Blog

Long time no postings

Sorry, my life got a little crazy the past few months with a lot of personal drama.  But we are back.  I promise to update this blog as least once a week so hang in there.

Sale Tax changing

In California, the sales tax is going up by 1 percent on April 1st.  To change your sales tax in POS V6 and above, go to the Edit menu, choose preference and then company.  In your company preferences, select the sales tax section and then click on the edit button on the relevant sales tax.  Click through till you get to the rate and change it.  Since you can't schedule the change, you will need to do this after you close the 31st.

How to track items you use at the store

A question that we get quite a bit is how to track items that we pull out of inventory to use.  It really depends on your sales tax codes.  There are 2 ways to do this.  The first way is to do a qty adjustment and then when it gets posted to QBF, change the journal entry that was created to shop supplies.  You will have track the amount taken and usually pay some sort of use tax.  The easier solution if allowed is to sell the item to yourself at cost (collecting the tax) and use the payment on account.  In QBF, discount the invoice to your supplies expense.  With this method, no need to track

How do I fix a receipt when I use Intuit's Merchant Processing

While I advise all of my clients not reverse receipt and instead do a return receipt, occasionally they will have a problem with a receipt that needs to be fixed.  For example, you rang up the wrong item with the same price, but now your inventory will be off.  If you reverse a receipt where you have processed a credit card, it will refund the customer credit card, so this is not a good idea.  What you can do is to do a return receipt on the same day and process the refund as payment on account.  You can either use the customer that was the problem or create a customer called sales receipt cor

Problems with reports in POS

If you find yourself running a report and not getting the results you expect, I would try to "revert" the report to it's original version.  To revert, run the report and then click modify report.  At the lower left of the modify button is a revert button.  Press this button and it will run the report as original configured.  Then you can modify from there.  Sometimes POS will not clear all of the filters even if you remove them and this is a quick way to make sure.

Inventory process

Being the start of a new year and all, a lot of you are thinking about doing inventory.  The first step in a successful inventory is to buy or rent the POS inventory scanner.  Yes we do sell them, but that is not why I am telling you to get the scanner.  The scanner turns the inventory process from days to a few hours.  Next, in Version 6 and new, click on inventory and start phyiscal inventory. find a expected item with zero and put a 0 in the counted field.  Then save the change.  It will start the inventory process and ensure that anything gets sold or received will be flagged. Then scan or

Merry Christmas

Hoping the best for you and yours during this holiday season.

How to handle prepaid merchandise

Typically when a new business starts up, vendors require payment in advance for items ordered.  When using QuickBooks POS with QuickBooks Financial software, there is a relatively easy way to track this.  When posting your check or charge in QuickBooks Financial, enter accounts payable in the account field and the vendor you placed the order with in the customer job field.  Then receive your inventory on a receiving voucher as normal (you are using receiving vouchers right?)  When you go to QBF, click on pay bills.

POS inventory adjustment

When we are called into consult with a new client who either set up POS themselves or had another consultant work on it, the most common problem we see is a negative amount in the POS inventory adjustment expense.  This indicates that the client has not been receiving inventory in properly.  Most commonly, the client will just enter quanities of items in the on-hand field.  While POS does warn you that you are creating an adjustment, you can hide the message and most do.  What is happening is that you are telling POS that you have X qty at Y cost and therefore it increase the inventory and the

I'm back, sorry for the long delay

So version 8 of Point of sale has been out for a few months.  Here are my comments.  The web component is not quite ready for prime time.  It has very limited functionality and NOT a good fit for clothing store at this time as there is only 1 view available for each style and the styles display kind of weird.  We have been promised fixes early next year.  The simple cashier screen is great improvement for touchscreen use.  Please note however that not all of the data entry fields are on the simple cashier view. For example, to enter a customer you need to go back to the old screen. The good news is it is pretty simple toggle.  The currency buttons when taking cash are LONG overdue and really cool.