Quick Books Checks

For cash flow reasons, sometimes clients need to make credit card payments more frequently than once a month. Here are directions to record all aspects of this process.

Enter the Charges

Enter the credit card charges. You may either do this manually or download them from your credit card company.

To do it manually:

Under the Banking menu, select Record Credit Card Charges, then select Enter Credit Card Charges. Record the vendor, date, amount, and type of expense.

You may either use the paper receipts, or the credit card statement.

To download:

Under the Banking menu, select Online Banking, then select Online Banking Center (if you don’t have Online Banking enabled, QuickBooks will walk you through the set-up procedure). Select the account in the upper left corner, enter your password, and the download process should start. Some financial institutions use a “web-connect” procedure which requires you to go to their site through the QuickBooks web-browser. Log-in to your account, find the link that says something like, “Download transactions,” select the correct version of QuickBooks, and make absolutely certain the date range is correct. Do not download previously downloaded or reconciled transactions. Removing these types of transactions from QuickBooks’ Online Banking Center can be time consuming and frustrating.

Once all credit card purchases are recorded, not only is the expense recorded, but the amount you owe the credit card company is recorded as well.

Make Payments to the Credit Card Company

You may make as many payments toward the credit card as you like during the month. Follow these steps:

Use the Write Checks function (from the Banking menu, select Write Checks). Use the Write Checks function even if a paper check was not written. Make sure you are using the correct bank account, as shown in the top left corner of the open window. On the Expenses tab, under the Account column, scroll up to select the credit card account you used for the charges. Do not select an expense account here. The expenses were already recorded when you entered the credit card charges. The amount in the Amount column should be the same as the amount on the green electronic “check”.

This entry takes money from the bank account and applies it as a payment to the credit card account.

Reconcile the Statement

When you receive the credit card statement, reconcile it as you would for a bank statement. (From the Banking menu, select Reconcile, then select the credit card account you wish to reconcile.) If you wish to record a payment or enter a bill (to make a payment later) after reconciling, you will be given the opportunity to do so. If you do not wish to record a payment or a bill after reconciling, select Cancel. Print a Detailed copy of the Reconciliation report and staple it to the back of the credit card statement.

Using this method allows you to make payments when you wish, in whatever amount you wish. Reconciling the credit card statement is an important step to verify that you have recorded everything properly, and that your records agree with the records of the credit card company.

Author: Jennifer A. Thieme

Recording multiple credit card payments | Article Discovery - News
Recording multiple credit card payments. by Cheryl L. True. For cash flow reasons, sometimes clients need to make credit card payments more frequently than once a month. Here are directions to record all aspects of this process. Enter the credit card … credit card statement. By downloading; Under the Banking menu, select Online Banking, then select Online Banking Center (if you don’t have Online Banking enabled, QuickBooks will walk you through th.

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Sometimes businesses need to pay their employees with cash, verses issuing a paper paycheck. There are a couple reasons the business may want or need to do this:

• The business is having cash flow problems, and paying employees from cash is easier to manage.
• The employee may not have a bank account. Cashing a paycheck is difficult and/or expensive, and direct deposit is not an option.

Businesses should never simply hand employees cash for work performed. There must some type of paper trail to prove:

• in what manner the employee received the funds
• when the employee received the funds
• how the gross pay was computed
• what employment taxes were withheld from the pay; gross pay vs. net pay.

Every single one of these is a potential issue that could arise in the event that the employee disputes the pay, or in the event of a employment tax or work comp audit.

Here is how to pay employees with cash, while still protecting the business from potential problems:

1. The business must be set up with some type of payroll service. Either QuickBooks must be enabled to perform payroll, or an outside service should be used. Either way does not matter, but somehow payroll taxes, etc., must be computed correctly.

2. Generate a paycheck in the normal way, using the checking account to draw from, or a special checking account for payroll, if you have one.

3. Have the employees endorse the checks - he/she is signing it over to you.

4. Pay the employees cash. It must be the exact amount on the checks, to the penny. No fudging here! This is important, because the cash paid out must reconcile to the check amounts. If the amounts are not exact, it will be difficult to reconcile them.

5. Take the checks to the bank and deposit them back into the checking account. Don’t void them in the software. Although voiding them has the same net effect on the bank balance, the accounting software cannot compute the gross pay and payroll taxes correctly if they are voided.

Another alternative is to simply create “dummy” checks on blank paper. Make sure the employees put their signatures on them. Pay with cash, to the penny.

The employee’s signature on the paycheck or “dummy” check is crucial - this way, the employee cannot claim he/she was not paid.

Following this method, you are simply cashing the employee’s paychecks for them. This leaves a very good paper trail for your accountant or auditor to follow. Everything is clean, above-board, and easy to understand.

My thanks goes to Suzanne Mead, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor over at http://forums.quickbooksusers.com/index.php, for this excellent tip. Thank you Suzanne!

By: Jennifer A. Thieme

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Let’s analyze why you are in the contractor business. Most likely it is because you love it, but of course the more practical reason is to make money. Keeping track of that money and all the various places it goes is a job in and of itself. However, there is a surefire way to make sure all your finances are in order and that is to use QuickBooks in your contractor business. Any contractor who has used this program over the years can tell you what a huge difference it makes in conducting business.

QuickBooks is an easy to use powerful accounting software package that has been amazing business people for decades. It is a must have for any contractor and can really keep your finances and taxes in order. Besides being user friendly it can help manage your whole business. It has great tools for figuring out payroll taxes, sales, trends, expenses, you name it. It’s like having an accountant on staff without all the hassle. All you do is enter in all your expenses against all your sales by either writing checks and assigning every penny to a certain account, or by listing everything individually. Whatever way you choose QuickBooks keeps track of everything for you. You can even do bids on QuickBooks to make sure each and every quote is profitable and track expenses along the way to make sure the project stays that way.

Every contractor will tell you keeping track of payroll and payroll taxes are a real pain and any mistake can cost dearly. QuickBooks does that for you and each time you upgrade it already knows all the appropriate laws and regulations and calculations that have changed so you never have to worry about payroll mistakes. And, it’s a lot cheaper than a payroll service. It’s like having a whole payroll department right on your PC.

With QuickBooks, at the end of the year you don’t have to worry about putting everything together either. All you have to do is save a copy of your QuickBooks files and give it to your accountant and all the info is right there. It’s easy. As a matter of fact it’s real easy. For years all kinds of businesses have relied on this program including contractor businesses. It’s great piece of mind knowing that something so easy to use can be such a powerful force in your business. Check out QuickBooks real soon.

Author: Josh Macmichael

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Introduction

QuickBooks is by far the easiest program to use with the most complicated and diverse applications in it that never get used by most business owners. Fraud happens every day and as I have said before, small businesses lose more money every year due to fraud than some of the largest corporations. What a lot of Fraudsters, who happen to use QuickBooks don’t know is that every move they make, every step they take, is being ‘watched’ by the QuickBooks software.

Prevention

The key to preventing fraud of course is making sure that it is not the same person who handles more than one accounting function in a business. You don’t want the same person who is opening the mail, being the one who sends the checks. You don’t want the same person who can sign checks being the one determining the amounts to put on the checks.

Upon setup, QuickBooks allows the business owner to set up users. The owner should always be the Administrator, not the bookkeeper, not the CPA or accountant, but the Administrator. Anyone else using the program can be limited to the parts of the program that they can access by the Admin. Sales persons needing to enter sales can do so, but they don’t need access to the bank account information. Purchasers need to be able to create purchase orders and invoices, but not able to adjust inventory on hand or create checks to pay for invoices. Only the admin should be able to make these adjustments. Name the users of QuickBooks so you know who is doing what and when. This will give you an eagle eye on the security of the QuickBooks transactions.

Detection

There is a little known feature of QB that is called the Audit Trail. The Audit Trail records any changes made to original transactions, any deletions of invoices, checks, etc. You’ll want to do this when the place is closed or when you have plenty of time because this report can take a very long time to generate. Go to the Reports tab on the menu bar and click on it. Find the Accountant’s Reports and you will see the Audit Trail as one of the options. Click on it and apply the dates you wish to check, (the longer the period of time and more transactions, the longer the report will take) and wait.

In the audit trail, if an entry has been altered or deleted there will be two or sometimes three lines for one transaction. The one on the bottom is the original entry, the one(s) above it have been altered or deleted and the report will give what was changed, the payee, the amount, or an account and tell you which user entered the original, which user changed it and the day and time it was done.

So how do you tell if it’s fraud or just someone making changes? First, deleting an invoice should rarely be done, if there are a large number of deleted invoices then chances are, your company is not using the Estimates icon. The invoice should only be created when you know for sure a customer is going to go through with the arrangement, if you are using the invoice feature to send estimates, those estimates are posting to your accounts receivable account which should not be done.

So how would someone commit fraud by altering an invoice? If the same person that prints the invoices also sends the checks, it is very easy to print the invoice for your approval at $200 or more than what was actually invoiced for. Once you’ve approved what should be a $5000 invoice for $5200, the clerk will change the $5200 to $5000 and send the vendor the right amount, and at the same time issue themselves a check for $200 which would be written off to another account somewhere in the books. The bank reconciliations would always match and no one would be the wiser. This is one reason that you cannot print an invoice without saving it first.

Another commo
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n method of fraud is altering the payee of existing invoices to benefit the relatives, friends, etc of the crooked clerk. So an invoice may come in that has been created at home and submitted to you for payment by the person creating the invoice. Or, you may be cutting a check for a legitimate expense only to have the funds redirected to the crooked clerk.

You might also be on the lookout for checks being issued for identical amounts, during the same period every week, every month, etc. Sometimes the fraudster will send two checks to the same vendor and call up a day later and ask the vendor to return the check ‘mistakenly’ sent. If the fraudster is the same person who opens the mail, he will take the check and ‘wash it’ and make himself the payee. (If your bookkeeper seems to be continually doing her nails, you smell nail polish remover constantly, your company is at risk as that is what is used to remove ink off of checks) You can catch this by exporting the check detail to Excel and sorting it according to amounts, if you have one or two more checks a month for identical amounts, call your bank and ask for a copy of the cashed checks, front and back. The back of a check tells you which bank cashed it, and often, the name of the person who cashed it as well.

If you get your bank statements already opened by your bookkeeper, watch for checks that have cleared but that aren’t placed into the envelope with the statements. Compare your bank register to the images of the checks on the statements and confirm that the person or company you wrote the check to is the actual person or company that cashed the check.

Conclusion

If you take the basic precautions, it makes this kind of fraud much harder to commit. But you have to be vigilant and ready to take action should fraud be occurring in your business. Remember, however, that this is America, home of the Free Land of the Lawsuit. NEVER directly accuse your bookkeeper of stealing, especially in front of others. Find the services of a Certified Fraud Examiner in your area and they will be able to help you put a successful case together for prosecution, should you choose to go that route.

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After you’ve been using QuickBooks for while and have been balancing your account regularly, you will only irregularly have trouble reconciling it. However, if you are just getting started, you may have trouble getting your QuickBooks bank account to balance. For that reason, let me offer some suggestions for balancing a bank account that’s causing you trouble.

Check for missing transactions

Account balance trouble stems from only three causes:

Reason 1: You cleared a transaction the bank hasn’t recorded

Reason 2: You forgot to record a transaction, or perhaps several transactions

Reason 3: Either you or your bank incorrectly recorded a transaction

Therefore, when you find yourself with reconciliation troubles, first make sure that you are not missing some transaction. Go through the bank statement line for line, comparing each of the transactions listed there with the contents of your account register. If you find the bank statement lists a transaction that your QuickBooks bank account register does not, then you need to record it in QuickBooks.

Confirm you haven’t incorrectly cleared transactions

Once you confirm that the QuickBooks bank account register includes all transactions, verify that you have not incorrectly cleared transactions that are still outstanding. To do this, thoroughly review the QuickBooks account register and make sure that each transaction marked with a ‘C’ does, in fact, appear on the bank statement.

Compare amounts

If the two reviews described in the preceding paragraphs don’t explain the difference between your records and the bank’s, you need to check the actual transaction amounts that you have recorded against those shown in the bank register. In other words, if the bank register shows a check to your mortgage company for $500, you need to make sure that your account register also records the check as $500.

Unfortunately, it is easy to incorrectly record transaction amounts in the QuickBooks account register. All it takes is pressing the wrong key. And, in fact, two data entry errors are particularly difficult to see: transposition errors and sign errors.

Keep a sharp lookout for transposition errors

Transposition errors occur when you transpose, or flip-flop, the numbers in an amount. If you write a check for $123, but record the check as $132, for example, you’ve transposed the 2 and the 3. And this error is hard to spot later. You look at the bank statement, for example, and see the digits 123. Then when you look at the account register, you see the digits 132. Unless you are looking not just at the digits used but also at their order, you may miss this error.

Don’t miss sign errors

Sign errors occur when you enter a deposit as a withdrawal, or a withdrawal as a deposit. All this really means is that you have entered some transaction amount in the wrong column. Again, this error is sometimes tough to spot because the transaction appears both on the bank statement and in your registerjust in the wrong column in the QuickBooks bank register.

If you come up with some difference with your records and the bank’s that is irreconcilable, try dividing the error by 2. Then look for a transaction equal to this result. For example, if you have a $200 error, divide $200 by 2 to get the result $100. Then look for a $100 transaction that is entered in the wrong column.

Some problems account reconciliation won’t fix

There are several common errors that account reconciliation won’t catch. Reconciliation won’t catch when you forget to record a transaction and the transaction hasn’t yet cleared the bank. If you forget to record a check and the check is still outstanding at the end of the statement month, for example, the check doesn’t appear in your register and it doesn’t get listed on your bank statement.

Another kind of error that a bank reconciliation won’t catch stems from entering a fictitious transaction in the account register. For example, if you enter a check in the QuickBooks bank account register that you never wrote or a deposit you never made, the check or deposit will never clear the bank.

Unfortunately, there is not much you can do to find these sorts of errors. Mostly, you need to apply simple common sense to prevent them. In the case of forgotten uncleared transactions, your only recourse is to be careful in your record keeping. Try to establish a system whereby you regularly record the checks you write and the deposits you make.

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Nowadays, starting and taking care of a business represents a real change and the most difficult part is dealing with your business’s finances. Although there are many types of software that can help you with your business available nowadays, you need to be sure you are choosing what suits your business needs. One of the most efficient software nowadays is quickbooks, which is easy to use and highly recommended for small and medium businesses.

As far as accounting is concerned, quickbooks will help you manage all of your expenses. This software will make things much easier for you and for your accountant, allowing you to keep track of the checks you write and of your credit card bills. Furthermore, by using this software you can be sure that you will never miss an expense. Another quickbook benefit is the fact that it has several different reports which can help you see how your business is doing. Thus, you can print graphics so that you can see how much profit and loss you have every month. You can even have an annual report which will help you see how your business has fluctuated and if it needs any improvement or not.

Next, besides keeping track of your expenses and offering useful reports, quickbooks will help you create estimates and take care of the billing tasks. This program enables you to draw up estimates for your clients and also to create invoices. One of the essential aspects of using quickbook is making tax time a lot easier, since you will already have your expenditures and your income. If you decide to use this software the data will be entered just once, which enhances the efficiency of the program.

Furthermore, quickbooks integration will allow fewer errors because it is well known that people make more mistakes when entering data then professional computerized programs. Another quickbook advantage is the fact that the billing will take place a lot faster, thus increasing the cash flow of the business. The information will be updated automatically, thus diminishing the number of errors and allowing the accountant to work faster and more efficiently.

Clients will spend less money on bookkeeping services, being able to focus on other aspects. Nowadays there are 2 ways of facilitating the integration of quickbooks: batch imports and backend integration. Batch imports enable the manager to create an export file, to view the contents and to choose to import that file into quickbooks, while backend integration will allow to the systems to communicate directly, all the data being completed in real time.

We suggest resorting to quickbook if you are an accounting firm, a staffing agency, an online store, a construction company and others. This program can be easily integrated into most web applications, enabling businesses to increase efficiency and to enhance the productivity of the company. These days most companies have started to use quickbooks to handle their accounting needs such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, time tracking, vendor and client databases. Managers or accountants can import anything into this program, thus increasing their productivity and eliminating redundant data entry.

By: Ckint Jhonson

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