Greetings The CPA911 Newsletter April 2010 ------ > Contents < ------ QuickBooks Tips Puzzle Winner Contact Info Subscription Info ------ > QuickBooks TIPS < ------ *** Replacing a Reimbursement Check *** A reader wrote to ask how re-issue a reimbursement check that was given to an employee at the end of last year. The employee never cashed the check and has now notified him that she inadvertently threw the check away. This was an expense for last year and the tax return is finished. He doesn't want to void the old check because that will change the P & L for last year. The easiest way to do this is to write a manual check and use the date of the original check. Go into the bank register and change the check number of the old check to the number of the manual check. Then, to avoid having a "missing check number", enter a new check directly into the register with the old number and mark it void. *** Tracking Potential Customers *** We receive quite a few requests from users to help them track leads for which estimates have been created. They don't want to add the customer unless the estimate is accepted. There are several ways to do this, but here are two suggestions that users report work well. Create a customer named Leads or Prospects. When you create an estimate, fill in the Name/Address block with the current prospect's information. When you save/print the estimate QuickBooks asks if you want to change the customer's information to match this name/address: Answer NO. After the prospect accepts the estimate you can create a new customer. When you create a Quick Report on the customer named Leads/Prospects, you can see the name entered in each transaction. Open the original estimate and change the customer name to that of the new customer. Create a customer named Leads or Prospects and create jobs for each estimate. If the prospect becomes a customer you can change the job to a customer (move the job listing to the left in the Customer List). *** Fixing Vendor Bills Paid with Direct Disbursements *** We frequently get messages from users who have written direct checks instead of using the Pay Bills feature when they pay vendors for whom they'd entered bills. Most of them use the bank account register to record checks they wrote manually (instead of using the Pay Bills transaction). In recent versions of QuickBooks, if you use the Write Checks command, when you enter a vendor name, QuickBooks warns you to use the Pay Bills feature if there are outstanding bills for this vendor, but you see no warnings if you record checks directly in the register. After a while, these users notice they have a very large Accounts Payable balance, and running an A/P report displays names of vendors who have actually been paid. In addition, expenses are higher than they should be, because the expense was posted when the bill was entered, and was posted again when the direct disbursement check was written. We've posted an article to explain how to fix the problem in the QuickBooks Tips section of our Web site. You can go directly to the article by entering the following URL in your browser's Address Bar. http://www.cpa911.com/read_article.asp?ID=147 ------ > Puzzle Winner < ------ Congratulations to Roberta Gold of California, who wins a copy of "Accounting Savvy for Business Owners" for solving our puzzle last month. Her name was drawn at random from the correct entries we received. If you missed the puzzle, here it is: A reader wrote to ask whether she could invoice multiple jobs in a single invoice. She'd been creating separate invoices for each job, but wanted to know if she could avoid these multiple invoices each month. She said she'd asked the question in the QuickBooks Community Forums and received several answers telling her she could. One answer told her to put each job on a separate line item of the invoice, which is what she did. Now, of course, her recent invoices aren't linked to jobs (and the same problem would occur if she were using Sales Receipts). She also said that in addition to listing each job with inaccurate data, her customer reports include a "funny category" she doesn't understand. What's the name of the "funny category" that's appearing in her customer reports? The "funny category" in her reports is "Other". For each transaction that included multiple jobs for a customer there's a report section named ": Other. The actual job is never linked to the transaction. Accounting Savvy for Business Owners has had excellent reviews from accountants and business owners. This book answers the most frequently asked questions business owners pose to their accountants. If you're a business owner you'll learn how to keep books accurately. If you're an accountant, this is a great reference for answering your clients' questions (or to present as a gift to that client who calls most often with questions like, "How do I take money out of the business?" or "Why doesn't my bill payment show the expense?"). ------ > 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.