then select this option
• Other display options include:
  • Home Page – which has icon shortcuts to various parts of Quickbooks
  • Coach window – which assists you with different aspects of Quickbooks
  • Live Community is a direct link to Intuit’s online Quickbooks community website
  • Color Scheme

       One other area of interest is the “CHECKING” page. If you have multiple checking accounts, this is where you can set the default checking account to use for deposits, paying bills and payroll,

         If you’re not sure whether or not to make some of these changes, you can turn them on and try them out. Then go back to Preferences and turn off (uncheck) any you don’t want to use. PLEASE NOTE: If you have multiple Quickbooks companies, you will need to set up My Preferences for each company, as user and company preferences are linked to each company file.

Protect Yourself from Fraud

I was the guest at a presentation given by City National Bank yesterday concerning fraud protection for businesses. One disturbing fact I learned concerned ACH debits and credits, which occur when a vendor debits directly from your checking or savings account electonically. These can be automatic monthly payments for your utility or credit card bill or when you pay a bill over the telephone.

By law (and I’m not sure if  it’s just California law  or federal law), a consumer has 60 days to dispute an ACH charge after it hits thier personal checking account. However, business account holders ONLY HAVE 24 HOURS to dispute an ACH charge.  This is extremely worrisome, as many of my clients don’t even have on-line access, let alone check their accounts daily.

City National Bank has a couple of Fraud Prevention services that help protect their business account holders. Their ACH Fraud Protection allows you to either block ACH debits & credits by your filters (specific vendors, web generated, etc) or just block all ACH transactions.

CNB has another service called Positive Pay. Using this service, clients upload their check register from accounting programs, such as Quickbooks, to the bank. The bank will authorize checks & debits from your register. Anything not listed on your register shows up on an exception report and you can tell the bank whether or not to process it.

I’m sure most major banks offer similar services. It might be a good time to give your bank a call and see what they have to offer…BEFORE you get hit with fraud! For more info on fraud prevention, you can visit CNB’s website at: www.cnb.com/fraudprevention.

Intuit Town Hall Meetings

Following a link on a recent Twitter (@Intuit), I recently viewed a couple of Town Hall meetings sponsered by Intuit, the company behind Quickbooks, as well as a variety of tax programs. These informative one hour meetings are led by well-known personal finance and small business experts Farnoosh Torabi and Gene Marks. There are 2 varieties, one geared toward small businesses and one for consumers. I viewed the small business editions, which brought together a dozen or so small business people for the discussions on a medly of issues facing independent businesses during these unchartered economic times. Here’s the link to an archive of these townhall meetings:

http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_kit/intuit_town_hall/

Just a few of the interesting tidbits I learned while listening to a few recent meetings In the background, while working on aproject):

If you accept credit cards, use a separate checking account for those deposits and then sweep those funds into your main checking account. Credit card processors can, if a cardholder objects to a charge (up to 6 months after the purchase), remove those funds from your account. This actually happened recently to a client of mine, an attorney,  who had $40,000 removed from his general checking account by a the credit card company.

Intuit, whcih spends a sizable amount on various forms of advertising, receives 81% of its sales from word of mouth. While that advertising would usually focus on the many features of Quickbooks, they found from market studies that the main reason word of mouth buyers selected Quickbooks was:
Ease of use
It saves them money
It saves them time.

Calculating within Quickbooks

Are you aware that, in most input forms within Quickbooks (checks, invoices, bills, estimates, etc.), you can perform simple calculations in any number field? For example, if you’re writing a check to reimburse yourself for several parking fees, you can highlight the check amount field and add up the individual receipts to arrive at your total.

Using the numeric key pad on your keyboard (or number keys on your laptop), enter the first amount, then press the “+” key. Continue adding each number followed by the “+” key. After you’ve entered the last number, press the “Enter” key (rather than the plus key) to total your numbers and put the total figure in your check amount.

This will work in pretty much any dollar field within Quickbooks. You can also perform subtraction (-), multiplication (*) and division (/). For example, paying a vendor for 4 ½ hours at $45/hour, you would key in:

•  4.5  *  45.00  Enter  (4.5 times 45.00)

 If you’re paying 25% down on an $8500 project, you would type in: 

• 8500.00    /    4.00   Enter (8500.00 divided by 4) or
• .25  *  8500.00 Enter   (.25 times 8500.00)

 You will notice that, when you are adding or subtracting a list of numbers, Quickbooks will display a running tape of those numbers. You can review the tape BEFORE YOU HIT THE ENTER KEY to verify you’ve entered all the numbers correctly. Quickbooks allows you to edit the current line amount you are entering, but not a previous line number. That means you can change the numbers you’ve entered on the current line before you hit the + or – or enter key.

 If you’re adding a long list of numbers and  you’ve entered a wrong number previously on the tape, you can simply subtract that number and then reenter it correctly, rather than starting over. You would hit the – key and then enter the wrong number, then the + key and the correct number:

•  456.55  +
• 123.88  +
• 251.58 +
• 444.98  -
• 123.88  +
• 120.88  Enter

 Also note that, if you have your preference set to automatically enter decimal points, you will not need to enter decimal points when added or subtracting numbers. However, you should ALWAYS enter the decimal point when multiplying or dividing, as Quickbooks doesn’t add the decimal point automatically for these functions. I recommend keeping multiplication and division calculations simple.

 In this case, 4 is multiplied by 9 first (which = 36) and then 3 is added (resulting in an answer of 39). If you intended to add 9 + 3 and multiply the result by 4 (resulting in 48), you should do the addition first, hit enter, then multiply the result:

      9  +  3   enter  (12)

      *  4       enter  (48)

 When I’m in need of a quick calculation and I have Quickbooks open, I tend to open a new check and run the calculation in the amount field. One reason I prefer this method over Quickbooks calculator (which you’ll find in the edit pull down menu) is the running tape when adding or subtracting a long list of numbers. Another advantage is not having to switch back and forth between the Quickbooks form and the calculator, when you can perform your calculation within the form.

 Happy Number Crunching!

Quickbooks Keyboard Shortcuts

With most software programs, I tend to look for keyboard shortcuts to speed things up, and Quickbooks is no exception. If you’re not currently using keyboard shortcuts or are only use a few of them, I think you’ll find some of these will really enhance your data entry experience.

Let’s start with date functions. Whenever you have a date highlighted in Quickbooks, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:

+ = 1 day later
- = 1 day earlier
(Note: You can press either several times to move 1 day at a time)

YeaR -> y = 1st day of the year and r = last day of the year
MontH -> m = 1st day of the month and h = last day of the month
WeeK -> w = 1st day of the week and k = last day of the week

Hitting the letter several times repeats the function (y takes you to 1/1/09. Hit it again & you’re at 1/1/08, and hitting y one more time brings you to 1/1/07)

Here are some more keyboard timesavers:

Ctrl + I = create Invoice
Ctrl + W = write check
Ctrl + M = memorize transaction
Ctrl + T = memorized transaction list
Ctrl + A = chart of accounts
Ctrl + Enter = save & new
Ctrl + D = deletes current transaction
           (BE VERY CAREFUL WITH THIS ONE – ONCE YOU DELETE A CHECK, INVOICE, ETC., IT’S GONE FOR GOOD)
Ctrl + Delete = deletes the current line in an invoice, bill, check, etc
Ctrl + Insert = inserts a new line in an invoice, bill, check, etc
Ctrl + C = copy
Ctrl + V = paste
Ctrl + N = new customer, vendor, account or list item
Escape closes current window

For a more complete listing of Quickbooks shortcuts, visit the following Intuit Web page:

Intuit Quickbooks Keyboard Shortcuts

NOTE – Some, but not all, of these shortcuts work with Quickbooks for Mac, using the command key.