Greetings The CPA911 Newsletter January 2010 ------ > Contents < ------ QuickBooks Tips New Poll - VOTE Contact Info Subscription Info ------ > QuickBooks TIPS < ------ *** How to Include Shipping in Item Price *** Several readers have asked how to include shipping in an item price in a way that doesn't show shipping as a separate line on the sales transaction form. They want their P & L reports to show the item income and shipping income separately. You can do this by creating a Group. For example, create an item (Gadget, with a price of $10.00, linked to an Income account for sales) and create an item for shipping (Shipping, with a price of $2.00, linked to an Income account for shipping). Then Create a Group Item named Gadgets, with a price of $12.00. Use the Group in your sales transactions. *** First Bank Reconciliation in QuickBooks *** A reader wrote to say he'd entered the opening balance for his checking account using a journal entry. When he opened the reconciliation window for the checking account, the screen shows that the beginning balance is $0. He tried changing the date of the journal entry to a month later than the original entry, but the beginning balance on the reconciliation window was still $0. He says that he's finding it impossible to reconcile his bank account. The beginning balance you see in the reconciliation window shows you the beginning balance from the last reconciliation, not the balance of your bank register. For the first reconciliation, this would have to be zero. Reconcile the first month by selecting all the transactions that cleared for that month. The ending balance (which should match the ending balance on the statement for that month) will be the beginning balance of the next reconciliation, and so on and so on. *** Customer Credit Limits *** We receive a lot of queries from users who want to find a method of enforcing customer credit limits. QuickBooks doesn't support enforced credit limits; instead, the software issues a warning when an invoice will exceed the limit. Users are free to ignore the warning. Enforcing customer credit limits in QuickBooks is a matter of setting rules for employees. You can also make some changes to the customer's configuration to make the credit limit problem more apparent: Create a Terms option named NO CREDIT (all caps makes it more noticeable on the Invoice template) and assign it to customers who are close to or over their credit limits. Change the name of the customer to add the words NO CREDIT or NO INVOICES to the customer name, e.g. SmithCo-NO CREDIT. (The customer name doesn't appear on any transaction forms.) *** Get Rid of The Payment Services Ads on Sales Forms *** All of you who wrote to express your anger about the space used to try to sell you payment services on the Sales Receipt and Receive Payment windows will be happy to learn that Update R5 for QuickBooks 2010 lets you get rid of that annoyance. After you install the Update and open either transaction form, click the link labeled Close Toolbar at the top of the left pane. (Yes, Intuit actually calls this advertising method a "Toolbar".) When you select the option to get rid of it, you're told that you can put it back by choosing Edit, Preferences, and going to the My Preferences tab of the Sales & Customers category. (Who would put it back?) Update R5 has a number of other fixes, and you can read about them by putting the following URL in your browser's Address Bar: http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/Pages/KnowledgeBaseArticle/898561 *** NEW POLL - Needed Fixes Still Missing *** Every year, as users upgrade to the newest version of QuickBooks, we receive a great many messages asking why the new version hasn't fixed . Many of the complaints include the same problems year after year after year. We usually recommend that users take advantage of the Feedback command on the Help menu, because many folks at Intuit tell us that the company pays attention to messages from users. However, the evidence doesn't support that statement. According to our mail, several problems have generated user complaints for many years. We've posted the top three complaints from users about "unfixed annoyances" in a new poll on our Home Page at www.cpa911.com. When we provide the poll results next month, we hope all our readers will use the "winning complaint" in a feedback message to see if that will make Intuit sit up and take notice. Here are the results of our last poll, in which we asked whether you gave employees year-end bonuses for 2009: Yes = 34% Not this year, did in previous years = 26% No, never gave bonuses = 40% ------ > CONTACT INFO < ------ Copyright 2010 CPA911. Comments or questions? Write to: editor@cpa911.com. Visit our web site: http://www.cpa911.com. ------ > SUBSCRIPTION INFO < ------ You can forward this newsletter to anyone, as long as you forward it in its entirety. If you received a forwarded copy, subscribe for yourself (it's free) at http://www.cpa911.com/newsletter.asp.