Initials Rental Deposit Receipt Made Easy

Initials rental deposit receipt

[Music] [Music] good morning everyone this is alicia katz pollock from royalwise.com and i'm delighted to be here at quickbooks connect i'd like to talk to you about best practices for using quickbooks online whether you're a business owner who wants to make sure that you're using your quickbooks to its fullest or you're a beginning bookkeeper who wants to make sure that you are serving your clients as best as possible let's talk about some of the things that you want to watch out for when you're using quickbooks so this is a little quote from my book that day in and day out i work with small business owners that to set up and use quickbooks online and over time i've seen patterns emerge i find myself coaching people through the same mistakes over and over again and so because of that i've created a list of 10 of my best practices so that you can keep your books as clean as possible so just a little bit about me real quick i'm a top 100 pro advisor and i'm a member of the intuit trainer writer network so if you ever do any trainings at qbtrainingevents.com i'm one of the voices behind the curtain in my own practice at royalwise.com i run a quickbooks online mentorship membership program which is basically a quickbooks online training program for both business owners and bookkeepers and it consists of a quickbooks online training video library but then also customized coaching for yourself in addition i have four books on quickbooks online on amazon that's enough about me let's get to why you are here what we're going to talk about today are customizing your settings refining your chart of accounts creating your products and services list managing your vendors list meals versus owner draws using undeposited funds adding income from the business feed or not adding income from the business feed maintaining your supporting documentation how to reconcile properly and how to get help when you need it the first of the best practices that i want to take a look at is going through your settings in your quickbooks online up under the gear in accountant settings you can turn on and off all the features that you need and it's really important to do that when you're first setting up your quickbooks online because you may not know that there's things that quickbooks online does until you've actually turned on the features and they've shown up in your interface in addition to doing it when you first get set up i recommend looking through those settings maybe once a year or so maybe even more often until it is always rolling out new features and if you want to take advantage of all of these new opportunities for you this is the best way to do it also your business is going to grow and evolve over time and there may be features that you didn't need when you first set up your quickbooks that two years from now they're absolutely the best thing that ever happened to you for growing your business and being able to analyze your company's functionality so always go in and double check the settings and look for things that are new or things that you've grown into in addition there's a section called quickbooks labs and that's where when intuit is testing out a new feature they put it up you can choose which ones are relevant for you you try it out you give them feedback sometimes quickbooks labs turns into permanent features in the software sometimes they're quietly pulled because they didn't work as they had hoped so i love looking at quickbooks labs to see what's new and exciting in the software here's an example of why it's important to go into your settings and take a look at everything where i am right now is in the gear in accountant settings and then on the expenses tab and when you're using quickbooks online plus and advanced you have features here to help you with your job costing and your product costing so you turn these on and off if they're relevant for you the first one show items table on expense and purchase forms that's a cool little feature that if you're not running inventory but you still want to see the profitability on the different services that you provide you can turn that on and it will give you additional reports and opportunities and i'll actually show that to you later on the second option track expenses and items by customer that's where job costing comes in if you want to see your profitability by the jobs that you're doing or by customer you need to turn that feature on let me go in product and show you what i mean by all these things and let's go on and turn on another feature so right now i'm in craig's design and landscaping which is a test a test drive for your quickbooks and so when you want to try things in quickbooks without mucking up your own books this is a place that you can go if you want to get here yourself anytime here's the url up here at the top it's qbl.intuit.com slash reder like r-e-d-i-r like redirect slash test drive and when you type that in it takes you to craig's landscaping and any changes you make here get wiped out after a few hours now that i'm here i want to take you in to see the settings so i'm going to go up to the gear in the upper right hand corner and drop that down and i'll go to account and settings right here now that i'm here what i would do is i would comb through each of these settings in each of the sections in order to look at the different features and figure out what they do here's an example of why it's important to take a look every so often i just clicked on the sales form content area so it expanded out and i can see all of these different features that i can turn on and off one of the new features here is the ability to take tips inside your quickbooks online and this was kind of it quietly introduced a couple years ago but a lot of people don't know that you have that ability especially if you're used to using square out in the field and you were doing it so that you could take tips you can now do that in quickbooks online when i turn this on it asks well who's receiving these tips is it just me or am i distributing them to a team i'm going to say just me for now and then it's going to ask to update my sales template now what that is going to do for me is when i make a sales receipt or make an invoice there's going to be a new box down on the bottom right hand side where i can put in what the tip is and even better when you're out in the field and maybe you're making a sales receipt for somebody on your phone and swiping a credit card when you hand the phone to them for their signature there's now a chance where they can say do you want to do a 15 or an 18 or a 20 tip and then it adds it into your sales receipt for you so this is why it's so important to look at the settings if you need that you would never know it's there unless you come in and look for it now that i've made that change i will take a look i'm not going to go into all the settings right now but you as i said you go through all of the different settings here's the one that was in the presentation once i'm done i will click on done and i'm back to where i started i also mentioned the quickbooks labs that's also up under the gear down at the bottom of the same column where accountant settings are i want to go into quickbooks labs this is going to be different every time that you go in there so they're testing out you know dark mode or a cash flow dashboard widget i love this tool so if i click on on then i say done and then i refresh my screen on the dashboard i now have a new cash flow management widget up at the top that's going to show me not just my money in and money out but if i click on it it actually takes me into a new tool that again they're testing out to see if people like it and it will allow me to actually do cash flow projections once you've got your settings dialed in the next thing that you want to do in your best practices is to refine your chart of accounts your chart of accounts is the backbone behind your quickbooks online and it's how you set up your quickbooks so that you can use it not just for taxes but also for business management as well if you're not familiar with all of the different account types in your chart of accounts and what it does this is a great opportunity to get some additional training on it because the more you understand about it the more you can craft it so that it really becomes a business management tool your chart of accounts is what creates all of the categories that you see on a profit and loss statement and also on your balance sheet dialing it in so that it suits your company is really important now if you don't understand how a profit loss report and a balance sheet work this is a great opportunity for you to get some help in setting up your chart of accounts so talk to a local bookkeeper or to your tax accountant or hire a quickbooks pro advisor so that they can help you dial in this list some of the things that you can do are to add additional income categories out of the box your chart of accounts is only going to say maybe sales and sales of product income or services and sales of product income but you may find it more helpful if your business has different revenue streams to be able to identify what those are you know if you're in construction you could just have construction income or you might want to say well this is the income that i made from remodels versus new construction so take the time to figure out what different ways you make money and add those income accounts to your chart of accounts another best practice is renaming the categories to the terms that you use you still need to use the accounts the way that they're set up for accounting practices but if there's a certain terminology that you use in your business you are absolutely welcome to rename those categories so that when you look at your reports they make sense to you there are going to be some categories that you need that don't show up in your chart of accounts by default for example dues and subscriptions for some reason that doesn't show up as an automatic category and so you need to add it in the same way your default chart of accounts is going to have accounts that you never use if you don't use prepaid expenses you can inactivate it that way when you are using your quickbooks you're not seeing things on the list to choose from that you don't really use that way you won't accidentally code anything to them and your list of things to look through gets a little bit shorter with your chart of accounts in general you want to keep it pretty tight you want to keep it general you want to keep it really high level you don't want to put in a lot of detailed subcategories although depending on your business sometimes you need that level of detail one of the mistakes that i see people make is putting in their vendor names instead of the purpose of the account for example for your telephone expenses you would normally have telephone under utilities but i see people actually say verizon instead of telephone and so you don't want vendor names in your chart of accounts this is an example of what your chart of accounts looks like almost out of the box it's had a little bit of modification to it one of the things that does happen when you set up your quickbooks is that the checking and savings accounts sometimes get created just as checking and savings but what i like to do is i like to see which bank they're from so i would call this chase checking or chase savings and in addition you may also find it helpful to put the last four digits of the account number next to the checking account name that way when you're doing your banking you can identify which account you need for example when you do a transfer after you get your chart of accounts dialed in that's where your products and services list comes in even though i recommend keeping a tight chart of accounts you can make as many products and services as you want and then that way you can have a lot of detailed information on the invoices and the sales receipts that you create for your customers or in the products that you buy and then you can have a lot of different products and services all dump into the main categories on the chart of accounts that way you can gather a lot of detailed information about your business sales and your services but not see a giant list when you're doing your financial reports and then you can still run reports on all of those products and services one of my favorite customizations that i do for my customers is that in the same way that you would do inventory like you know inventory makes sense if you're going to sell a product you have to buy the product so that you can see what your profit margin is on that product but even if your company doesn't do inventory there's still a workflow that you can use where you can buy your products and services in order to resell them for example maybe you're a contractor and you are painting a house for one of your clients but you're hiring a subcontractor to do the painting when you pay the subcontractor you can pay them using painting the same line item that you would put on your invoices that allows you to run additional reports so that you can see the profitability on your subcontracted services this is what that would look like inside your quickbooks this is actually turned on by that first option that we talked about when i showed you how to customize your account settings that when you actually create an expense instead of just putting that subcontracted service to subcontracted services in your cost of goods you can actually buy that service on this slide it's electrical and lighting but the idea is still the same thing that if you are providing electrical and lighting services to a client but you're subcontracting it out buy the electrical and lighting service from the subcontractor and then that way you can see your profitability for all your subcontracted services our next best practice is managing your vendors list your vendors are the payees or the people that you are paying for the services and the products that you buy it's really important that every time you bring an expense into your quickbooks that you assign a payee or a vendor to that expense the bank feed used to say payee optional and people would skip it or in the current bank feed you can turn off the payee column but i do not recommend doing that if you don't assign payees to your expenses you're never going to be able to easily look up that actual transaction if you need to look for it the only way you're going to find those expenses is by running a profit and loss report and then drilling into the category to see the list of all of those transactions you want to be able to go into your vendors list see the vendor on the list click on it and see all of the times that you've used their services or bought their products all in one place in addition if you have 10.99 that you need to run those subcontracted services are not going to show up because you didn't actually assign them to the person who did the work now on the flip side you don't need to go crazy with your vendors list either you don't need to add a vendor for one off expenses sometimes having just a generic category is going to be helpful for example restaurants gas stations parking lots you know i don't have to enter in every restaurant that i've ever eaten at especially if i'm only going to eat there once so i name all of my restaurants just restaurant and i have the detail on the attached receipt and in the bank feed the bank detail will always have the name of the restaurant there so you can still have that information for which restaurant you always ate at but not have your list cluttered with 25 or 500 restaurants that you've ever eaten at this is a look at the vendors list which you get to by going to expenses and then clicking on the vendors tab and here you can see that my list is pretty tight another sign that you have too many vendors is you might have like office depot number one two three four an office depot number six five four three two you don't need the location numbers you can consolidate all of those just under office depot you'll also notice here that it says bob's burger joint you may have a couple restaurants that you eat at frequently and you actually want to track how often you eat there for business you know one little story there's a local donut shop near me called pips and they make these tiny little really cute little donuts and homemade chai and it shows up on tv shows like diners drive-ins and dives and so when i'm taking a colleague out for a networking meeting i always go to pips because that way when they see it on tv they're like oh wait i've been there i was there with oh it was alicia from royalwise and then they remember me so that's kind of one of my little marketing tricks and so i do have pips on my vendor list and i keep a track of all the people that i've taken to pips so what you want to come away with here is that you want to strike a balance between the one-off vendors that you don't need to see and some of the ones that you do want to track our next best practice is talking about meals versus owner draws a lot of business owners will put on their starbucks or their lunch as on their business card because you know the logic is oh well you know i got coffee on my way into work or i stopped for i was at one job in the morning and i stopped for lunch and then i went to my next customer job and so by their logic because they were out and about for work therefore this is a business meal those are not business meals that's just you feeding your human body in order for meals to qualify as a deduction it has to be a networking meeting an employee meeting a partner meeting you have to actually be doing business while you're at the meal and it's essential that you have proper backup and documentation of that meal take that receipt that you got not just save it but write on the receipt who you ate with and what you talked about so there's a little agenda on it and then make sure that you have that receipt attached to the transactions we're going to talk about that too in a minute now these business meals are still only 50 deductible you still don't get them as a full amount because you are still feeding your human body and it's not a pure business expense but because you're doing business at the meal that's when it counts if you find that you have a lot of transactions that really should have been personal expenses what you do is you classify them as an owner draw instead now i say owner draw that's if you're a sole proprietor but it might be a shareholder distribution or a partner distribution whatever your terminology is for the equity category where the owner is taking money out of the company that's what you would use for those meals that don't qualify as business expenses another thing to be aware of is that the category meals used to be called meals and entertainment but they took away the ability to deduct entertainment so it's no longer a tax-deductible expense so if you have any entertainment charges you have to write them off as owner expense if you do have a lot of these expenses that were miscategorized there is a tool in quickbooks online for accountants called reclassify that allows you to look at the list of all of your meals and then check them off and then reclassify them all at one time if you're a business owner you don't have that tool you would have to click on each transaction and then edit it to change it and so this is a good reason to reach out to a bookkeeper in your community if you have this as an issue and they can fix it for you our next topic is undeposited funds and this is hugely important one of the mistakes that people make when they are taking a payment from a customer is there's a field on the payment to say deposit to and their logic is oh i'm going to deposit this to my checking account but that is not a best practice have all of your deposits and all of your payments go into undeposited funds the reason for that is the bank feed is trained to look there so if you take a payment for 250 and you um and it goes to the bank by itself when you see that 250 on the bank feed the bank fee will automatically match it and take it out of undeposited funds on your behalf but when you have batches maybe it's multiple credit card payments that all get batched together or you have a stack of checks and cash that you drive to the bank and you take them all to the bank all at the same time undeposited funds is the place for making this workflow happen and what you should do is every time you are going to the bank you want to go up to the plus new button and choose bank deposit and actually create the deposit slip in quickbooks just like you do on your deposit slip in real life here's also a real life best practice when you do create a deposit slip when you are taking things to the bank don't just put the grand total on it you will your bookkeeper will love you if you actually itemize what the different check amounts were or the total cash was and even better like put the customer initials or the customer name next to each one some banks when you log into their websites will show you that deposit slip and so when your bookkeeper's trying to figure out what this deposit was made up of they'll have that specific information so that's really helpful but you do want to take that step inside your quickbooks go up to the plus new button and choose bank deposit you get a screen here that has all of your individual sales transactions for the day and what you want to do is check them all off so that you get one grand total up here that grand total is what shows up on your atm slip or your deposit slip or your bank statement or your bank feed and so that's why this step is really helpful for making everything completely match in fact this is so helpful that i want to show you how to do this process live in your quickbooks the first thing that i need to do to demonstrate this is let's take a payment together so i'm going to go up to the plus new button and i'm going to receive a payment and let's work with amy's bird sanctuary so i'll pull her up and here's her invoice that she's paying off so i'll check that off and here she's paying me in full for 239 dollars and here's that deposit to field that's so important what you don't want to do is say i'm putting this in checking even if you are make sure that this says undeposited funds and just do this as your normal workflow and then i'll save and close now let's see how this plays out i'm going to go back up to the plus new button again and this time i'm going to go to bank deposit right up here and so when it's time to take my cash and checks to the bank i would go into this bank deposit i'd put down the date that i am doing the deposit i'll say which checking account it's going into and then i'll check off all of the individual payments that are getting grouped together now this 231 52 is what i'm going to see in the bank feed it's going to be what's on my bank statements and so they'll all combine together and then i'll save and close now another best practice that dovetails right from this one is adding income from the banking feed if your business is making invoices and sales receipts for all your sales one of the common mistakes that i see people make is that when they see the deposit in the bank feed they don't match it to those invoices and sales receipts if you find yourself looking at your banking fee and clicking on it and typing in the customer's name and which income account it goes to you are duplicating your income your p l is going to be really off your income is going to look twice as high as it really is and you might wind up paying extra taxes on that income that you never made what you want to look for when you are making your deposit is that anything in the received column here has a match and if you see that it says one record found and you compare the dates then you would just go ahead and match it and that's confirming that the bank deposit matches your invoices and your sales receipts what you don't want to do is look at this one right here and say oh a1 rental paid me money and then i'm going to classify it right here now when i'm looking at the banking fee i can see all of these received and they're all matching and that's all absolutely perfect what i don't want to do again is you don't want to sit here and say oh this income came from a1 rental and that it was for for landscaping income or you know you don't want to actually sit here and categorize these things and add them because that's going to make a duplicate transaction from the 200 that's really in the system so that's another reason why going up to new and then bank deposit and bringing those dollar amounts together is so very important next best practice is maintaining your supporting documentation it's really important that you have receipts for all of your expenses and i've had some business owners say to me oh well it's on my bank statement or it's on my credit card statement so i can prove that i spent it but that's not sufficient documentation if it says office depot on your expense the irs is going to say yeah but that was in september how do i know that you're not shopping for your kids school supplies and then putting it on your business card you need that itemized receipt that actually says what you bought so when you are putting expenses into your system one of the things that i recommend doing is in the memo type in what it was actually for not just office supplies but maybe say okay today i bought file folders and today was buying the printer so that you can look through your records and actually find the history of the actual activity in your business even better quickbooks online has a receipt capture so you can import your receipts and attach them to the expenses either from your computer or from your phone it can be a jpeg it can be a pdf but everything automatically attaches when you use receipt capture you can take that picture and you know here's an example of a restaurant where i need to justify that this really was a business meal so so when the receipt comes in you can say all right i paid for it from this credit card account and it was meals and entertainment and it was for my watered group meeting and then what happens is that it will create this expense when you categorize it first it will look and say oh you already have this expense in here and if it sees that then it will attach the receipt to your to that transaction or if it does if it's not already in the system it creates this transaction and then when it comes in the bank feed the bank feed will match it so it's really slick i also want to show you what this looks like in your quickbooks online so that you can take advantage of the opportunity when i'm in my banking i'll go up here to receipts and there's either you're going to see either three or four ways of adding your receipts to your system one is to upload from your computer you can find a file and drag it onto that box or click and then navigate around to that file i know that they're beta testing google drive so you might see a fourth box here that allows you to log into your google drive and pull in receipts that way you can also forward from your email this works for anybody who has a registered quickbooks online username you can create a specific email address for your company and then forward any emails you get to this email address as long again as you're a registered user and then it will pull out the attachments or parse the email and allow you to do receipt capture that way and then last but absolutely not least is your mobile phone you can download your quickbooks onto your phone and then you log in the same way you do on the browser and there'll be a little plus sign in the bottom right hand corner and you tap on it and you'll see scan receipt and you can then take a picture of the receipt and it uploads it into the system for you after you've used any of these methods to import the receipt you'll see it over here where on this one it says processing and then you click on the receipt and it takes you into that same mode that i showed you before where you will either then match it to an existing transaction to add the attachment or add the expense to your system and then later on match it inside the bank feed it's a two-way stream another best practice incredibly important is that you reconcile all of your bank accounts i've had business owners tell me well i don't need to reconcile because i'm doing everything off of the bank feed but that's not sufficient sometimes the bank feed might occasionally bring in your transactions twice and give you duplicates or maybe it's down for a day and you're missing a couple transactions even more importantly sometimes you make duplicated transactions inadvertently when you're using your quickbooks for example bank transfers if you're in your banking fee and you've got your checking account and your savings account and you see a transfer in your checking account you say oh that's a transfer to savings and then on the savings side you're supposed to match it but instead you say oh well that's a transfer to checking and then you create it now you've got two transactions for the same transfer and your balances are off so reconciling is the only way that you're going to catch those duplicated or missing expenses and receipts or deposits reconciling is not just opening it up and checking off the transactions that are on your statement that's not reconciling that's reconciling reconciling is also looking at the list and seeing if there's transactions that are not on your bank statement and then figuring out why and then managing them or deleting them you know if it's a check that just hasn't cleared yet that's fine you can just wait until the following month but keep an eye on it in case they lost the check but we also want to look for duplicates another thing about reconciling you will always want to reconcile your checking account your savings accounts your credit cards and your loans because you need to split your loans into principle and interest but i'm a little ocd and i even reconcile all of my other liability accounts like my payroll taxes and my sales taxes because occasionally i find that somebody miscoded something and they put it in the liability account instead of to the expense and then that just lives on on the balance sheet forever uncaught and you don't get the deduction so that's why it's so important this is what it looks like when you're doing a reconciliation everything that came in from the bank feed is going to have a green box here to show that and so those are going to be checked off automatically your goal is to get a zero dollar difference up here at the top but after you get the zero dollar difference it's really important that you scan up and down the list and look for transactions like this one that don't have any matches that's a sign that you've got a problem in the system and again you figure out if it's just something that cleared next month or if you have a problem one of my little secrets is one of alicia's little hot tips is that you can click on the charge column so instead of being sorted by date then it will sort them by dollar amount and you can look up and down and find okay now is there another 16 transaction here then you can look at the two of them decide which one is the correct one delete the one that is duplicated as a little side note here for some of you who are a little bit more advanced after i do that step of taking out all my duplicates i then pause my reconciliation go back to the bank feed because those transactions are now going to show up on the bank feed and most of the time they will then match back to this so that i'll match match match them or i might exclude them if i don't need them because i know the reconciliation is solid after i've done that extra little step then that's when i'll come up and say finish now and then that's when i've done my true reconciliations so this reconciliation is one of the most important parts of using your quickbooks online properly because if you don't reconcile you have absolutely no guarantee that your books are actually correct you may have handled all the transactions but your balances are wrong and so you may have things on your balance sheet that are supposed to be on your profit and loss report now last but not least in your best practices for using quickbooks well is getting help if you're not sure what to do with a transaction don't guess you may say to yourself oh well i'm just going to put this over here in this category for now and then i'll ask my account about it later on the chances of you remembering to ask that question are pretty darn slim there is an account that comes by default in your quickbooks called ask my accountant and if you're not sure what to do with the transaction you can always put it in there and then those can be handled at the end of the year and the next time you meet with your accountant but this is really a workflow issue if you're not sure what to do with something in your quickbooks guessing at it isn't going to work in the long run because you can really mess up your books you're much much much better off calling your bookkeeper calling your accountant or talking to a pro advisor a consultant like myself who can actually tell you what to do and train you to do it properly that way the next time it pops up you know exactly what to do if you just kind of hack at it and hope it's all right then what happens is your quickbooks may not be accurate and it's way more expensive to hire somebody to clean up your quickbooks than it is to just do a half an hour consultation with somebody and find out what the right way is to do it so i really i really recommend being proactive with your training being proactive with your q a so that you're doing things properly you don't want to have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for somebody to go in and have to move everything around where it really belongs one of the things that you can do is intuit does have a website called findaproadvisor.com and anybody who has passed one of the certification tests for quickbooks online is listed there and then that way you can go in and do a search and find a local bookkeeper in your area or a consultant who you can ask questions for let me go ahead and flip over to that and show you that there's a whole website for find a pro advisor and then you can read through all the different pro advisors in your area and find somebody who can help you i just can't emphasize enough how important it is that you get the training that you need or you ask the questions and have a conversation with the people who can help you here are the things that i want you to walk away with from today the first thing is avoid common mistakes with the bank feeds make sure that you are using the bank feed accurately if you're using it correctly it's going to be your absolute best friend for saving you data entry time but if you're not using it correctly it's going to be your worst nightmare because you're going to create bad data it's not the the bank feeds are absolutely fantastic as long as you're using them properly it's so important that i even have a two hour training just on the bank feeds and reconciling on my website and it's something i really emphasize with every client i work with the second is knowing how to properly classify your transactions sometimes that's industry specific knowing what to do with works in progress in construction or you know what we were talking about with meals and entertainment that you understand for instance what's the difference between an expense and cost of goods so making sure that you understand the purpose of your categorizations and then last but absolutely not least knowing the best practices for your record keeping whether it's how to keep your receipts or how to make your deposits match knowing what workflow is going to both give you the information that you need for the irs and the information that you need in the reports to run your business better these are all great reasons to use all of the best practices that i've shown you today so thanks for coming today i hope you've been enjoying quickbooks connect my name is alicia katz pollock from royalwise.com and i'll see you in the next class [Music]