Paying for Expenses

Although most small business owners sift through the daily mail looking for envelopes containing payments, they usually find more containing bills. One frustrating aspect of running a business is that you often have to pay for the items you sell before you can invoice your customers for the goods.

If you want your financial records to be right, you have to tell QuickBooks about the expenses you’ve

Tracking Time and Mileage

When customers pay for your services, they’re really buying your knowledge of how to get the job done the best and fastest possible way. That’s why an inexperienced carpenter charges $15 an hour, whereas a master woodworker who hammers faster and straighter than a nail gun charges $80 an hour. When it comes right down to it, time is money, so you want to keep track of both with equal accuracy. Product-based companies track time, too. For example, companies that want to increase productivity often start by tracking the time that employees work and what they work on.

Setting Up Other QuickBooks Lists

Open any QuickBooks window, dialog box, or form, and you’re bound to bump into at least one drop-down list. These lists make it easy to fill in transactions and forms. Creating an invoice? If you pick the customer and job from the Customer:Job drop-down list, QuickBooks fills in the customer’s address, payment terms, and other fields for you. Selecting payment terms from the Terms List tells the program how to calculate an invoice’s due date. If you choose an entry in the Price Level List, QuickBooks calculates the discount or markup you extend to your customers for the goods they buy. Even the products and services you sell to customers come from the Item List.

Bank Accounts and Credit Cards

You’ve opened your mail, plucked out the customer payments, and deposited them in your bank account. In addition to that, you’ve paid your bills. Now you can sit back and relax knowing that most of the transactions in your bank and credit card accounts are accounted for. What’s left?

Some stray transactions might pop up—an insurance-claim check to deposit or handling the aftermath and bank fees for a customer’s bounced check, to name a couple. Plus, running a business typically means that money moves between accounts—from interest-bearing accounts to checking accounts,

Data Entry Shortcuts for Lists

If you frequently add or edit more than one customer, vendor, or item at a time, working in a New or Edit window (like New Customer or Edit Item) isn’t only tedious, but it also takes up time you should spend on more important tasks, like selling, managing cash flow, or finding out who has the incriminating pictures from the last company party.

Setting Up Items

Whether you build houses, sell gardening tools, or tell fortunes on the Internet, you’ll probably use items in QuickBooks to represent the products and services you buy and sell. But to QuickBooks, things like subtotals, discounts, and sales tax are items, too. In fact, nothing appears in the body of a QuickBooks sales form (such as an invoice) unless it’s an item. You can also use items to fill in the bills and other purchase forms you record. Now that you’ve got your chart of accounts, customers, jobs, and vendors set up in QuickBooks, it’s time to dive into items.

Setting Up Customers, Jobs, and Vendors

You may be fond of strutting around your sales department proclaiming, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something!” As it turns out, you can quote that tired adage in your accounting department, too. Whether you sell products or services, the first sale to a new customer often initiates a flurry of activity, including creating a new customer in QuickBooks, assigning a job for the work, and the ultimate goal of all this effort—invoicing your customer (sending an invoice for what you sold that states how much the customer owes) to collect some income.