Home: Message List - Event: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

Event: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

SBOCTeam — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:35:13 GMT

This event will cover some target areas that you can troubleshoot in your QuickBooks file and how to fix them, some tips and techniques to examine and verify that your QuickBooks file is as accurate as possible and how to prepare your file to be ready to take to your tax accountant.

Amy Vetter, CPA.CITP leads the Florida office for Technology In A Box, LLC and serves as CFO and Executive Director for the company. Technology In A Box, LLC is a national consulting firm that offers complete end-to-end solutions to small to mid-market businesses and franchises.

Amy Vetter is an accomplished author of QuickBooks reference materials and is a contributor and speaker for Intuit's courses for Certification and Training of QuickBooks ProAdvisors and Accountants. Amy has been recognized by The CPA Technology Advisor as an outstanding 40 under 40 technology-based Accountant and was also awarded South Florida Business Journal's Up & Comer Award in 2007 for her expertise in accounting. Visit her at http://www.TechnologyInABox.net

Amy can answer questions such as:

How does QuickBooks data directly relate to financial statements and tax returns?
When and how do I make corrections to the QuickBooks data file?
How do I identify changes made to QuickBooks lists?
Can I resolve open items in A/P and A/R?
How do I troubleshoot bank reconciliation errors?

Post your question here and then check back on December 9 at 2:00PM EST, or any time thereafter for Amy's reply. You can also pose a question any time during the event hour.

What's your QuickBooks's question?

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

ICEDOTS — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:11:58 GMT

I really only have 2 products. each product has different flavors. Can I sent up my 2 products as an inventory part. Is this the correct way to set it up? Also I get rebates back on one of my products. How would I create that account under the inventory system?

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

ICEDOTS — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:05:15 GMT

The problem is the reconcile has already been thrown off.....Because I've attached the bill pay through the chart of account. Do you have another suggestion.

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

SBOCTeam — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:12:20 GMT

Amy, the Community can not thank you enough for participating in this event. We appreciate your time and professional responses today.

Community, although our time with Amy has concluded, feel free to discuss today's topic amongst yourselves. If you would like more information on Amy and Technology In A Box, please visit http://www.TechnologyInABox.net

The SBOC Team

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

QB_Accountant — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:02:03 GMT

It was a pleasure to be your Guest here today to faciliate this discussion on Year-end issues in QuickBooks. If you would like more help or information on Training and Accounting Services we offer, you can go to www.technologyinabox.net. Under the QuickBooks menu option, we have various Consulting packages that we offer. You can also contact me by selecting the Support - Contact Executive Directors - choose Amy Vetter.

Good Luck with your Year-End Clean-up!

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

QB_Accountant — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:58:33 GMT

In QuickBooks, since it is driven off the Items List, it sometimes hard to be sure that a transaction posted the accounts you wanted it to post to. On any transaction you are on, you can select CTRL+Y to see the Journal Entry behind the scenes to get some peace of mind it posted to the right account!

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

QB_Accountant — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:56:49 GMT

Some other things to watch out for at Year End:

Make sure to review your Open Invoices and Unpaid Vendor Bills Report. You want to make sure your A/R and A/P is cleaned up before providing your QuickBooks file to your Accountant. Match and Credits or Payments that are outstanding and should be applied to an Open Invoice or Open Bill. Write off any Bad Debt as we discussed earlier in this chat, and make sure you do not have checks issued for an Open Vendor Bill outstanding. Follow the process I outlined prior to this to clear out checks that should have been applied to Vendor Bills.
Make sure you created Sales Tax Payments or Payroll Liabilities Tax Payments to pay those Liabilities down in QuickBooks rather than Manual Checks.
Review your Chart of Accounts. Items, Customers and Vendors Listings for duplicates. Merge accounts that are similar, and clean out any miscellaneous type accounts to a specific account it should be coded to.
Make sure to perform a Physical Inventory and adjust your inventory levels if you have inventory in your business.
Complete all your Bank Reconciliations for the year. Make sure that you do not have any reconciliation differences. If so, make sure to resolve those.

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

QB_Accountant — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:48:32 GMT

A tip for those of you that are upgrading to 2009 this year is to create your outside Accountant as their own user! That way their changes are tracked separately from yours! If they take an Accountant's Copy of your QuickBooks File, you will want to create them as their own user first, before giving them your file.

The Administrator of your file creates an External Accountant role for you in their data file. This is NEW in QuickBooks 2009, the External Accountant user allows the Accountant access to all areas of QuickBooks similar to the Administrator role. In the past, in order to get Administrator level access, the Accountant would have to sign in as the Administrator on the file. The downfall of signing in as the Administrator is that any changes that the Accountant makes are combined with the your changes in the QuickBooks file. Now with the External Accountant user, the Accountant has access to all sensitive accounting activities and information in the QuickBooks data file without needing to be logged in as the Administrator.

The only limitations for the External Accountant user role are that you are unable to add, edit or delete existing users of the QuickBooks file and you cannot view customer credit card information.

The Administrator of the QuickBooks data file is the only person that can create an External Accountant User in the QuickBooks file. Once created, the Accountant should always log on with their own login to perform their accounting tasks in the QuickBooks file. This enables any changes made by the accountant in the QuickBooks file to be tracked separately. The External Accountant should be the only one allowed to have this user role in QuickBooks since it has Administrator-level access to the QuickBooks file.

The External Accountant role is available in QuickBooks Premier Accountant 2009, as well as QuickBooks Pro and Premier editions, as long as the Administrator creates this user role for you in their company file.

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

QB_Accountant — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:43:48 GMT

Great thinking on this one! Yes, I would suggest that you have it import to Undeposited Funds - not the Bank Account directly, if you do not have an option to match this in ServiceCEO. That way you can take the entries from undeposited funds and group it yourself into a deposit. When you do the Online Banking matching, then the 2 will match.

I do not believe Journal Entries will show up when working in your Online Banking window. That is probably the reason you are not seeing it there. You would have to verify that with Intuit Technical Support, but I believe it is looking for transactions, not journal entries.

In the Online Banking Center for 2009 - the interface changed in QuickBooks. But one thing that may help you with the new interface is that you can match a deposit from your Online Banking download to Open Invoices OR Undeposited Funds. You do not have to group it first. You can select all the undeposited funds that downloaded and match it to the deposit from Online Banking. Or, what you could do is not download the deposites from ServiceCEO, just the invoices, and match the open invoices to the Online Banking deposits if that would work.

You should probably take some time talk with ServiceCEO as well about this issue and if they are coming out with updates to help you with this issue.

Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks

iserviceceo — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:24:13 GMT

Amy,

I am having some difficulty matching transactions downloaded from my finanical institution (Bank of America) with transactions that have been exported to my QuickBooks company file by a field service management package ServiceCEO.

Essentially, I do all of my invoicing and receive all of my payments from customer in ServiceCEO. There is an integration utility using the QuickBooks SDK that allows me to automatically export batches of Income, A/R, and Cash Receipt transactions from batch processing queues in ServiceCEO directly to QuickBooks.

QuickBooks accepts these transactions as GL entries in my chart of accounts. There is NOT a customer level integration. Each invoice in ServiceCEO does NOT create a matching invoice in QB's. Each Deposit from ServiceCEO might contain multiple checks, Credit Card Transactions, etc. The deposit total can be written to any account on my chart of accounts by the import. If the deposit contains payments of multiple types (checks and cash) then it will create two journal entries, one totalling all of the checks in the deposit, another totalling all of the cash in the deposit.

The problem that these deposits are currently dropping directly into my BoA checking account in the GL. Later, I download the transaction history from BoA Online, and the deposit is being added to the same checking account again. I'm getting duplicate payments.

When I use the matching utility, I have 2 major problems:
1) A single journal entry in the GL (ServiceCEO Depost #3 - $3000 Checks) might be coming from 3 separate checks from 3 separate customers, because the deposit is the total of all checks included in Deposit #3 (3 checks for $1000 each). This would make it difficult to match the transactions on it's own.

2) When using the match utility available from the "Online Banking" utility, I choose to view the register above my unmatched transactions, but it's empty.
a) Shouldn't my existing journal entries be there so that I can line things up and match them?
b) Is the fact that I don't have actual deposits in QuickBooks (just journal entries in the bank account) the reason that they aren't showing up in the register? (Or could it be that anything in the Undeposited Funds Account doesn't show up in the register view?)

I've been testing an alternate setup in a duplicate of my QB's company file where I have all deposits from ServiceCEO exporting to the "Undeposited Funds" account instead of directly to BoA.
I'm imaging a solution where I never actual deposit the funds from my undeposited funds account, but instead wait for the deposit to show up in the online banking download, and then somehow remove the transaction from undeposited funds (or void it) Could this work?

I know that's a whole lot of questions, but any insight you can lend to my situation would be much appreciated.

Thanks!