LaCrews Bookkeeping’s Blog

If you don’t need to track sales receipts for each customer, you can simplify your record keeping by recording all your sales for a specific period of time on a single sales receipt. The sales receipt acts as a summary of your sales for that period of time.

In the Create Sales Receipt window, you can select the Daily Sales Summary template from the drop down menu. You can enter all sales and payment items into this form for the day.  Once saved, it will be in your undeposited funds account.

If your sales period is longer than a day, or you track detailed sales data, the Custom Sales Recipt template from the drop down menus is a better choice.   You can enter your popular sales items along with each payment method then save the form as a Memorized Transaction.  Each form will have a different payment method, thus being a different Memorized Transaction.  When you’re ready for your periodic sales entries, call up the Memorized Transaction/form and enter your sales.  Once saved, the payments will be in your undeposited funds account.

An Accountant’s Copy is a version of your company file that your QuickBooks expert can use to make changes while you continue to work.   Choose a cut off date.  You continue to work in your company file after the date and, at the same time, your QuickBooks expert works in the Accountant’s Copy on transactions before the date.   When your QuickBooks expert is done, you then import his/her changes into your company file.

Besides being a convenient way to “share” a data file, QuickBooks makes it easy to transfer the Accountant’s Copy between users.   You send the file via FTP and added password security to a QuickBooks website.  Your QuickBooks expert downloads the data and works on the file.   If you send an Accountant’s Copy to your QuickBooks expert via email attachment, that particular type of file CAN be used by anyone if intercepted. 

There is no reverse way to FTP this data file back to you, so it can be sent back to you as an email attachment .   The converted copy is useless to anyone, on the off chance someone ever intercepted the email.     It is an import only file and has no readable data as a stand-alone file.  Wthout your “brother” file on your local computer, the file that is emailed is useless to someone else.

When users setup their companies originally they have to indicate their fiscal year. Quickbooks then knows what reporting period constitutes a year and is smart enough to know at what date net income is transferred to retained earnings.  However, Quickbooks does not “close” the books in the classic accounting sense.

You can choose whether to close your books at the end of the year or not.  The closing date/set password feature in Edit > Preferences > Accounting is simply a safeguard to not allow postings to periods that have had financial statements printed or even more importantly tax returns completed. For this reason, setting the closing date to the end of the most recent fiscal year is ideal.

You can set a password to restrict access to data from the prior fiscal year.  To modify or delete a transaction in a closed period, a user must know the closing date password and have the appropriate permissions. Any changes made after the closing date to transactions dated on or before the closing date will appear in the closing date exception report. The Closing data exception report shows transactions dated on or before the closing date that were changed or entered after you established the closing date.

We were once asked what happens when you post vendor invoices from a previous month. Assuming you are reporting on the accrual basis the date of the invoice will reflect the month in which the expense is recorded. If you have set the closing date to the end of that month you will receive a warning and have to enter the password. If you know invoices are still due from vendors from the prior month then you probably have not issued financial statements.

If a single payment from a customer covers more than one job, open the Receive Payments window and select the customer in the “Received From” box.  The Customer:Job list then displays the outstanding balance for each job.  Checkmark jobs/invoices to which you are applying a payment. 

Important: Do not apply “Credit” payments or “Overpayments” against the customer instead of the job; your records will show a credit balance for the customer but still show the charges against the jobs as unpaid.