QuickBooks Tips and Tricks

Managing the accounting through QuickBooks is one of my main responsibilities at CCA. I’ve been doing it for about two years and I’ve come up with a few tips and tricks to make my life easier, and hopefully they’ll make your life easier too.

  1. Categorize your services in the item column.

We provide services, rather than items, and I wanted to find a way to see how much or our income was coming from each service. By creating an item for each service I can then use that on each invoice then run reports to see what percentage of our profits each service is generating.    

You can create items and subcategories of items in the List tab (fig 1).  In your individual invoices you can select what item name matches with the service you are billing for (fig 2).

Figure 1

Figure 1

Figure 3

Figure 2

You can see from this sample invoice what it would look like if you were billing for multiple services (fig 3).

Figure 4

Figure 3

You can then run reports to see the results. The Sales by Item Summary and Sales by Item Detail are both excellent reports to be able to see how much business each service is bringing in (fig 4).

Figure 5

Figure 4

  1. Take advantage of the Payroll feature

The Payroll feature through QuickBooks cost a bit extra, but it calculates your taxes, wages, and much more for you.  It makes paying your employees incredibly simple and easy.

  1. Back up your QuickBooks often

We back up our QuickBooks every day onto a remote computer.  The idea of losing all of our accounting data because of a computer malfunction or user error is terrifying. Also, if you make a mistake, and we’re talking a catastrophic, un-fixable mistake, while editing your QuickBooks throughout the day you can simply upload the previous day’s backup and start fresh.

I am by no means an expert on QuickBooks and I am still learning more every day. These are just a few things I’ve picked up while using QuickBooks, and I hope they will be able to help you get the most out of your experience. If you have any QuickBooks tips and tricks that you’ve discovered please feel free to share them in the comments.

 

-Easton Smith

easton225

2 Comments

  1. Stebbean on August 28, 2015 at 4:53 pm

    Thank you so much for the great advice! Loved this article sooooo much!

    • esmit106 on August 31, 2015 at 4:05 pm

      Thank you so much Stebbean. I’m glad the article could help you! Let us know if you need help with anything else, and maybe we’ll write a blog about it!

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