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

Use QuickBooks’ Tools to Make Invoicing Easy In a previous post, we reviewed QuickBooks’ ability to create a simple project budget based on the Estimate form. In this post we’ll focus on some additional tools in QuickBooks that can make invoicing customers easier. Creating an estimate in QuickBooks is an optional step. An invoice can be created without having used the estimate form at all. If an open estimate exists for a certain Customer:Job, when you begin an invoice for th