Juliet

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Posts by Juliet

Modifying Already “Cleared” Items in QuickBooks

Some small business owners make mistakes in reconciling their bank accounts, looking at the dollar amount to clear in a bank statement reconciliation instead of choosing the amount AND the correct date. Or they press reconcile now when there is a balance (which creates an entry) and later finds out what the error was and does not know how to correct it.

For example, a recurring debit of $25 is posted for internet services. The person clears the $25 debit for ABC Internet Company dated 1/25/2012 but the $25 debit dated 4/25/2012 should have been chosen because s/he is reconciling the April 2012 bank statement. Or a check for $125 for office supplies cleared the bank for $110, the person cleared the check, had a difference of $15 and still pressed the reconcile now button. Here are some tips on how to fix account reconciliations without making your account out-of-balance the next time you reconcile the account:

Do NOT Do This – before I tell you what you could do, I want to tell you what you should not do. Do not delete the transaction. Deleting the transaction will definitely cause your future bank reconciliations to be off.

Do not change the dollar amount of a cleared transaction. This will cause the “cleared” transaction to “unclear” and will cause your future bank reconciliations to be off.

Modify the Reconciliation Discrepancy Journal Entry – If you press the reconcile now button and there is a difference in the reconciliation, QuickBooks will make a journal entry to increase or decrease your cash balance and the other side of the entry is recorded to an account called reconciliation discrepancies. Open a quick report through the chart of accounts. For the example above, look for the journal entry for $15 and open it. Change the account from reconciliation discrepancy to office supplies. In the memo write “ck#1234 for $125 cleared for $110″ and save the transaction.

Undo the Previous Reconciliation – You can undo the previous reconciliation and start over. That would let you fix the transaction and clear it properly. However, if you had an entry to reconciliation discrepancy you would need to delete it (I know, do not delete transactions, but this is an exception – the computer created a fake entry to make up for your mistake).

Use the Register – You can clear and unclear transactions using the register, but I recommend this step only for advanced users. In the register, there is a column with a checkmark. This means the transaction has cleared. Unclear a transaction by clicking the checkmark until it disappears and save the transaction. Next find the one you really wanted to clear and check that one. You may have to go back into the reconciliation screen and reconcile that one entry to keep your beginning balance correct for the next time you reconcile your bank account.

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Love Your BS

Small business owners, in my experience, are very focused on a report called the Profit & Loss Statement which lets the business owner know if the business is making a profit or not. However, there is a report that often confuses my clients called the Balance Sheet (aka the BS). I think that because people do not understand their BS that they do not see the benefit. The Balance Sheet is a report that shows cumulative balances since the beginning of operations (as opposed to the Profit & Loss Statement which shows activity over a period of time). The BS shows you the balance as of a point in time (such as today, end of last month, or end of last year). Here are some reasons to love your BS:

Cash To Spend – Your BS shows you how much money you have available to spend on upcoming bills. As long as you are current with entering checks, debits, deposits, transfers, and other activity that flows through your bank account, you can generate your Balance Sheet to see how much money you have left that you can use to pay your bills or even pay yourself!

Looking at the bank balance daily online may assist you in figuring out if you have money available for bills, but the online bank balance fails to take into account checks you have written that have not been cashed yet and deposits (such as credit card payments) that have not been deposited into your account. So the online balance is not accurate and paying bills using this balance may cause you to suffer NSF fees and black marks with banks.

I had a client once who I told numerous times to stop calling in to find out his bank balance (this was years ago before the Internet was so popular to perform online banking). When I completed his bookkeeping, I informed him that if all the checks he had written cleared today then he would have about $17K negative bank balance. About a week later he called me to say that my impending doom never occurred, from which I asked if he received customer payments since seeing me and he had.

Payroll Liabilities – This account in your BS lets you know right away if you either have not properly paid your payroll taxes to the appropriate taxing agency or if you improperly recorded a transaction. Some clients use a payroll tax service which withdraws the payroll and the payroll taxes on the same day, so after recording the payroll the balance in the payroll liabilities account should be zero. For clients who pay the taxes when due, the balance in the account should equal the amount owed in the following month/quarter. And payroll taxes are not to be played with. The IRS, in my experience, is very aggressive, putting liens on peoples houses and sending them to jail. So look at your BS to make sure you are up-to-date with payroll taxes.

Wages Payable – If you use an outside payroll service, one way to record payroll is to record all net monies owed to employees to an account called Wages Payable. Then, when you record the checks individually written to the employee you also use the account called Wages Payable. This account should be zero after you record payroll and enter all the payroll checks.

Undeposited Funds – This account is unique to QuickBooks. If you receive a payment from a customer that has been applied to an invoice or you have received a payment from a customer through the sales receipt screen, by default QuickBooks records the amounts to Undeposited Funds. This account is important to look at when you view your BS. The account should go to zero as soon as you make the “deposit”. If this account continues to grow, then you are missing a step in your accounting process. And if you are missing this step AND download transactions, record the deposits as revenue, you are recording your sales two times and increasing your taxes!

Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, & Inventory – Generate your BS. Then generate your Accounts Payable aging report, Accounts Receivable aging report, and Inventory Valuation report using the same date as your BS. Assuming your reports are all on an accrual basis, the aging and valuation reports should equal the balances on your Balance Sheet. For example, if the AR Aging report shows $23,500 as the total balance as of 3/31/12, then the Accounts Receivable balance on your Balance Sheet as of 3/31/12 should also be $23,500. If not, you have an error with your data entry and need to fix this problem.

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Is My QuickBooks File Possessed?

If you have used QuickBooks for a while and later decide to clean up your chart of accounts, you may want to be aware that making accounts “inactive” keeps you from using the account in the future, but reports may still have amounts in the now “inactive” account. So do not think your program is possessed.

Budgets – So you entered in a budget for the year. Later you decide to make some accounts “inactive”. For example, you made an account called Pager Services “inactive”. However, when you generate the Budget Overview report or the Budget vs. Actual report there is $560 in the account called Pager Services. You go back into your budget screen and do not see a line item for Pager Services. Your QuickBooks file must be corrupt, right? Maybe not.

When you make an account “inactive”, the program does not delete information used on that account. If you return to the chart of accounts, make the account “active”, go back into the budget screen, put in $0 for Pager Services, the budget reports will no longer show the account called Pager Services. Now you can make the account “inactive” again.

Merge Accounts – If you have created a new chart of account to add more detail to your accounting records and later decide you do not want the detail, you can either make the account “inactive” or you could merge the account with an existing one. For example, if you created a sub-account called Yellow Pages under Advertising and later decide that you want to record all advertising expenses to Advertising, you could make the sub-account called Yellow Pages “inactive” so you cannot use it anymore or you could merge it with the account called Advertising.

Rebuild Data – If you still think that your program is possessed, you could run a utility called “Rebuild”. This feature typically fixes issues that make QuickBooks act strangely. However, if in the past your computer has crashed and corrupted the file the “Rebuild” may not work. I have also seen that files with several years worth of data or a large data file can cause oddities with the program that “Rebuild” cannot fix. You could also use the Condense Data utility to enhance the performance of your file.

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