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Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
15. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:16 PM
in response to: amspcs

Yes, QuickBooks will take up a lot of space on your computer. So, if you no longer need those versions, you should remove them. However; since this may have something to do with the specific hardware you have or conflicting software on your computer, your best bet is to call Intuit Technical Support on this. They have lots of ways to get support if you don't want to call - here is the link - http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/Default.aspx?homepage=true
Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
16. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:21 PM
in response to: Tori

Petty Cash should be tracked like any other Bank Account - even though it is not a "real" bank account. A lot of fraud happens with Petty Cash, so if you do not track it properly, you can be unpleasantly surprised with how much cash is disappearing. You don't want your staff to make an entry in your Bank Register and code it to Petty Cash Expense - that does not tell you what it was used for. Instead, create another "Bank" type account in your Chart of Accounts in QuickBooks. Then transfer the money from your Operating Account to your Petty Cash Account. Within your Petty Cash Bank Register, make entries - just like you would write checks in your Operating account - to show how the cash was used. If $10 is used for lunch, make a cash entry for $10 and code it to Meals in your Petty Cash Bank Register. You can reconcile this account as it is drawn down before replenishing it again. That way your employees know you are tracking and monitoring your cash.
Click to view amspcs's profile Mogul amspcs 516 posts since
Oct 18, 2007
17. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:21 PM
in response to: QB_Accountant
My QB file is HUGE--dates all the way back to 1996! Any suggestions on how to deal with and/or store
such old data without losing it permanently? I don't necessary want to delete it, but I don't normally need to see it every day on the register either. I believe there is a function in QB known as 'archiving', but I'm
not sure how to safely use it. Thanks.
Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
18. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:30 PM
in response to: amspcs

There are a couple options here. If you are in later versions of QuickBooks, there is no longer an option to Condense a QuickBooks file. Instead, there is a Cleanup Utility you can run. However; it does not reduce the file size of your QuickBooks file anymore.


The first option is that you can upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise. QuickBooks Enterprise is built to run larger databases so that you do not have problems keeping all of this history as your file size grows. If you are interested in learning more about QuickBooks Enterprise, you can email me at amy.vetter@technologyinabox.net and I can go through more of the details on this.


The next option is to use the Clean-up Utility. This option is under your File Menu, Utilities, Clean-up Company Data. It will ask you first to Verify Your Data to make sure there are no errors in the QuickBooks file. After that, you are going to want to back-up your QuickBooks file to archive it so that you have a copy of the history of your data. Then it will walk you through a wizard of removing transactional data and will create a summary Trial Balance for that year instead of leaving the history of all the transactions there.


The 3^rd^ option - which you should work with an Expert on - is using a utility created by an Outside Company to delete transactions from the QuickBooks file. However, I would not suggest you do that yourself. Again, you can contact me offline if you want assistance with that.

Click to view tallship's profile Professional tallship 3 posts since
Dec 9, 2008
19. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:30 PM

I work for a small nonprofit and we need to set up our first contra revenue account. How can we do this?
Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
20. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:34 PM
in response to: tallship

Go to your Chart of Accounts. At the bottom of the list, choose Account, then New. You are then going to select the type of Account you want to create - which will be an Income type account. Even though it is a Contra Account - or negative amount - it will still be an Income type account so that it nets against your Gross Revenue. For example, Sales Discounts - which is a negative income account - is a Contra Account.
Click to view iserviceceo's profile Start-up iserviceceo 1 posts since
Dec 9, 2008
21. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:34 PM
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!
Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
22. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:44 PM
in response to: iserviceceo

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.

Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
23. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:48 PM

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.
Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
24. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:57 PM
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.
Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
25. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 2:58 PM
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!
Click to view QB_Accountant's profile EXPERT QB_Accountant 23 posts since
Oct 24, 2008
26. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 3:02 PM
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!
Click to view SBOCTeam's profile sboc SBOCTeam 328 posts since
Jul 27, 2007
27. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 3:12 PM
in response to: QB_Accountant
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
Click to view ICEDOTS's profile Professional ICEDOTS 4 posts since
Dec 8, 2008
28. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 3:13 PM
in response to: QB_Accountant
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.
Click to view ICEDOTS's profile Professional ICEDOTS 4 posts since
Dec 8, 2008
29. Re: Event December 9: Preparing for year-end with QuickBooks Dec 9, 2008 3:13 PM
in response to: ICEDOTS
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?
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