quickbooks tips | QuickBooks for Contractors blog

10May 2011 by Nancy Smyth

Top 10 Tuesday QuickBooks Tips from Around the Web-5/10/2011

Construction News, News You Can Use, QuickBooks Tips & Tricks, Vendors & Accounts Payable

Top 10 Tuesday features our favorite QuickBooks, social media, construction and business tips from around the web. It's tough to choose just 10 and even tougher to read everything that is of interest - if I did ....... well I wouldn't ever get anything else done! This week's Top 10 include: Carrie Kahn Why Use Accounts Payable? Darren Slaughter The Law of 25 5 Reasons to Use How-To Articles for Contractor Marketing Intuit Small Business Blog How to Deal With Working Alone Top Notch Bookkeeping Can You Read Your Balance Sheet? A Bookkeeper's Corner Do You Have a Bookkeeper Or Do You Have a "Bookkeeper"? ProBlogger 3 Simple Changes to Increase Your Subscribers by 50% BNET 5 Signs That You're The Problem QuickBooks and Beyond QuickBooks Auto Data Recovery QuickBooks…

03May 2011 by Nancy Smyth

Top 10 Tuesday QuickBooks Tips from Around the Web – 5/3/11

News You Can Use

Top 10 Tuesday features 10 of our favorite tips from around the web. This week’s favorites include: DIYSEO Blog Small Business SEO - 45 Experts on the Biggest Mistakes SMB's Make with SEO and Internet Marketing (and How to Avoid Them) Branding & Marketing Six Questions You Need to Answer to Improve Marketing Effectiveness of Your Website Belshaw Accounting & Tax Services Free Tax Organizer QuickBooks and Your Business What's the Job Market Like for People with QuickBooks Skills? One Hour Bookkeeper.com Bookkeeping Money-Saving Tip #18: QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax Long for Success Why get QuickBooks Accountant instead of QuickBooks Pro? QuickBooks and Beyond QuickBooks Update for Manage Apps and Services - an Unexpected Update Scott Gregory Can An Inventory Item Have Two Different Descriptions in QuickBooks? Jan's Sushi Bar…

19Apr 2011 by Nancy Smyth

Top 10 Tuesday #QuickBooks Tips from Around the Web-4/19/2011

News You Can Use

Top 10 Tuesday features 10 of our favorite tips from around the web. This week's favorites include: Microsoft Demo: Create and use an e-mail template in Outlook 2007 Top Notch Bookkeeping The IRS May Hold You Liable for 941 Payments AccountingWeb Senate repeals 1099 provision; bill goes to President Obama for Signature Obama signs repeal of expanded 1099 requirements Scott Gregory How Do I Remove the Intuit Payment Network Stuff from My Invoices? QuickBooks & Beyond Intuit Statement Write Update Long for Success Top 10 QuickBooks Technical Support Questions QuickBooks and Your Business How to Restrict User Access in QuickBooks? The Contractor's Perspective The Small Business Jobs Act raises the stakes for fraudulent small business Intuit Small Business Blog 10 of the Best, Boldest, and Most Outrageous Tax Deductions Ever…

12Apr 2011 by Nancy Smyth

Top 10 Tuesday QuickBooks Tips From Around the Web-4/12/2011

News You Can Use

Top 10 Tuesday QuickBooks Tips from around the web has to be one of my favorite things. I'm always interested in new QuickBooks, business, social networking and productivity tips. Scott Gregory - QuickBooks Expert Alert: QuickBooks Online - Turbulence in the Cloud Intuit Small Business Blog How to Secure Small Business Government Contracts Free Resources for Minority-Owned Businesses How Not to Trigger an IRS Audit Chris Pirillo 140 QuickBooks Tips - $7.00 IRS Interim guidance on employer-sponsored health coverage information reporting (voluntary in 2011 - mandatory in 2012) Inc. Magazine 9 Tips to Help Redesign Your Company Facebook page 7 Blogging Mistakes That Small Businesses Make Artisteer Create Wordpress themes & Joomla Templates all in minutes QuickBooks & Your Business Best Way Ever to Print Checks in QuickBooks Well that's…

22Mar 2011 by Nancy Smyth

Top 10 Tuesday QuickBooks Tips from Around the Web-3/22/2011

News You Can Use

Each Tuesday we post our favorite QuickBooks and business tips that we found on the web the previous week – so today we’ll be posting our favorite tips for the week of March 14 through the 18th. Boy it's tough picking just 10 favorite tips! There is so much really good information out there. This weeks Top 10 favorites are from: AccountingWeb New QuickBooks certification will validate small business accounting skills Accounting Department Do your Accounting Policies Keep Your Financial Records Secure? Scott Gregory - 8 Free QuickBooks Guides Intuit Small Business Blog Why Isn't My Site Showing Up in Google? 7 SEO Tips to Raise Your Ranking Nerd's Knowledge Center Social Media - From Action Plan to Strategy $7 QuickBooks & Beyond QuickBooks & Internet Explorer 9 QuickBooks 2011…

21Mar 2011 by Nancy Smyth

How to Set Up Timetracking – #QuickBooks Tip

Payroll Tips, QuickBooks Setup & Cleanup

How to set up timetracking and use QuickBooks timesheets is a question that I see nearly every day on the Intuit Community forums. There are several ways in which you can enable timetracking in QuickBooks. When you create a new QuickBooks company file using the File -> New Company option and go through the EasyStep Interview there is a window that specifically asks "Do you want to track time in QuickBooks?" [caption id="attachment_1974" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Right click on the image to enlarge it"][/caption] If your QuickBooks company file wasn't set up using the EasyStep Interview, turning on timetracking and timesheets is an easy task, but you'll find that it is slightly more hidden. Turning on timesheets will require that you be logged into QuickBooks in single user mode as the…

10Mar 2011 by Charlie Russell

QuickBooks Tip – Understanding QuickBooks Inventory Cost

Be A Better Bookkeeper, From Our Guest Bloggers

If you are using QuickBooks to manage your inventory, you need to understand how QuickBooks deals with the cost of inventory items. Unfortunately, the term “cost” is used in several different ways, and it can get confusing. Here is a quick rundown of how QuickBooks handles things. I’ll focus on Inventory Part items, which are the true “inventory” items in QuickBooks, with a little detour to talk about Inventory Assembly items. Cost Fields in QuickBooks If you look at an Inventory Part item, you will see that there are two cost fields. Cost, on the left, is a "reference" field. That is, it doesn't have any direct bearing on the valuation of your inventory, the cost of your inventory in your inventory asset account. I wish they had another name,…

09Mar 2011 by Nancy Smyth

QuickBooks Tip-Tracking Retainage Payable to Subcontractors

Vendors & Accounts Payable

There are two possible ways to track retainage (retention) that you owe to your subcontractors; one method utilizes a Sub-Account of Accounts Payable, called Retainage Payable, and the other method utilizes an Other Liability Account, called Retainage Due to Subcontractors. Please review the setup and use of both methods, and choose whichever one seems more appropriate for your use. You will need to inform your accountant of this at year end, so he or she, may make the necessary Journal Entries. Method 1: Retainage as an Accounts Payable Sub-Account Accountants tend to really like this method, but, it is a two-part process for the person actually doing the billing, which means that it's error prone, simply due to normal day-to-day distractions. From the Lists menu, choose Chart of Accounts From…

08Mar 2011 by Nancy Smyth

Top 10 Tuesday QuickBooks Tips From Around the Web – 3/8/2011

News You Can Use

Top 10 Tuesday is a new feature here on the QuickBooks for Contractors blog and will feature our top 10 favorite QuickBooks tips and articles from around the web. We hope that you will find them useful too. This weeks favorites are from: Scott Gregory, QuickBooks Expert: QuickBooks and Wireless Networks - They Don't Play Nicely With Each Other QuickBooks and Beyond QuickBooks Mac 2011 Update Stopping QuickBooks Automatic Updates from Installing Nerd's Blog How To Audit Your QuickBooks file - 5 Things EVERY BUSINESS OWNER SHOULD KNOW how to do in QuickBooks QuickSource for QuickBooks blog Upgrade Bug: COGS convert to "billable" after upgrade to v2011. Very Messy Do these 2 Easy Steps to Maintain a Healthy, Lean, and Fast QuickBooks file QuickBooks and Your Business How to Repair…

03Mar 2011 by Shannon Tucker

Warning Signs: Is Your QuickBooks File Getting Too Big?

From Our Guest Bloggers, General QuickBooks News, QuickBooks Setup & Cleanup

Have you ever had a dream where you desperately needed to run fast (you’re being chased by Sasquatch, say) but your feet just won’t go? Your feet can only go in slow motion? If some of your QuickBooks reports seem stuck in molasses, or it’s taking a minute or more to save an invoice, that’s about as fun as a bad dream. Performance problems in QuickBooks are one warning sign that your QuickBooks data file is probably getting too big. (How big is too big? We’ll look at that in a minute.) Another warning sign is when you get random errors or crashes in QuickBooks. It doesn’t crash ALL the time, and you can’t reproduce the problem whenever you want (as if you want to!) But QuickBooks sometimes flakes out…

03Feb 2011 by Nancy Smyth

QuickBooks Tip – How Much Data Can QuickBooks Hold?

Be A Better Bookkeeper, General QuickBooks News, QuickBooks Setup & Cleanup

How much data can your QuickBooks company file hold before it becomes "stuffed", overflowing like a file cabinet, and SLOW? This is a very good question that most people don't take into consideration -- well because it's software and should hold an unlimited amount of data. QuickBooks Pro and Premier are designed for small businesses with 20 or fewer employees and annual revenues of less than $1 million per year, according to the latest information from the ProAdvisor certification study materials. It is intended to store at least 2 years of detailed information in a company file - this allows you to compare your current business years performance with that of a previous year. Quickbooks Enterprise is designed for larger businesses having 20-250 employees, needing up to 30 simultaneous users,…

26Jan 2011 by Nancy Smyth

QuickBooks Tip-Handling Employee Reimbursements for Expenses

Payroll Tips

Handling employee reimbursements for business related expenses, including mileage, should not be run through payroll in QuickBooks. When an employee uses his/her own money to pay for a business related expense it is money that they have loaned the company, and the company should account for those expenditures in the same manner in which they would if the company had made the expenditures themselves - in other words - those reimbursements should be correctly assigned to the appropriate expense or cost of goods sold accounts in QuickBooks. As a bookkeeper handling reimbursement requests, not only do you need to make sure that the expenses are correctly recorded; you also need to make sure that the manner in which expense reimbursement requests from employees meet accountability standards by the IRS. Every…

21Jan 2011 by Nancy Smyth

QuickBooks Tip – Upgrading to 2011 Forms & Template Errors

QuickBooks 2011 - What's New?

Upgrading to QuickBooks Premier Account 2011 caused some errors with my existing forms and form templates. Earlier this week I had to bite the bullet and upgrade my own QuickBooks file, moving it from the 2008 Premier Accountant version to the 2011 Premier Accountant Edition; as part of our own move from Windows XP to Windows 7. Yes, folks just like many of you we have been moving software and multitudes of data from XP machines to Windows 7 and updating our QuickBooks company data file. Not a fun task, but a necessary one. Upgrading our QuickBooks file was an easy task, we have a rather large QuickBooks file and the time it took to do the actual update seemed to be much faster than with previous upgrades. Our file…

06Jan 2011 by Nancy Smyth

QuickBooks Tip-What Account Should I Use?

Be A Better Bookkeeper

What account should I assign this transaction to? This is a frequent question that most QuickBooks users ask themselves at one point or another. Frequently you will run across a transaction that you just aren’t sure which account you should be posting it too. Often times you end up “just picking one”, and tell yourself that you’ll remember to ask your accountant about it the next time you talk to him/her – and quite promptly forget. To alleviate this problem; and give your accountant a “heads up” on transactions that you are having trouble classifying – add a new Expense Account to your Chart of Accounts called See (Accountants Name). Every time you have a transaction that you aren’t quite sure what to do with: Write a pretty detailed description…

05Jan 2011 by Nancy Smyth

QuickBooks Tips-Year End Tasks for Filing Taxes; 1099’s

Vendors & Accounts Payable

The end of the year always adds even more tasks to your already busy schedule, and sometimes it is simply overwhelming and I’ve often been asked – “What do I need to do?” Intuit has built a very good “QuickBooks Year-End Guide/Checklist” and it’s included right in your QuickBooks program by going to the Help Menu and choosing Year-End Guide. Over the next few days, we’ll cover each topic listed in the Year-End Guide, and offer some additional tips on each of the three sections: Tasks to prepare for filing taxes, Tasks to do if you use subcontractors, Tasks to do if you have employees and some Tips for the upcoming year. Tasks to do if you use subcontractors Ensure that 1099 info is correct – the IRS requires that…

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