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Hello Community! Today we will cover the top five conversations that are trending across our social platforms. If you want to join in on the discussions or attend any of our live events, you can join us on social media by clicking the links below.
In our latest Answer Room event, hosted on the QBCares X Spaces, we went over vendor expenses, customer forms, insights and reporting, best practices for account management, and the differences between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop.
So let’s dive into what we discussed!
Best Practices for Account Management
QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online
Vendor Expenses
Checks
You can either record on the spot expenses as checks or even create and print checks to pay bills in QuickBooks Online.
One of the really cool features you’ll notice when making your checks in your account is that you get to choose which account you want the check to pull from, which means you don’t have to juggle different checkbooks for all your different accounts.
Creating checks is a super simple process:
- Click the +New button and choose Check
- Fill out the Payee and the Bank Account you want to pay from
- Set your printing preferences
- Then click Save and Close.
For more information on creating and printing checks in QuickBooks Online, check out this article.
Bills
If you’ve already paid an expense, you’ll enter it as a check or an expense. However, if you want to keep track of upcoming or recurring expenses, bills are the way to go.
You can add your Bills to your account by:
- Choosing +New and Bill
- Filling out all of the appropriate information
- Clicking Save and Close
Once you’ve entered your bills, they will live under your Expenses and Bills tab, where you should see them sorted by For Review, Paid, and Unpaid.
When you’re ready to pay your bills, you can toggle to the Unpaid tab and either schedule payment or mark a bill as paid, depending on the circumstances.
For more information on when to use checks or bills, click here.
Customer Forms
Estimates
Estimates are an awesome tool to use when you want to provide your customers with a quote or a bid for work you plan to do. And, not only are they great to provide to customers, they’re also beneficial to business owners since they help you keep track of what income you will have in the future.
To create a new estimate:
- Click +New and choose Estimate
- Fill out the applicable information
- Choose to Save and Close or Save and Send
Once your customer approves the estimate, you can find it by going to Sales then Estimates, click the dropdown in the action column, and choose the Update Status button to mark it as accepted.
Note: If you email your estimate to your customer, they actually have the option to accept or decline it from their end as well, and it will automatically update the status on your end!
Invoices
After your work is completed and you’re ready to invoice your customers, you can convert an estimate to an invoice by using that same action dropdown and choosing the Create Invoice option. You can always make changes to the invoice if things have changed since you created the estimate, so you don’t have to worry about starting from scratch in that situation.
If you’re needing to invoice a customer that you haven’t provided an estimate to already, just click the +New button from your home page and choose the Invoice option, fill out the fields, and you’re good to go!
Click here to catch Chance’s top tips for getting the most out of your invoicing experience.
Reports and Insights
You can find your reports by clicking Reports from your Business Overview dashboard, or by going to the Reports tab on the left navigation menu. From here, you can either browse the reports list, or use the search bar to find the report by name.
Once you’ve found the report you want, you can customize it or filter it by dates and then choose Run Report to apply your changes.
You can also run reports for specific accounts by going to your Settings then Chart of Accounts, finding the account you want, and clicking Run Report under the action dropdown.
Check out our Quick Help with QuickBooks Guide on Reports here.
Location and Class Insights
You can also filter your Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet reports by location. When you add a location to a transaction, it links that location to both the header and the details, so you can use the Display Columns By dropdown on those reports and choose Locations to apply that filter.
Similarly, you can also sort your Profit and Loss reports by classes for additional insight by following those same steps, but choosing Class instead of location.
Note: You’ll also see the option to sort your Balance sheet by class, however this sorting will not be accurate as the headers on those transactions will be listed as Not Specified.
Best Practices for Account Management
One of the most crucial steps in avoiding login issues is to make sure that your Intuit Account is always up to date and verified.
To do this:
- Go to accounts.intuit.com and sign in using your current QuickBooks credentials
- Click on Sign in and Security on the left hand side
- Confirm that your email address and phone number are up to date and that they are listed as Verified
The reason it is so important to keep this information current and verified is that if you forget your password, you can recover your account by choosing the Sign in a Different way option on the QuickBooks Online login screen.
That option should then let you choose between receiving a code to your phone number or email address that’s on file, and you can then use that code to sign in and then reset your password from there!
QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Desktop
QuickBooks Desktop is a bookkeeping software that you download directly to your computer and maintain with an annual subscription. It helps you manage invoices, inventory, employees, banking, and so much more.
While the list of features is long, some of the main appeals for QuickBooks Desktop are that it is a wonderful inventory management tool, it isn’t a cloud-based software, and it makes it easy to save hard copies of all your work all in one place.
QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online’s capabilities are very similar to those of QuickBooks Desktop. However, QuickBooks Online is a cloud-based software that is accompanied by a monthly subscription plan.
Some of the great features associated with QuickBooks Online are the ability to manage the account from any device with internet access, the QuickBooks Online mobile app, mileage tracking, and the ability for integrations with a handful of popular business apps.
Desktop to Online Migration Process
While QuickBooks Desktop is still an amazing fit for a lot of businesses, there are a handful of reasons why users may look at making the move to QuickBooks Online.
- QuickBooks Online does offer a monthly subscription plan, rather than the annual subscription that QuickBooks Desktop uses, which could make Online a nice change for certain budgeting needs.
- With 2020 versions of Desktop having the service discontinuations, some customers may feel inspired to make the transition to Online rather than going through the Desktop upgrade process every few years.
- Or, they may just be ready for the ease of access that QuickBooks Online has to offer.
It’s definitely up to the customer to decide which version of QuickBooks is the best fit for their needs all the way around. The migration isn’t a forced process by any means!
If you find yourself interested in moving your QuickBooks Desktop file to a QuickBooks Online account, you can follow this link to learn more, or check out the video below.
That’s all we have to share with you today! If you’re interested in joining us for our weekly live events, you can follow us on our @QBCares X page.
See you next time!
