Quickbooks
6 Quick and Easy Ways to Optimize Your Quickbooks!
If you’re like most business owners, you’ve probably spent hours looking for ways to optimize your Quickbooks to get the most out of your accounting software. You’ve gone through the training, read the manuals, and spent time in the forums to learn how to use Quickbooks, but you’re still struggling to get the most out of your accounting software. If you’re looking for quick and easy ways to optimize your Quickbooks, this article is for you! In this article, you’ll discover 6 quick and easy ways to optimize your Quickbooks that you can do today to get more work done.
1. Track your time
One of the best ways to get more out of your Quickbooks is by using the Time Tracking feature. You can easily track your time spent on each billable and non-billable task with this feature. This feature will also allow you to see which client you spend the most time on. You may find that you spend a lot more time with one certain client than the other. With that, you’ll be able to balance your time for more efficiency and identify the best clients for your business.
For nonprofits, it will be useful to track time spent on programs and projects. Then, create an invoice for pledge payments easily and faster.
2. Track your expenses
You already track your time in Quickbooks, so next, why not also track your income and expenses? In Quickbooks, you can easily track your income and expenses by simply creating and assigning classes to transactions. By doing so, you’ll be able to do so much more! You can assign a Class to many transactions, including Estimates, Invoices, Credit Card Charges, Refunds & Credits, Pledges (restricted & unrestricted), Donations, and more. And the great thing about this is that it makes it easier to filter and create reports!
3. Scan, upload & track your receipts
Tracking your expenses is a great way to ensure that you’re not overspending, but another equally important way to optimize your Quickbooks is to track your receipts. You can do this by hand, but why go through the headache when you can easily upload them directly to your Quickbooks? Yes, you can! You can either scan or take a picture of your receipt and then upload it to your Quickbooks from your computer, mobile device, or even your email. And that’s not all; after you upload your receipts or bills, Quickbooks takes the information and creates a transaction for you to review later. Once you are ready to review it, you can reallocate and edit as necessary.
4. Review your income and expenses
The best way to increase your revenue, track your expenses, and save time is to review your income and expenses monthly. Quickbooks provides various types of reports that you can run and even customize. The most common ones are the Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows.
The Profit & Loss, or P&L, shows you an overall picture of your income, expenses, and profits or losses over a given period. The Balance Sheet reports the assets, liabilities, and equity of a business at a specific time. The Balance Sheet is commonly used to evaluate a business. Then, there is the Statement of Cash Flows. This last one paints a picture of how the operations are running, where the money comes from, and how it’s being spent.
5. Setup, pay contractors, and track them for 1099s
It can be tedious to go back through the past 12 months to figure out who needs to be issued a 1099-Form and the amount the form needs to be issued for. Conveniently, you can set up contractors as vendors, pay them, track their payments, & process their 1099s from your Quickbooks account! Before starting, however, it is strongly recommended to have contractors complete a W-9 form. This will get you the information you need to set them up and process their 1099s. You must also check the “track payments for 1099” box within the vendors’ profiles. This makes it easier and smoother at the end of the year to process their 1099 forms.
6. Track mileage
Mileage can be one of the most significant tax deductions for a small business. And, of course, Quickbooks makes tracking mileage manageable and painless with its automatic GPS tracking. All you need to do is 4 easy steps – download the Quickbooks app, turn on the automatic mileage tracking, set the location permissions on your cell phone, and DRIVE! You can add as many vehicles as you need, categorize business & personal trips and run reports whenever you need.
Conclusion
In this article, you discovered 6 quick and easy ways to optimize your Quickbooks. You now know about tracking your time, expenses, receipts, mileage, and reviewing your income & expenses. You’ll see dramatic improvements to your Quickbooks and your day-to-day bookkeeping by following these steps regularly. And you’ll be able to get more work done in less time!
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