QuickBooks Year-End Planning & Tips

Dec 15, 2015

QuickBooks is a reliable and popular program used by many small businesses to fulfill their accounting needs. There are numerous features many users are unaware of because accounting isn’t their only responsibility and finding time to explore the program is difficult. With the year-end fast approaching, closing the books is another one of those time-consuming jobs. QuickBooks offers a “Year-end Guide Checklist” located in the Help Menu. This guide lists tasks to perform to get your books ready for your accountant to prepare taxes, 1099 preparation and payroll tax return requirements. Once all necessary adjustments have been done for the year, it is very important to set a closing date and password. To do this go to Edit | Preferences | Accounting | Set Date/Password. This will preclude anyone from posting information to a prior year without entering a password.

The Company snapshot is another feature which provides a great deal of information. You can view  income and expenses in a graph format, account balance table, customers who owe money, and vendors who require payment. This feature is a great place to start since you can quickly gauge what accounting tasks need to be handled.

There are other ways to speed up and simplify your QuickBooks program:

1. Use Keyboard shortcuts There are numerous keyboard shortcuts. Here a just a few: Ctrl-I  = Create an invoice Ctrl E = Edit transaction in register Ctrl F = Find transaction Ctrl M = Memorize transaction or report Ctrl N = New invoice, bill, check, or list item in context Ctrl W = Write new check

2. Customize the Icon Bar QuickBooks has a default icon bar at the top of the screen. You can add, remove, or modify the icons to better suit your needs. Customize Icon Bar window lets you make other changes to the icon bar. You can add separators between icons, change the order in which icons appear, and opt to show both icons and text or icons only.

3. Use the QuickMath Calculator If you want to get away from using the old machine with tape, this is a good solution. It can be accessed by going to Edit | Use Calculator.

4. Use Right-Click Menus QuickBooks has extensive use of right-click menus everywhere in the program. Try them out anywhere you want to do something instead of heading right for the toolbar icons and menus.

5. Back Up Your Data QuickBooks contains a wizard to walk you through the process of backing up your data to a removable data storage device. A reminder can be set upon exiting the program to do this task. Intuit can handle your backups and keep them safe with the QuickBooks Online Backup Service. This option is not a free one. Plans start at five dollars a month and let you retrieve your files from any computer with an internet connection.

QuickBooks Pro 2016 is the newest version with improvements to the bill tracker, sending forms and enhanced reporting features. QuickBooks Pro 2013 users that currently use the payroll service will be required to upgrade to version 2016.

If your business has questions or needs guidance, our dedicated QuickBooks team can provide training or assistance to help you get on track. Call us today (419) 891-1040.

Diane Cook, Staff Accountant

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