Error Messages/Troubleshooting

Q&A with Will English:

One of our nursery clients in FL purchased the QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS) V2013 system from us  that included an All-in-One POS terminal and the accompanying peripherals. We also performed the installation and training.

They have a retail garden center and a wholesale center. In an effort to have the system ready and the staff trained prior to their projected go-live date, they planned ahead and started the process a few months ago, but there are always some questions that come up once a client actually starts using the system. It’s inevitable. Even though we train them on how to do the overall tasks as well as the ones specific to their business needs, whenever a client begins working with the software, they run into some bumps and need a little guidance to get over them. For example, where to find certain information, they realize they want to run a particular report, there may be a little check box that needs to be marked on a specific screen, etc. Ongoing support is crucial.

Hi Will, We went live this week. I have a few questions.
1. Hourly sales seem to be only in graph form. Is there a way to change that? I only need numbers. The only hourly report is a graph.  There are date comparison reports. 

2. When we close out financials all seem to drop into undeposited funds. Is there a way to separate which account each one goes to. (credit cards, cash, checks).  Cash should go into an account called cash in drawer.  We can set up separate “accounts to deposit” but would like to understand why as it will create extra work.

3. When we take a gift certificate, we put it in the total gift certificate amount and then we give back a gift certificate for the difference. We do not give back cash. The report at close out shows that we are over. Is there any other way besides putting in the exact amount of the gift card (GC)? This is a problem.  Maybe using store credits with the account payment type.

4. We set the POS up on mine and Marvin’s computers. His seems to work (and I can sign in on his computer). On my computer, I can sign into the POS and when it comes up on my screen, everything is shadowed like I have no access to it. Also the only way to close out of it is to end task (and I don't have them running at the same time).   I will need to log in to take a look. How about Monday morning? I will be in Florida for the TPIE conference.* I will try remote first as it is a bit of a drive, but could come onsite if needed.
NOTE: in this situation, Will is going to be within a close proximity of the client’s site so he can go to their location if he needs to. Usually, though, he can perform all of the necessary work by remotely logging into the customer’s system and providing phone support.

Also at the end of the day, when the QuickBooks POS connects to QuickBooks Financial, the customer job says counter sales. I can't seem to find where it is in Financial. I looked under customers and it's not there. I would like it to link up with the customer name that we were using before.

*See our next blog on the TPIE conference

Q & A with Will English

Issue and question from one of Will's colleague's:
I had not updated the store's financial file from QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS) for months due to computer and other issues at the store back-office. I've been doing taxes, payroll, etc. from my copy of their file. (I know -- not the way to do things, but I'm slowly getting the customer up to speed on the procedures and hardware I need him to have). I finally got the customer to put in a back-office computer, with the intent I could get on it when the store is open.

When I tried to update the financial software, only one thing got updated which was his inventory adjustments for product used as samples. Did I do something wrong in setup, or do I just have preferences set up wrong?

William English: So did you transfer the file from your office to their file? Did they synch the file in the meantime? If so, then POS thinks everything has been sent and has been flagged. You can perform a recover QuickBooks to resend the data, but need to make sure that this is what happened and be careful about dates, etc.

Colleague: Thanks. It will be a few days before I'm able to get on the system again. Basically if the system was on auto-sync, which I'm 99.9% I set up, and if I then did a rebuild or restore on the financial side, rolling back to a previous date, POS doesn't know that and only sends over the things it
knows it hasn't sent over before, right? And the way to correct that is to do a custom sync. Is that correct?

William English: When you restored the backup, POS had already flagged the items as having been sent so it would not send them again. You’ll find in the Financial center under advanced options ‘Recover QuickBooks.’ Be very careful, however to ensure you understand what dates are missing and then resend the data. You are welcome to contact our office for a free consultation to ensure that you get this right.

Q & A with Will English:
Today’s topic is about recording deposits in QuickBooks Financial but all of the transactions are not present for one day. Below are the questions and statements from one of our retail clients and Will’s replies.

Question from client’s email: I have a weird issue. I'm recording deposits in QuickBooks Financial (QBF) and for one day I do not have all of the transactions present. If I look in Point of Sale (POS) I see all of the sales that we had but for some reason both cash and credit card are way short in QB. Should I resend the information for just that date? Thanks!

Will: Go into Sales History. Try to filter for the QB status as Error or Not Posted and see if there is anything there. Then, answer back.

Client: I looked at this month and sorted by QB Status and each one has completed in the field.

Will: Go into one that appears to be missing. Then, go to the I Want To (must be done on the server computer) and view financial detail.  If the link is blue, click and open in QBF. If it is black, then someone has deleted the transaction.

Client: I fixed the issue by resending the ones that were missing. Thanks!

A question from one of Will’s colleagues:

My client is using QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS) v9 Pro, QuickBooks Premier 2012. When I pull a sales tax report from POS and compare to Sales Tax in QB the numbers are off. I normally tell my clients to trust the POS numbers since the sales are entered here. This client is a work in progress, but I'd like to be able to tie out numbers reasonably close. I have about $10K difference in sales. Do you have any ideas on troubleshooting?

Will’s response: The biggest problem is that there is a bug in the software. If you choose the exempt option when recording the sale, the sale will transfer over to QuickBooks with no tax, but the customer is set as taxable. For this reason, never mark the customer as exempt. Do set up separate locations for all of the reasons that someone might be exempt and use those. For example, set up an out-of- sale location, resale location, etc.

Q & A with William English

Question from colleague: I have a client who for years now has had problems with workstation connection issues. They have had their Intuit Solution Provider (ISP) out for repairs, upgraded to V10.0, and swear that their router has been checked out, yet their workstations still lose connection to POS on a regular basis. I am no expert with network, router and hardware/Windows issues. Do you have any suggestions?

A: Have you edited their hosts file? Tech support will sometimes edit the host file for the workstation to put the IP address and computer name into this file. That works until the router is rebooted and then the server grabs another IP. I would also remove the wsactivity.xml and switch between single and multi-user mode.
 

Q & A with Will English

Topic: Receiving an Unsettled Transactions Warning When Closing QB POS

Q: I have a client that is getting a warning that he has unsettled credit cards (CC) transactions when closing his program, but when he runs his End-of-Day the program tells him there are no CC to process. Any ideas?

A: You have an incomplete closed batch. Have them call Intuit Merchant Service support and then they can manually force the batch to close. There are a number of steps and it requires the entry of a merchant service password that changes daily, but it is pretty straight forward. This can happen when you restore a backup over a file that has not been batched properly. I always batch before doing any file operations.
 

One of our clients could not print in QuickBooks Financial (QBF) this week. The solution was to rename the QBF file. QuickBooks recreated it and renamed it which solved the issue. Our client can print again.

Any time you have an issue or even just a question, do not hesitate to contact us to get expert help and solutions. We don't want you to be unclear on how to use QuickBooks or to struggle with an issue. There are too many more important aspects to managing your business. One of our clients tried for 4 days to overcome an issue on their own before calling us to assist. Kudos to them for giving it their best effort but it prevented them from performing the function they needed to during that time. Will was able to quickly solve the issue so they were properly back up and running again.

A customer recently inquired about opening the QB Enterprise Solutions (ES) Accountants copy. She uses the QB Premium Edition and her client gave her the Accountants copy that goes along with QBES. She cannot open it. The reason is that you have to use the QBES Accountant Edition to open an ES Accountant’s Copy. Enterprise is a different file structure.

Don’t hesitate to contact us with your questions and we will be happy to respond. We want to ensure that you have correct information to enhance your operational effectiveness, whether you are already a QB user or you are researching the QB products.

Will had a customer this week with a problem that he's never seen before, so he wants to share in hopes that it will help some of you if you ever have the same issue.

When the customer booted up the computer, they just got a splash screen; no boot up menu or anything and it didn’t boot into windows. Digging back into the far recesses of my brain, I recall that the first thing computers check when they boot up is hardware (keyboard, mouse, etc.)  We unplugged all of the USB devices and then started adding them back one by one until we found out the problem.  In this case, it was the touch screen.  Touchscreens use either a USB port or serial port to allow the computer to communicate with the touchscreen.  I got the screen replaced under warranty and in the meantime, the customer is using the computer with no touch.   

It was a pretty easy fix and the customer was back up within an hour.