Lance B Wilkins

A common QuickBooks question is, what’s that column on checks and bills that says Billable? QuickBooks users unfamiliar with it either ignore it, or use it for another purpose, which purpose is being totally unaffected since it’s not what the column is for. The Billable column ties in with tracking expenses by project or job. You cannot mark the Billable column unless a Customer:Job is selected in the Name column. If a Customer:Job name is selected, marking the Billable colum

In our last post we talked about shrinking your QuickBooks company file by using the Condense Data menu item. Today we’ll look at creating an entirely new QuickBooks file. Usually, the creation of a new company file happens when the existing one becomes too large and performance, like looking up transactions or creating reports, is just too slow. There are no hard limits to a QuickBooks company file, that is, you don’t need to worry that QuickBooks will stop working all of a

What could go wrong? She added mileage reimbursement to her employee’s paycheck. No need to write an extra check. Why was it costing her hidden fees and why was the employee upset? It didn’t happen exactly that way, but close. Actually, working with a client, we discovered her mileage reimbursements were being reported as wages. Subject to withholding, social security, medicare, and more. It’s actually easy to do. Here’s how to prevent that. To reimburse an employee for milea

“Are you sure you want to do this? Type Yes in the box if you do.” That message is enough to scare anyone from completing the operation they started. We often see this when restoring a backup file over an existing file. If we don’t replace the existing file however, we can end up with even more serious consequences. Let’s review the Restore process in QuickBooks. Our first decision, although not presented to us as such, is what’s mentioned above. Are we creating a brand new c

Almost anyone who creates invoices in QuickBooks knows how to print them. We’ve been doing it for years and the commands to print are straightforward and easy to follow. What about emailing invoices? No paper. No printing. No stuffing envelopes, adding stamps, or taking to the post office. And no extra charge. Interested? Let’s look at the process. Fist, make sure you tell QuickBooks about your email account and how you normally access email. Outlook is an easy choice, QuickB

So, your business or organization is growing? You need to track more than one department or location or grant? Do you need another QuickBooks? No, you don’t. It’s a common question, but it almost never results in purchasing another QuickBooks license. For most people then, the question comes down to: Do you need a separate QuickBooks company file? Generally, if your new enterprise has a different tax ID number, separate asset and liability accounts like bank accounts and buil

It’s coming. January. The start of a new year and the beginning of the filing of numerous tax forms. W2s and 1099s are usually the first required filings we tackle. Thankfully, if we have all the information on our vendors that we should, QuickBooks can make easy work of creating 1099 forms. First, access the 1099 wizard by navigating to Vendors->Print/E-file 1099s->1099 Wizard. QuickBooks will open the wizard to a welcome screen. Continue to the next step and you will be pre

This is the start of a series of posts in which we look at the features in QuickBooks that would be used in a business that sells services to its customers. It may sell materials as well, but the significant portion of its business is to provide a service to the public. These are industries that QuickBooks serves well. The software, both the desktop version and the online, is rich with features to aid business-owners that fall into this category. We will alternate the posts.

A lot of the work Intuit has done in recent years to improve inventory management in QuickBooks has gone into their Enterprise software. Even without the Advanced Inventory features that are part of the highest subscription level, Enterprise has several inventory features the other versions of QuickBooks don’t have. One of those is automatic cost and price changes. It’s very important to note a couple of things about cost information in QuickBooks. First, the value of invento

A lot of the work Intuit has done in recent years to improve inventory management in QuickBooks has gone into their Enterprise software. Even without the Advanced Inventory features that are part of the highest subscription level, Enterprise has several inventory features the other versions of QuickBooks don’t have. One of those is automatic cost and price changes. It’s very important to note a couple of things about cost information in QuickBooks. First, the value of invento