How do you charge sales tax to multiple general ledger accounts, since I have more than one state that I owe sales tax to?

All sales tax items default to the Sales Tax Liabilty account on the G/L, this cannot be changed. If you have them set-up properly, you should see the different vendors and the amounts payable on the Sales Tax Liability report. To run this report:

1.    Click on Reports (across the top)

2.    Click on Vendors & Payables

3.    Click on Sales Tax Liability

Make sure to select the date range you are reporting on.

Set up item codes for each state sales taxes,  and for some states, you will need multiple item codes for each county/city.    New York as example, has different rates for each county.    Orange County, Dutchess County, Westchester County each have its own rate, and Sales to each county are required to be reported.
As far as the liability - you might need to set up sub-accounts under Sales Tax Payable, and do a journal entry to move the liability on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. 

QuickBooks 2012: New Paths to Better, Faster Financial Management

As it usually does this time of year, Intuit has introduced new versions of its Pro and Premier products. QuickBooks 2012 promises to help you get better organized, save steps, and acquire more in-depth financial insights.

The new Express Start is designed for businesses that want to blast through setup and start entering customers and invoices. You have two other options, though: Advanced Setup is the old EasyStep interview that solicits more details. You can also open an existing file or convert data from Quicken or other accounting software.

Express Start requires minimal input: company name, industry, company type, tax ID, and contact information. After you save your company file, it lets you start adding or importing customers/vendors/employees, products/services, and bank accounts.

An Activity-Driven Calendar

QuickBooks' Reminders keep you apprised of each day's tasks, but they don't provide any information about the past or future. QuickBooks 2012 solves this problem with its new Calendar. When you enter an appointment, to-do, or key business task (invoices, bills, purchase orders, etc.), it appears in the calendar. You can display a graphical view of the month that tallies activities for each day and lists them below. Daily and weekly views are in list form. And links open the original documents.

Save Excel Formatting

Once you've formatted a QuickBooks report in Excel, it's frustrating to have to reformat it each time you run it for different time periods and/or with your ever-changing content.  Excel Integration Refresh simplifies this process. You can now export a report to Excel, make formatting changes and save them, and then reapply them later to the same type of report using different date ranges and your updated QuickBooks data. Acceptable alterations include:

·         Row and column header font formatting

·         New formulas

·         Renamed column and row headers, and report titles

·         Resized columns

·         Inserted columns and rows

·         Inserted formula text

You can do this by opening your report in QuickBooks and clicking Update an existing worksheet, or by launching your report in Excel and clicking the QuickBooks tab on the toolbar, then the Update Report button.

A New Report Community

There's always room for more report formats. QuickBooks 2012 offers a library of Contributed Reports, variations created either by Intuit or your fellow users. You can select one of these, like Customer Sales By Quantity By Item Detail and instantly populate it with your own data.

You can sort these templates by industry and rating, and view them as a list, in a grid, or in the Report Center's Carousel view.

Centralized Operations

QuickBooks 2012 also saves you time with its new Centers. The Inventory Center works similarly to those available for customers, vendors, and employees. It's a clearinghouse of item records and transactions that can be viewed and sorted. You can also do inventory housekeeping tasks here, like adding items and launching transactions.

The Lead Center helps you carefully track new leads that you either paste in from Excel or enter manually. You can add to-dos and notes to contact records, and convert them into customers.

Upgrading Can Be Tricky

Intuit has included other, smaller time-saving organizational and reporting tools in QuickBooks 2012, like One-Click Transactions, which lets you create related transactions from existing ones (i.e., invoice to credit memo) with one click.

There's nothing especially difficult about using most of QuickBooks 2012's new features. But upgrading and setup are sometimes quirky, and the Excel Integration Refresh tool has a learning curve. We're happy to help you start your company file on the right foot or get acclimated to this latest version.

Customer Refunds: Are You Doing Them Right?

Refunds. You probably wince at the word. Some – like customer refunds for returns – are fairly uncomplicated, thanks to QuickBooks' tools. Others, not so much. You may find yourself unable to balance your accounts receivable.

There are numerous scenarios that necessitate the use of credit memos, including overpayment, order cancellations and bad debt write-off. It's critical that these are entered correctly. If they aren't, you may lose a lot of the time that QuickBooks helped you save as you try to chase down a few dollars.

Sending money back

Let's say a customer pays for an order but cancels before it ships. You could:

·         Apply the balance to an existing invoice

·         Keep it as an available credit

·         Issue a refund

 Click Customers | Create Credit Memos/Refunds. Select the correct customer and job (and A/R account, if you have more than one). Enter the items just as they appear on the invoice. When you're finished, click Save & New.  The Available Credit window opens, displaying your options.

You would select Give a refund and click OK. The Issue a Refund window opens and should already be filled in. If everything is correct, click OK. The refund check has now been entered in the checking register, ready to be processed.

WARNING: If the invoice was paid with a credit card, it gets complicated. Your instructions will depend on whether you are using Intuit Merchant Service for QuickBooks or another merchant account service. You'll also have to deal with transaction fees. We can help you deal with this.

Other refund options

If the customer has open invoices, you may want to choose Apply to an invoice in the Available Credit window. A list opens;  just select the correct invoice. Or if you want to have those extra funds available for other invoices but don't want to apply them immediately, click Retain as an available credit.  When you want to use them, click the Apply Credits button in the lower right corner of the invoice.

Sometimes, customers overpay an invoice or statement charge, or make a down payment for which there is no invoice. This is easy to fix. Open the Customer Payment screen (Customer Center | Transactions | Received Payments) and double-click the related payment.  In the screen's lower left corner, you'll see your options.

Click the correct button, then Save & Close. The Issue a Refund window opens; you'd treat it the same way you did when you dispatched a return refund.

Another use

You can also use credit memos to write off bad debt if you are using the accrual method of accounting.

If you don't already have a Bad Debt item in your item list, set up a new item as an Other Charge. Name it “Bad Debt” and match it to the correct account.

Open the Credit Memo window and select the customer, then select Bad Debt as the item. You'll get a message saying that the item is associated with an expense account; click OK. Enter the write-off amount minus sales tax if taxable (be sure the Tax column is correct) and click Save & Close.

WARNING: Enter two lines on the credit memo if it combines both taxable and non-taxable items (both charged to the Bad Debt account), one for each type. Be sure that the Tax Columns are correct.

The Available Credit window opens. Select Apply to an invoice. Put a check mark next to the correct one and click Done.

Make refunds make sense

It seemed easier in the days when you just wrote a check for a refund or made an entry in a paper ledger, didn't it? Using QuickBooks credit memos, though, helps you maintain records that follow standard accounting procedures and simplifies our understanding of your files. We'll be glad to help you make sure that this sometimes-complex task is done right from the start.

Accounts Receivable Payment Incorrect

I recorded a payment from a customer through Accounts Recievable but it wasnt for Invoices it was for something else, how do I get it out of AR?

1) Go to Receive Payment screen for the payment that is incorrect
2) Uncheck the checkmark next to the statement charge it was applied to (unapply pymt)
3) Click on History and see date of when the Deposit was actually made
4) Go to bank register and find the deposit on that date
5) Open up the Deposit- Find the check that is incorrect- Take notice of total deposit amount
6) Click on the line of the incorrect check and hit edit- Delete Line
7) Click Edit and insert a line (if needed)
8) Enter Account Name for whichever revenue account it should have been and deposit amount
9) The deposit amount should be the same prior to any adjustments
10) Go back to customer center and the payment that is being corrected
11) Edit- Delete Payment
12) As long as deposit amount is the same you should not have to clear the deposit again in the bank rec module

Freelance Bookkeeper

Can a Freelance Bookkeeper Help My Business Succeed? 

At times in order to be successful we need to learn how not to fail.  There are things that you must do to succeed in business, but there is one thing that you should NOT do and that is to attempt your own bookkeeping when you have no clue what you are doing.

Many business owners make this mistake when they are first starting out.  In order to save a few dollars they either shirk this responsibility onto a spouse or spend hours trying to figure out a skill they are not trained in -- many times with costly errors.  Then before they know it, the government is hounding them because they are behind in important remittances and have a huge mess on their hands.

If you are willing to invest money in your business, then you need to be willing to invest in having your bookkeeping done properly.  A freelance bookkeeper can take this responsibility off your hands and competently get your bookkeeping done on time.

Not only will your freelance bookkeeper take care of all your daily paperwork to keep the government away, but they will also provide you with monthly financial statements so you can see how your business is doing.  After all, how can you react and make necessary changes if you don’t know what you need to change?

Most small business owners worry about the cost of hiring a freelance bookkeeper, but you may be surprised to learn that many small businesses can have their books done for under $200 a month.  Of course, it does depend on the scope of what needs to be done for your business.

So before you get yourself in hot water with the government, make sure you contact a freelance bookkeeper and see what they can do for you.  It could be the difference between success and failure in your business.

Incorrect Amounts on 1099's

With QuickBooks you have to map accounts to a certain box on the 1099. Once these accounts are mapped QuickBooks looks for the vendors eligible for 1099's that have transactions in these accounts. If you run the 1099 report and see that the amounts are incorrect you can try to troubleshoot and see if there are transactions for these vendors in different accounts that you have not mapped to the 1099 box. However if the amounts are wrong and you just need to enter a certain amount for this 1099 you can follow the following steps. There are also instances when you will just use QuickBooks in order to print 1099's since you did not use the 1099 set up correctly and it will take you longer to try to change vendor's eligibility and map the accounts. These steps can be used for this purpose too.

1) Create 3 new expense accounts: 1099's, 1099 expenses, & 1099 Clearing, make the last 2 accounts sub-accounts of the 1099's account.

2) Map the 1099 box to the 1099 expenses account only.

3) Create a journal entry debiting the 1099 expenses account for the correct amount that should on the 1099, and crediting the 1099 clearing account for the same amount. (This will cause the expenses to net to zero, therefore not affecting the profit & loss statement)

4) The 1099 report will show a total of zero for the vendor, there will be a debit in the 1099 box column and a credit in the uncategorized column, this is OK, the 1099 will print correctly.

If these steps are taken and the amounts are not coming up correct, check the following:

1) Make sure vendor is 1099 eligible

2) Check any other accounts that are mapped to 1099 boxes that might have transactions for this vendor, you might have to adjust the amount of the journal entry by the amount in these other accounts or you can just create a new vendor with 1099 after the name, use this vendor in the journal entry and uncheck the box to make the original vendor eligible for 1099 so it does not show up on the report.

Close Out Year in QuickBooks

In QuickBooks there is nothing that you have to do in order to "close out" the year.  QuickBooks will automatically post profit and loss to the retained earnings account.  There is one thing that you should do once you are done with the year and your file is either given to your accountant or you file your tax return.  This one step is to set a "closing date".  After the tax return is finished or your accountant has your file, the information for that year should not change.  This closing date will prevent transactions with dates in the year that was closed out.  You will receive a warning that you are trying to create a transaction for a year prior to the closing date.  You will be required to enter a password in order to proceed.  In order to set the "closing date" follow the steps below.

1) Click Edit on the toolbar
2) Select Preferences
3) Choose Accounting
4) Click Company Preferences Tab
5) At the bottom you will see "Set Date/Password"- click on it
6) In Closing Date box enter the date of the year that ended  (Ex.  12/31/10)
7) Enter a Password
8) Confirm Password
9) Click OK

After the closing date is set, QuickBooks will not allow you to enter a transaction prior to this date without entering the password. 

After a tear is closed out there are a few entries that should be done on the first day of the next year.  For more information see "Beginning the Year" post. ( Coming Soon)