invoices

QuickBooks 2012: Better Financial Management

As it usually does this time of year, Intuit has introduced new versions of its Pro and Premier products. QuickBooks 2012 promises to help you get better organized, save steps, and acquire more in-depth financial insights.

The new Express Start is designed for businesses that want to blast through setup and start entering customers and invoices. You have two other options though.

Advanced Setup is the old EasyStep interview that solicits more details. You can also open an existing file or convert data from Quicken or other accounting software.

Express Start requires minimal input. Company name, industry, company type, tax ID, and contact information is all that’s required. After you save your company file, it lets you start adding or importing customers/vendors/employees, products/services, and bank accounts.

Figure 1: Express Start simplifies company setup

An Activity-Driven Calendar

QuickBooks’ Reminders keep you apprised of each day’s tasks, but they don’t provide any information about the past or future. QuickBooks 2012 solves this problem with its new Calendar. When you enter an appointment, to-do, or key business task (invoices, bills, purchase orders, etc.), it appears in the calendar. You can display a graphical view of the month that tallies activities for each day and lists them below. Daily and weekly views are in list form and links open the original documents.

Figure 2: The new Calendar displays daily, weekly, and monthly views of your financial transactions

Save Excel Formatting

Once you’ve formatted a QuickBooks report in Excel, it’s frustrating to have to reformat it each time you run it for different time periods and/or with your ever-changing content. Excel Integration Refresh simplifies this process. You can now export a report to Excel, make formatting changes and save them, and then reapply them later to the same type of report using different date ranges and your updated QuickBooks data. Acceptable alterations include:

Row and column header font formatting
New formulas
Renamed column and row headers, and report titles
Resized columns
Inserted columns and rows
Inserted formula text

You can do this by opening your report in QuickBooks and clicking Update an existing worksheet, or by launching your report in Excel and clicking the QuickBooks tab on the toolbar, then the Update Report button.

Figure 3: This window opens when you click Update Report in Excel

A New Report Community

There’s always room for more report formats. QuickBooks 2012 offers a library of Contributed Reports, variations created either by Intuit or your fellow users. You can select one of these, like Customer Sales By Quantity By Item Detail and instantly populate it with your own data.

You can sort these templates by industry and rating, and view them as a list, in a grid, or in the Report Center’s Carousel view.

Centralized Operations

QuickBooks 2012 also saves you time with its new Centers. The Inventory Center works similarly to those available for customers, vendors, and employees. It’s a clearinghouse of item records and transactions that can be viewed and sorted. You can also do inventory housekeeping tasks here, like adding items and launching transactions.

The Lead Center helps you carefully track new leads that you either paste in from Excel or enter manually. You can add to-dos and notes to contact records, and convert them into customers.

Upgrading Can Be Tricky

Intuit has included other, smaller time-saving organizational and reporting tools in QuickBooks 2012, like One-Click Transactions, which lets you create related transactions from existing ones (i.e., invoice to credit memo) with one click.

There’s nothing especially difficult about using most of QuickBooks 2012’s new features. But upgrading and setup are sometimes quirky, and the Excel Integration Refresh tool has a learning curve. We’re happy to help you start your company file on the right foot or get acclimated to this latest version.

Figure 4: Track your leads and convert them into customers in the new Lead Center

Year End Tax Saving Ideas For Individuals – Deferred Income

There are a number of steps you might take by year-end to cut your 2011 tax bill, such as deferring income, accelerating deductions and capital gains planning.

Deferring Income

If you are planning on selling an investment this year on which you have a gain, it may be best to wait until the following tax year to defer payment of the taxes for another year (subject to estimated tax requirements).
If you are expecting a bonus at year-end, you may be able to defer receipt of these funds until January. This allows you to defer tax payments (other than the portion normally withheld) until the following year. However, keep in mind that you usually defer taxes on a bonus that is contractually due in 2011.
If your company grants stock options, it may be wise to wait until next year to exercise the option or sell stock acquired by exercise of an option. Exercise of the option is often but not always a taxable event; sale of the stock is almost always a taxable event.
If you’re self employed, and can afford the delay in cash inflow, defer sending invoices or bills to clients or customers until the end of December.

Caution: Keep an eye on the estimated tax requirements.

QuickBooks Helps You Make a Statement

How do you let customers know they owe you money? Probably by sending invoices. And how’s that working for you? If your customers are all conscientious and pay on time, maybe that’s all you need to do.

But perhaps you need to consider doing at least part of your billing by dispatching statements. These forms have their drawbacks. For example, you can’t include sales tax or discounts on them. You can’t group related charges and subtotal them. And your customization options are weaker than in invoices.

Statements lay out the customer’s current financial obligation to you, including any statement charges, invoices, payments, unpaid bills and finance charges that have accrued during a specified period. Unlike invoices, they do not create new charges; they simply report on what’s already been entered. Billing statements that outline historical transactions can be sent as reminders of past due accounts, or you can use them for customers who order frequently, to keep track of items until you’re ready to bill and ship. They’re also useful when you request payment in advance.

You should not invoice for any products or services that have already been entered as statement charges or the customer will be double-billed. Statement charges show up under Recent Transactions in the window adjacent to invoice forms; they also appear in the Customer Center and your Accounts Receivable account in the Chart of Accounts. And you can find them in the Customer Register (Customers | Enter Statement Charges).

Outlining the charges

If you want to enter new statement charges instead of an invoice for, say, a monthly billing or a customer who is ordering frequently but is not ready to be billed, click on the Statement Charges icon on the desktop. (If there’s no icon and you want one, click Edit | Preferences, then Desktop View | Company Preferences, then click in the box next to Statements and Statement Charges.) Or you can just click Customers | Enter Statement Charges.

Click on Edit | Preferences to add Statement Charges and Statements icons to your desktop.

The customer register opens. Select the customer you want to create a charge for by clicking the down arrow next to Customer:Job. If you are in the middle of more than one job for the customer, make sure you make the correct one active.

Go down to the first blank line and change the date if necessary. Tab to the Item field, and drop the list to select the relevant product or service. Tab and enter the Quantity. The Rate and Amt Chrg should be filled in (if not, go back to Lists | Item List and edit the record). QuickBooks will have entered STMTCHG in the Type field. Tab to the Description field and complete it if it’s blank, and select a Class if you’d like. Your window will look something like this:

It’s very easy to enter statement charges in QuickBooks.

If you have another charge for that job or customer, go ahead and enter it. When you’re done with charges for that job/customer, click Record.

Build a statement

You can create statements at any time from data already entered in QuickBooks. The process is the same whether you’ve just entered a series of charges, as outlined above, or you want to remind a customer of outstanding invoices. You’re simply capturing all activity within a given time period. To do so, click the Statements icon on the home page. This window opens:

You’ll select options from this window when you’re building a statement run.

If the window contains an A/R field, that means that you have more than one receivables account. Be sure to select the appropriate one. Verify, too, that the date is correct. This will appear in the customer’s register as the Billed Date.

Here, too, you can choose a range of transaction dates for your statement(s), or simply opt to create forms for all customers with open transactions (in the latter case, you can limit it to transactions that are more than 30 days past due). You must also indicate whether you want statements sent to all customers or a subset. You can manually choose one or many customers, or select by Type (commercial, residential) or Preferred Send Method (E-mail or Mail).

QuickBooks gives you some control over your statements’ layout; click Customize if you want to explore this. Next, you can indicate whether you want to create one statement per customer or per job. The other options here are self-explanatory, but be sure to go through them every time you create statements.

Another decision

Will you be wanting to assess finance charges on the past due charges? This is a decision you should talk over with your ProAdvisor. It’s a complex issue. Should you want to do so, though, clicking on Assess Finance Charges will open the Assess Finance Charges window.

When you’re satisfied with all of your statement choices, you can Preview them. Here’s an example:

Statements lay out all transaction activity within a given period. Statement charges appear as “Due.” In this case, you’re reminding the customer that there’s a large past due balance as well as additional new charges.

Statements can be an effective way to let your customersâ€”and youâ€”get a comprehensive view of their financial interaction with you. They can be used instead of invoices, but there are limitations. If you’re still unclear on how these forms can fit into your accounting workflow, your ProAdvisor can help.