General QuickBooks Information

Did you know?  Intuit has on online community where you can read Q&A on all kinds of QuickBooks related products, services, and issues as well as you can post your own questions and inquiries. Product End-users, Consultants, Bookkeepers, etc. go there to find answers to their QuickBooks questions as well as post and answer other’s questions. It’s a great place to find effective solutions. Use the Search box to type in your keywords and you’ll see other valuable tools on this website. Will English is an active participant. His name on there is qbposwill if you want to specifically read his replies. Simply go to: http://community.intuit.com/

Intuit has done it again! They've extended their amazing Point of Sale promotion through the entire month of April. You can't beat it. If you are considering purchasing this software for your business and need a merchant service account, why not get some free stuff while doing it?! This applies to new and current QuickBooks customers.

QuickBooks Point of Sale: FREE select hardware with an approved Intuit Point of Sale (POS) Merchant Service account and POS V.2013 software! Plus, No Merchant Service Set-up fee.

But that's not all.

FREE select hardware. Choose one:
Hardware bundle OR Telium IPP350 Pin Pad/Credit Card Reader.
PLUS receive 50% off the buy price of a computer & monitor bundle!

Visit our Promotions Page and Contact Us for all of this month's promotional details.

Today is Good Friday, March 29th, and many people are celebrating hope more so than any other time of the year. We all have hope and confidence in something and someone. Now you may be asking what does this have to do with QuickBooks and your company or the company that you work for. Well, a lot actually. It’s a somewhat different type of hope but we don’t function without this element.

The definition of Hope by Wikipedia is: Hope is the state which promotes the belief in an outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. "to desire with expectation of obtainment"; or "to expect with confidence". "In many traditional Christian texts, the word is an indication of certainty and a positive expectation of future reward. “Hope” in the Holy Bible means “a strong and confident expectation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope

When you make business decisions, they are all based upon hope for a favorable outcome. When you decided to implement a Financial and/or Point of Sale software system at your company, you did your research and talked to professionals in the industry to make a well informed decision. Your decision was in part based upon hope; hope that the system will in fact do what it is supposed to, that you will receive the necessary training to use it, and that you have a reputable source for when questions and issues arise. You know you’re not alone to figure it out by yourself.

When you’ve run across some problems or needed instructions on how to perform certain functions in the software, didn’t you feel a sense of relief when your consultant fixed the problem or showed you how to accomplish what’s necessary? What a sense of freedom and confidence one has when they have the correct tools and the knowledge in how to use those tools on business and in life.
 

What does this mean? You may have received notification from Intuit that services to older versions of the QuickBooks products are scheduled to be discontinued on May 31, 2013.It is legitimate, and there is a lot of confusion surrounding this, but don’t panic!  We want to help clear it up. And one plug is that we also encourage you to contact us for all of your QuickBooks needs and allow us to be your QuickBooks resource! As a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Consultant and Intuit Premier Reseller, Will English is capable of providing ongoing customer support for your QuickBooks needs.

Here’s what’s happening in a nutshell:

Intuit has what they call a Sunset Policy where they phase-out their older software. This means that if you are using QuickBooks software that’s currently being sunsetted (see table of products below), your software will continue to work, but your Intuit Support plan and other Intuit Services will be cancelled after May 31, 2013 if you use the plan and services. After this, you will still be able to get answers to frequently asked questions through the searchable QB knowledgebase at www.quickbooks.com/support at no extra charge, but you will no longer have access to Live Support and other Services that Intuit provides.

• If you don't make use of Intuit's live technical support or any of Intuit's add-on services, and are happy with your current version of QuickBooks, you can continue to use it and will not be affected by this change.
• If you are using a product affected by service discontinuation and want to maintain access to live technical support and add-on services, you'll need to upgrade to the latest version of QuickBooks as soon as possible. Please read on and review the Affected Services below.

Will English is also available to offer ongoing Customer Support even for the older versions of QB, as long as the issues are within his capability to fix. If it is an issue that has to be escalated to Intuit, we will not be able to since they'll no longer support that version. If you are interested in pricing details for the newest version please let us know.

Please open the attached document below to review the Affected Services and Table of Products.  Upgrade as soon as possible to retain access to the Intuit add-on services and live support. Contact Us Today!

Q & A with Will English

Question from a colleague: Hello! There's a motorcycle dealership that has 3 revenue streams - parts, service and bike sales. They want reports on income and expense by revenue stream and has QuickBooks Point of Sale (QBPOS) V9.0 with 3 licenses now. They're thinking about upgrading to QBPOS V.2013. Will it work for them to go to the multi-store set-up?

Answer: You can set up mappings to general ledger (GL) accounts by item type or by each individual item. This will give him what he needs without Multi-store. Multi-store posts to classes so it is designed for locations, not income expense.

There may be times that you want or need to export Invoice information from your QuickBooks software into an Excel spreadsheet. Follow these simple steps:

1. Go to the Reports tab & choose Sales, & Sales by Customer Detail.
2. That opens a report. From there you can filter the specific customer/s that you need along with specific dates. You will want to choose date ranges such as a specific week, quarter, or year.
3. For the date range: directly above the report is a row with date options. Choose what is appropriate for your needs.
4. You can customize the report by selecting various filters.
5. Click on Customize Report & a screen will pop-up to Modify the Report.
6. On that screen choose the Filters tab.
7. For a specific customer/s: Choose Name in the left column, & then choose either one customer name in the next column or select the Multiple Names option.
8. That will modify the Sales by Customer Detail report for the specified customer/s.
9. Click the Excel button to export it into an Excel spreadsheet. You will have the option to export the information into a new worksheet or update an existing one.

Question from a QuickBooks Point of Sale (QBPOS) end-user who does not want to write Purchase Orders from POS but use it only for inventory distribution and tracking. Will trained the staff in Dec. 2012 on how to use the system for their business needs. She recently contacted us with this specific question.

Client: I have a question about the QuickBooks inventory system. When Will showed me the system in December, the ability to generate purchase orders was part of the process. I learned from our finance department that they do not want us to write purchase orders from this system. They would like it used for inventory distribution and tracking only.

I want to be sure that bypassing the purchase order option will still allow us to use the system effectively. I’m thinking we may have to enter the inventory manually (rather than receiving it electronically through the PO system).

Will: That is correct.  What you might do is "issue" a purchase in Point of Sale (POS), print it and provide it to your purchasing department for entry into their system.

Send us your QuickBooks questions to info@englishmgmt.com.

Q & A with Will English

So you're ready to upgrade your QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS) software to the newest version, V.2013. But how do you convert your existing data? With this new download, will the POS will be upgraded and the data converted from the previous version seamlessly?

A: Install the software.The first time you open the new POS, it finds the old data and offers to upgrade it. You simply follow the wizard through to completion.
 

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

Question from colleague: I have a retail store owner who needs QuickBooks (QB) Multi-Store for his 4 remote locations and headquarters (HQ). HQ and the 4 stores are all under one umbrella for tax purposes; however, he wants to treat HQ and each of his stores as separate businesses (i.e.: separate bank account, payroll, expenses, income, etc.). Are we better to set him up in QuickBooks Premier using class tracking for each store or Enterprise? Any special suggestions for setup?

William English: So Premier or Enterprise is not really the issue as class tracking will allow you to separate sales cogs, etc. I can see some real problems with trying to coordinate all of the various accounts. For example, I am assuming they would want separate A/P accounts, etc. That means that you would have to move the bills that POS creates into the right A/P account, banking, etc, etc, etc.
I think it’s more difficult as you will need to match each deposit to the proper account. In QBPOS V2013, merchant service is broken as it doesn't give the drop down for each merchant account.

Colleague: The client does have separate bank accounts and wants to keep it that way. He pretty much wants to treat each store location as if it’s a separate business so he can sell one off or close it...but yet roll everything up to the parent company for tax purposes, etc. Not sure if this is a case where QB cannot complete all functionality that they want?? An Enterprise customer service rep told them that Enterprise will allow them to do everything he wants to accomplish...or that’s what he thought he understood the rep to say.

William English: So it’s apples and oranges. Enterprise will allow you to report on multiple company files, however, POS multi-store only synchs with one QuickBooks file. The store synchs with HQ and HQ synchs with QB Financial, so I see a lot of extra work to match the right deposits to the right bank account. It’s the same on bills. Unless you manually create and move the bills that POS creates into the proper stores account, you will end up with everything in one AP account. Not saying that any of this is not doable, it just will not be easy. So the other choice would be to set up each store as its own HQ and synch to its own file, but then the problem will be item creation, transfers, etc.