• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Header Right

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact

Quickbooks

How to Set Up a Bookkeeping Cycle in QuickBooks Online

June 13, 2025 by admin

Event planner timetable agenda plan on year 2024 schedule event. Business woman checking planner on mobile phone, taking note on calendar desk on office table. Calendar event plan, work planningDo you have a regular schedule you follow with your QuickBooks Online work? It can be a good strategy.

Bookkeeping is cyclical. You tend to do the same things over and over, which may get to be a bit of a drag for you. QuickBooks Online can automate some processes, and it certainly helps minimize duplicate data entry, but you’ll undoubtedly find yourself growing weary of repetitive tasks.

We can’t help you avoid this drudgery completely, but we’d like to suggest a new, more organized way to attack your accounting tasks in 2025. It could be especially helpful if you’re a new QuickBooks Online user and don’t have a routine established yet. But even long-time users might find this routine helpful. It can keep things from slipping through the cracks and simply make you more productive and confident that you’re addressing all of your accounting issues.

Give it a try and see what you think.

What Should You Do Every Day?

Even if you don’t have expenses to enter or invoices to process, it’s a good idea to log into QuickBooks Online every day. If you’ve connected your online bank and credit cards to the site (which you absolutely should), there will probably be transactions to go over. So after you’ve taken a look at your Dashboard (especially your Tasks), hover your mouse over Transactions in the toolbar and click Bank transactions.

Click Update in the upper right to make sure you’re seeing the most recent transactions. If you’re doing this every day, it shouldn’t take long to go over the income and expenses that have been imported since you last logged in.

You should be looking at newly imported transactions daily and completing the fields provided as comprehensively as possible.

If you don’t know what Match or Record as transfer mean, we should schedule a session to go over transaction management in QuickBooks Online.

Every Week

You need to be monitoring your accounts receivable and payables on a weekly basis – at minimum. There are two ways to do this. You can:

Run reports.

• Click Reports in the toolbar and scroll down first to Who owes you. Run Accounts receivable aging summary. QuickBooks will display past-due transactions in several columns (Current, 1-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days, and 91 and over). If you’re keeping up with your receivables, you shouldn’t be seeing numbers in most of the columns, unless you’re in a known collections process.

• Scroll down to What you owe and run Accounts payable aging summary. This works like the aging receivables report. Again, you shouldn’t be seeing much activity here unless you’re in a payment dispute with a vendor.

• You can also run the Open Invoices report to quickly see the Due date and Open balance entries here. Ditto the Unpaid Bills report.

Consult the All sales page.

Hover your mouse over Sales in the toolbar and click All sales. The colored bars and numbers at the top of the page show you the status of your sales. Click the orange bar in the middle to see a list of overdue invoices. If there are any, you can set a Send reminder by clicking the corresponding down arrow in the Action column. While you’re there, look at estimates and unbilled income and take any action needed.

Every Two Weeks (or more often, depending on product volume)

If you sell products and track inventory in QuickBooks Online, you should keep a close eye on your stock to see if you need to:

• Reorder,

• Bring in a larger supply because something is selling well, or,

• Discount or discontinue a product because it’s not selling.

Click Reports in the toolbar and run Product/Service List under Sales and customers and look at the Quantity on hand column.

Every Month

Reconcile your accounts (Transactions | Reconcile).

It’s really, really important that you reconcile your accounts every month. We can help you with this.

No one likes to do this, but it’s way easier to do regular reconciliations than it is to have to go back several months to track down a problem. If you’ve never done this in QuickBooks Online, it works similarly to how you used to reconcile your accounts by comparing a bank statement and your paper checkbook register. Only you’re comparing your bank or credit card statements to your accounts in QuickBooks Online. Before you start, make sure you’ve matched and categorized all of your downloaded transactions.

Run a Profit and Loss report for the last month.

Click Reports in the toolbar and click Profit and Loss under Business overview. Did you make a profit last month?

Every Quarter

If you’re planning to apply for a loan or looking for an investor, or if you just want a deeper understanding of how your business is doing, consider having us create and analyze standard financial reports for you, like the Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows. You can run these yourself in QuickBooks Online, but it really takes an accountant’s eye to understand and interpret them.

If you decide that you want to work with us in any capacity, like helping you with reconciliation and/or modifying your Chart of Accounts, there’s another way we can help. If you ever have trouble categorizing an expense, select Uncategorized Expenses as the Category. If we’re meeting with you once a month, we can run a report on these and help you categorize them correctly.

Filed Under: Quickbooks

Is Your Favorite Pastime Turning Into a Small Business? The IRS Wants to Know.

February 11, 2025 by admin

Young serious man looking at laptop. Man learning new hobby, knitting on needles. Knitting project in progress. - ImageIf you’re making $400 or more on your hobby, it’s time to start declaring it on your income taxes.

We take on hobbies because we enjoy them. But at some point, we sometimes get enough people wanting the woven towels or the birdhouses or the Christmas ornaments we make that it’s time to start charging for them. Supplies cost money, and your time is certainly worth something.

A lot of people get started that way. Before you know it, they’ve set up a shop on Etsy and started exhibiting at craft shows. At what point does this become a business, they may ask themselves.

If you’re bringing in $400 or more per year on your side gig, you should know that there are two good reasons why you should be reporting your business on your Form 1040:
• You’ll be able to deduct at least some of your expenses, and,
• The IRS mandates it.

8 Questions

When your hobby becomes a small business, you’ll have to complete and file a Schedule C with your 1040.

If your personal enterprise has turned a profit in three of the last five years, it’s quite likely that your creative endeavors have become something that requires a Schedule C along with your 1040. The IRS suggests that you ask yourself eight questions to help determine whether it considers you a business and not a hobby. They go something like this:

1.   Does the time and effort you put into the activity show you intend to make a profit?

2.   Does the activity make a profit in some years, and if so, how much profit does it make?

3.   Can you expect to make a future profit from the appreciation of the assets used in the activity?

4.   Do you depend on income from the activity for (at least part of) your livelihood?

5.   Are any losses due to circumstances beyond your control or are the losses normal for the startup phase of your type of business?

6.   Do you change your methods of operation to improve profitability?

7.   Do you carry out the activity in a businesslike manner and keep complete and accurate books and records?

8.   Do you and any advisors you might work with have the knowledge needed to carry out the activity as a successful business?

How Will You Report Your Income?

Depending on how much money you make and where/how you sell your products, you may receive a 1099 of some sort. If you accept credit cards, it will most likely be the 1099-K: Payment Card and Third-Party Network Transactions. If you take checks and cash, you’ll have to add it all up yourself. Keep any documentation you have if this is the case. You’ll report this on your Schedule C.

How Will You Know If An Expense Is Deductible?

Some business expenses are obvious. If you’re making birdhouses, for example, everything you buy to assemble them should be considered part of your Cost of Goods Sold. If you’re buying products wholesale and reselling them, that should be deductible, too.

But there’s a lot of gray area. The IRS says that legitimate business expenses are those that are “ordinary and necessary.” An ordinary expense is one that is typical and widely accepted in your industry. A necessary expense, on the other hand, is one that is useful and appropriate for your business operations. An expense doesn’t need to be essential to qualify as necessary.

Some small business owners really stretch the interpretation of “ordinary and necessary.” There’s a famous case where a company that had a warehouse tried to deduct the cost of cat food. The contents of the warehouse were attracting rodents and snakes, and they wanted to feed stray cats who would keep the population of unwanted visitors down. The IRS accepted it as a legitimate business expense.

Our point here is not that you should try to find some outlandish business expenses to deduct. But we want you to really think about what it costs you to do business. If you’re ever audited, you’ll have to make a case to the IRS about why you claimed a particular purchase as necessary for your business. Keep meticulous records of your purchases.

On to a New Year

Keep these things in mind as we move into a new year – and tax preparation season. You may want to consider reclassifying your hobby as a business and filing a Schedule C with your 1040. We’re not IRS auditors, of course, so we can’t tell you whether a certain purchase will be considered a deductible business expense. But we can help you deal with the tax-related issues you’ll face should you decide it’s time for you to start claiming income and expenses for your pastime-turned-business.

Filed Under: Quickbooks

Too Many Transactions in QuickBooks Online? Create Rules

April 21, 2022 by admin

Confident young man at his deskIt’s important to categorize transactions, but it takes time. If every day brings several dozen into QuickBooks Online, you can automate this process.

One of the cardinal rules of accounting is this: Go through your new transactions every day. If you wait until there are too many of them, you’re likely to give them short shrift. You may miss problems, just as you might skip categorizing some of them because it simply takes too long.

But correct categorization is essential. Your income taxes and reports will not be accurate if you fail to assign the right category to all of your transactions. QuickBooks Online makes this easy.

The site also provides a way for you to accelerate the process by automating it. It allows you to create Rules. That is, if a transaction contains a specific piece of information, a name or an amount, QuickBooks Online allows you to indicate how it should be categorized. This kind of automation will save you time and may even prevent errors – as long as you use it carefully. Here’s how it works.

Defining Your Rules

We’ll use an easy example to explain how QuickBooks Online’s Rules work. Let’s say your shipping costs have started to increase lately, and you want to make sure you’re seeing any UPS transactions that go above a specified dollar amount, and that they’re categorized accurately. Hover your mouse over Transactions in the toolbar and click on Banking (assuming you’re downloading your bank transactions). Select an account to work with by clicking on it, and make sure the For review bar is highlighted.

Click on a transaction to open it. (If you’ve never explored what you can do with a downloaded transaction, study this box carefully while you’re there, and contact us with any questions.) On the bottom line, you’ll see a link labeled. Create a rule. Click on it, and a panel slides out from the right, as pictured below:

Quickbooks tips

The upper half of the Create rule panel

This portion of the Create rule panel is fairly self-explanatory. Give your rule a descriptive name (we entered UPS 25 Plus) and indicate whether it should be applied to Money in or Money out. If you want to select a specific bank account or card, click the down arrow in the field to the right and select it. Otherwise, choose All bank accounts. Next, decide whether a transaction has to meet Any of the conditions you’re going to specify or All of them. In this case, we want All.

Now you have to describe the conditions under which a transaction will be affected. We want transactions whose Description Contains The UPS Store. We also want to identify purchases from The UPS Store whose total is more than $25. So you’d click + Add a condition. In the row that opens, click the down arrow in the Description field and select Amount. Click the down arrow again in the next field and choose Is greater than. The final field in the row should contain 25.00.

You could keep adding conditions, but that’s all we need for this rule. You can click Test rule if you want to find out how many transactions in your For review list would meet your specifications.

Next, you want to Assign attributes to the transactions selected. Your options here are Transaction type, Category, Payee, Tags, Class, and Memo. The first two are required and the third is recommended. The last three are optional. If you want QuickBooks Online to automatically confirm transactions this rule applies to, click the Auto-confirm button so it’s showing green. If you choose this option, your matching transactions will be modified to meet your criteria and moved directly into the Categorized queue. You won’t see them in For review. So consider this carefully.

When you’re done here, click Save.

Quickbooks tips

The lower half of the Create rule screen

Warning: QuickBooks Online allows you to create new categories directly from this window. But accurate categorization is so critical that we’d rather you schedule a session with us to go over your list of categories and make any modifications necessary.

To recap: Any expense over $25 that comes into your For review queue whose Description reads will be automatically categorized and moved into the Categorized queue.

QuickBooks Online’s Rules can save you time, but if they’re not created correctly, you may have errors in your company file without even knowing it. We recommend that you let us help you set these up from the start to avoid this. If you’re new to downloading transactions onto the site, you may also want to consult with us.

Filed Under: Quickbooks

Start 2022 Off Right: Clean Up QuickBooks

January 19, 2022 by admin

quickbooks tips computerIs Your QuickBooks company file ready for 2022? Three things you can do to put things in order.

January is always such a transitional month. You’re trying to wrap up everything that didn’t get done during a hectic December. At the same time, you have to jump into the new year and start doing your regularly-scheduled work. It can be hard to tell sometimes which year you’re working on.

Don’t forget about QuickBooks while you’re catching up on 2021 and looking ahead to 2022. You probably don’t want to put one more item on your to-do list, but any steps you take now to ready the software for the new year will pay off. Once you start entering transactions and placing orders and welcoming new customers, it will help tremendously to have a clean slate.

Here are some suggestions for completing as much of the work you started in 2021 as you can.

Run four critical reports

Bills can slip through without being paid in December because there’s so much going on. This applies to both you and your customers. You need to catch up on what’s owed to you and what you owe. So generate these four reports in QuickBooks:

  • A/R Aging Detail. Which of your customers are in arrears with their payments to you? How much do they owe you, and when should the money have come in?
  • Open Invoices. Which invoices have not yet been paid? There will be some duplication with A/R Aging Detail, but this report isolates only unpaid transactions.
  • A/P Aging Detail. Are you caught up with the money you owe other individuals and companies? This report will tell you.
  • Unpaid Bill Details. Like Open Invoices, this report sets apart only the bills that have unpaid balances.

Create statements for past-due customers

quickbooks desktop tips

One collection method you can use in QuickBooks if you don’t want to communicate directly with overdue customers is to send statements.

You’ll have to decide how hard you want to lean on customers who are late paying your bills when it’s so early in the year. Certainly, if some customers are more than 60 days late (30 days if they have sizable balances), you may want to make a phone call or at least send a personalized email asking them to fulfill their obligations.

But you can also send statements. These documents provide details of financial activity between you and your customers for a given period of time. Open the Customers menu and click Create Statements. Look over all of the options in the window that opens and indicate your preferences. If customers don’t respond to your statements within 10 days, then it may be time for a phone call.

Take a hard look at your inventory

It may have been a while since you did this, but it’s really important to do it regularly – especially if you had a busy holiday season. The best way to start on this is to open the Vendors menu, scroll down and hover over Vendor Activities, and click Inventory Center.

If you don’t have a lot of inventory, you could just highlight each entry under Active Inventory, Assembly over to the left. The window that opens on the right side of the screen holds an enormous amount of detail about each item. But if you sell a lot of different kinds of items, that will take too much time. In that case, you might run one or more of the reports linked from this screen. Even the QuickReport can be helpful.

quickbooks desktop tips

You can get a lot of information about individual items you sell in QuickBooks’ Inventory Center.

Tip: If you need to adjust the quantity you have on hand, click the down arrow next to Manage Transactions in the lower left and select Adjust Quantity/Value on Hand. You might consult with us if you’re running into this problem, and we can go over inventory issues with you.

Set Up Online Financial Connections

January is also a good time to be thinking about how you can better use QuickBooks in 2022. We tend to learn how to use the tools we need and not explore any further when we’re using any kind of software. QuickBooks is such a massive program that that’s understandable.

But there are two tools that can have tremendous impact on your daily workflow, your ability to get paid faster by customers, and your understanding of where you stand financially every day. They are:

  • Online Banking. Did you know that you can connect QuickBooks to many financial institutions and import your cleared transactions every day? That’s what the Bank Feeds Center is all about. If you sign up for this service, you won’t have to wait until your monthly statement comes to see what transactions have gone through.
  • Online Payments. If you’re only accepting checks as payment from your customers, you’re probably getting paid more slowly than you might. Sign up for QuickBooks Desktop Payments, and you’ll be able to process credit cards, eChecks, and ACH payments.

We know you’re busy catching up from the holiday breaks right now. But if you need our help with anything we discussed in this month’s column, please reach out to us. We’re always available to set up a consultation.

Filed Under: Quickbooks

How to Create Estimates in QuickBooks Online

September 28, 2021 by admin

Two Businesswomen Meeting In OfficeWhether you sell products or services, you may need to create estimates in QuickBooks Online. Here’s how it’s done.

It would be nice if you could just instantly invoice every sale. But sometimes your customers need to know what a particular purchase will cost before they make the decision to buy. So you need to know how to create an estimate. If the sale goes through, you’ll of course want to send an invoice.

QuickBooks Online automates this entire process. It even helps you track the progress of your estimates by providing a special report. Here’s how it works.

Just Like An Invoice – Almost

The process of creating an estimate in QuickBooks Online is almost identical to creating an invoice. You click the New button in the upper left and select Estimate.

QuickBooks tips

Creating an estimate in QuickBooks Online is like creating an invoice, with a few differences.

When the form opens, you’ll notice one difference right away. Directly below the Customer field, you’ll see the word Pending next to a small down arrow. Click it to see what your options are here. You’ll be able to update its status later. Select a Customer to get started. If this is a new customer, click + Add New and enter at least the name. If you want to build a more complete profile at this point, click Details and complete the fields in the window that opens. To send a carbon copy or blind copy of the estimate to someone else, click the Cc/Bcc link.

Next to the Estimate date, there’s a field for Expiration date. Enter that and continue on to add the products and/or services that will be included, just as you would on an invoice. If you’re generating an estimate for a new product or service, click + Add new in the drop-down list. A panel will slide out from the right that allows you to create one.

You’ll see more options for your estimate at the bottom of the page. You can add a message in the message box (or leave the default message if there is one). You can also Customize it, Make recurring, or Print or Preview it. When you’re satisfied, Save it, and send it to the customer.

QuickBooks tips

You can preview your estimate to see what the customer will see before saving it.

Updating the Status

Your estimate will not be considered a transaction until you accept it. To do this, click the Sales link in the toolbar, then All Sales. Find your estimate in the list by looking in the Type column. Click the down arow next to Create invoice to see your other options there. You’ll see that you can Print or Send it or save a Copy.

Click Update status. In the window that opens, click the down arow next to Pending. From the list that drops down, select Accepted. You can also mark it Closed or Rejected. If you choose any of the last three options, another window opens that allows you to enter the name of the individual who authorized the action and the date it was done.

Click Create invoice if your estimate was accepted. You’ll have three options here. You can invoice your customer for:

  • The estimate total.
  • A percentage of each line item.
  • A custom amount for each line.

QuickBooks tips

When you locate your estimate on the Sales Transactions page, you’ll have several options for managing it.

After you’ve made your selection, click Create invoice to open the form with the amounts filled in based on your preference. Complete anything that’s unfinished but do not change any of the product or service line items. Save it, and your invoice is ready to go. You can always check the status of your estimates by running the Estimates by Customer report.

Creating and tracking estimates is as easy as working with invoices. You may run into difficulties, though, if you need to do anything beyond that point with estimates, such as modifying it and re-submitting them. We’re here to answer any questions you might have about this. It’s important that you get your estimates and their subsequent invoices exactly right, so you don’t lose money or sales. Let us know if you want to go over these concepts.

Our Northbrook, IL offers consulting for QuickBooks as part of our package of accounting services for small businesses. Call us at 847-982-1040 or request your free consultation online now and find out how you can leverage QuickBooks to precisely track your finances.

Filed Under: Quickbooks

How Do You Manage Downloaded Transactions in QuickBooks Online?

April 20, 2021 by admin

Business team busy at workDownloading them is the easy part. QuickBooks Online lets you work with downloaded transactions in numerous ways.

QuickBooks Online was built to import transactions from your online financial institutions. ou can enter them manually but downloading them saves an enormous amount of time and minimizes errors. It also makes reconciliation much easier, since you can see which transactions have cleared without calling the bank or waiting for a printed statement.

Once they’re in QuickBooks Online, your transacAtions are stored in a list, waiting for you to further define and categorize each one. Let’s look at how you can work with them to make sure your records are as thorough as possible.

Getting Connected

As long as you have online access to your bank and credit card accounts, you can set up QuickBooks Online to import cleared transactions. Click the Transactions tab in the toolbar, then click Banking. On the next screen, click Connect account. You’ll see links to popular financial institutions on the next page. If yours isn’t listed, enter its name in the search box at the top of the screen. Follow the onscreen instructions to make your initial connection and start downloading transactions.

When you’ve completed the connection, you can click Link account in the upper right to add more.

Dealing With Transactions

Once you’ve finished adding accounts, you’ll still be on the Banking page. Each of your connected accounts will appear in a box that includes the balance and the number of transactions that need to be reviewed. There will probably be quite a few, dozens or hundreds, the first time you download, since most financial institutions send you 90 days’ worth the first time. Every time your accounts are updated after that, you’ll only get new ones that have cleared since your last connection.

Tip: QuickBooks Online generally updates once every day. If you want to see your new cleared transactions at any time, click Update in the upper right corner.

Click on any of the account boxes, and its list of downloaded transactions will appear below. Make sure that For review is highlighted. You’ll notice that each row has one of two icons at the far right. Review means that QuickBooks Online has not assigned a category to the transaction. Confirm means it has, and it wants you to either approve it or change it. Check these carefully. Sometimes QuickBooks Online gets it right, but not always.

QuickBooks Online allows you to add a great deal of information about each individual transaction in the register.

Categorize is checked by default, since this is the most common action you’ll take in the list. Click Find match if, for example, you received a payment on an outstanding invoice, or Record as transfer. We can help you work with the latter two options.

Select a Vendor/Customer and a Category (if QuickBooks Online hasn’t assigned one or it’s not the best one for that transaction). Click in the Billable box if you want to bill this transaction to a Customer/project. You can also Split transaction if you need to divide it between multiple categories and/or billing statuses.

There are several other options below the section pictured above that allow you to:

  • Add Tags.
  • Attach a file.
  • Create a Rule for how similar transactions should be recorded.
  • Exclude the transaction if you have, for example, a duplicate one or a personal expense.

Before you take either of the latter two actions, talk to us. We don’t want you to do anything that might adversely affect your bookkeeping.

When you’ve finished, click Confirm. The transaction will move from the For review list to the Categorized one. It will now appear in the register for that account.

As you might imagine, it’s a good idea to keep up with your downloaded transactions so you have time to give each the attention it needs. We recommend you review them daily. Your transactions, of course, flow into your reports and taxes, so you want to be sure you’re categorizing them correctly. Let us know if you’d like help with this.

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

The transactions you record in QuickBooks Online flow into reports and taxes. Are you categorizing them correctly? Ask us.

Have you connected all of your financial accounts to QuickBooks Online? We can help if you’re unsure of this process.

Downloading transactions into QuickBooks Online is only half the job. Ask us about the other half: confirming that data.

Are you confirming the transactions you download into QuickBooks daily? Keeping up with this flow will help ensure accuracy.

Our Northbrook, IL offers consulting for QuickBooks as part of our package of accounting services for small businesses. Call us at 847-982-1040 or request your free consultation online now and find out how you can leverage QuickBooks to precisely track your finances.

Filed Under: Quickbooks

  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Search

Archives

  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020

Categories

  • Best Business Practices
  • Business Tax
  • Estate and Trusts
  • Individual Tax
  • Investment
  • Quickbooks
  • Real Estate
  • Retirement
  • Uncategorized

Copyright © 2021 · https://www.rhl1040.com/blog