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As your business grows, collecting receipts in a folder and logging expenses in a notebook just doesn’t cut it anymore. You’ll have to create the general ledger for your company, which is a financial tool that’s essentially a master list of every financial action made within your business. Your general ledger should include your assets, liabilities, and equity accounts, and any changes to these accounts should be listed as they happen. It includes every transaction throughout your company’s lifetime.

How do I format my general ledger?

When you’re a contractor, you work on multiple projects that need different accounts and we want to make sure the chaos doesn’t turn into confusion. To make sure everything is organized and you know exactly what’s going on in each account, we compiled a list of helpful tips.

1.      Set up your QuickBooks properly at the beginning. You will need a specialized Chart of Accounts and Items for your business. By doing this right the first time, you avoid the very time consuming task of having to clean up your books.
2.      Invest the time, money, and energy to set up QuickBooks to properly track Direct and Indirect Constructions Costs and keep Overheard separate.
3.      Use Estimates to your customers and Purchase Orders to your vendors. Link the two to track your costs by project.
4.      Assign Job Costing to all expenses.
5.      Make adjustments each month to recognize Work In Progress (WIP).
6.      Track your contractors for ease of issuing 1099’s at the beginning of the year.
7.      If this becomes too much to handle, hire a qualified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. The money you “invest” in this will help you save you time, money, and energy in the long run.

Need to write off an uncollectible invoice but don’t know how? It’s sad but sometimes people don’t pay you what is owed.  You need to get these numbers out of your books, but you also want to track this correctly, so what do you do? Here are step-by-step directions to do this in QuickBooks:  

Step 1.  In your Chart of Accounts create an Income Account called “Bad Debt.”

Step 2.  In your Items create an item called “Bad Debt-Uncollectible” and link it to “Bad Debt” (the account you created in Step 1).

Step 3.  Create a Credit Memo in your QuickBooks and use the Item “Bad Debt-Uncollectible” (that you created in Step 2) with the amount that you need to write off.

Step 4.  Apply this Credit Memo to the invoice(s) that are uncollectible.

Now when you look at your P & L report, you’ll see a negative number in the Income Area, labeled as “Bad Debt.” Although it seems unusual to have a negative number for Income, this is correct.

Here is an example of what is happening in the background:

Consulting Services Income            $500.00

Bad Debt                                              -$500.00

                    Total:                                      $0.00

Step 5.  Make a note to never do business with this individual/company ever again!

Intuit has released information about the new features coming with QuickBooks 2018. The scheduled release date is September 26. Although we’re excited for all updates coming in the latest version, here are the top five we are most anxious for:

1. Multi-Monitor Capability

The 2018 version now offers support for up to three monitors. This will allow you to move a task/report/register from your one monitor to another monitor. For example, you can have two reports open at once - one on each monitor. Or you might have an invoice on one monitor while you have a bill open on another monitor. This will be a definite enhancement to your productivity.