Excel expense reports in ProOnGo are all about filling out your exact custom format. Last September we announced the general availability of our feature that lets you upload just about any excel expense report template, and have it added as a report type in our system. When you think about what that means, it should give you great assurance that no matter what changes you want to make to your customized templates later on, you’ll be confident that you’ll be up-and-running with ProOnGo very quickly in just a few simple steps. Now that this feature is closing in on being 8 months old, we thought we’d show off our latest tricks — what’s new, neat, and useful.

Tip 1: Excel Expense Reports via Thumbnail Preview

When you’ve got multiple Excel Expense Reports that you need to run (it’s more common than you’d think!), we now make it very easy to manage the various XLSX templates that you have uploaded. When you go to edit/add/delete templates, we now show you a visual thumbnail of each of your custom formats:

Excel Expense Reports – Choosing via Thumbnail

You can still name your templates with a text-based name (which used to be the only way to uniquely identify them), but the automatically-generated thumbnail should be a very helpful visual cue when you are managing your templates.

Tip 2: Configure Regions, Then Revise Anytime

When you set up custom Excel expense reports in ProOnGo, you’ll no doubt find yourself doing a drag-and-hold to multi-select a region of cells that you want us to fill out as a table of expense information. No problem, we’ve supported that from the beginning.

However, when we first launched, we discovered that no matter how hard we work on usability, the intricacy of custom excel formats almost ensures that even the most detail oriented user will find themselves going back to tweak some aspect of the original configuration. So, we’ve made it easier and more obvious how to re-configure a multi-cell selection:

Excel Expense Reports – Configuring Regions

The ‘re-configure’ button in the center of the multi-cell region is your invitation to click if you want to make some incremental change to the settings for that particular region.

Tip 3: Easy Export Compatibility

Once you set up a custom Excel expense report format, and you get around to running a report, you’ll now see easier-than-ever compatibility options:

Excel Expense Reports – Export Compatibility

When we first introduced custom Excel reports, you might have had to hunt for a minute or two if you wanted to find the best way to export your reports to Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox. Not anymore: you’ll see those options every time you generate a report.

What’s Next?

What’s next for this feature depends on, well, you! Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and what problems you need us to put some brainpower into. We’re committed to giving you the easiest possible way to have your Excel expense reports fill themselves out, without you ever having to open Excel.

Our first publicly available version of ProOnGo Expense five years ago was little more than a receipt scanner that let smartphone owners snap pics of their receipts and have an expense report filled out automatically. We have great memories of those days, because that scenario was crisp and clear and easy to explain to even the most casual of users. It helped to heal perhaps the most “broken” part of the expense reporting process — replacing (in most cases) a manual process where employees were literally taping receipts together on a sheet of paper and submitting them with some kind of Excel-based expense report.

We were energized by the response to that initial launch, so we kept going, asking small business owners what their road warriors needed in order to not only take care of their process for receipts, but also “everything else” that they need to submit with their expense report.

Receipts → Receipts, Mileage, and Time

It wasn’t long before we ended up broadening our value proposition to include the ability to not only track receipts, but also to track mileage and time. Furthermore, our receipt tracking became much more refined when we started helping our users distinguish between receipts attached to corporate card expenses versus receipts that were from out-of-pocket expenses that needed to be reimbursed.

Likewise, our time tracking took a step forward when our customers taught us that sometimes filing “time activities” one-at-a-time is the easiest process, whereas sometimes filing a whole timesheet is the easiest process (usually for companies that are heavily powered by hourly labor or hourly billing).

Our customers have taught us a lot about what it takes to replace every scrap of a legacy based expense tracking process and modernize it into the world of web and mobile apps, and we’ve worked hard to keep up with the ever-expanding “suggestion box” from our customers.

The Power of the Expenses Tab

As we’ve gotten more and more detailed in the way that we serve your needs, our web app in particular has changed dramatically in the past year. Here’s a refresher on what you’ll find on the Expenses tab these days:

Expenses Tab in ProOnGo Expense

You can show/hide the various subtabs if you like — for example if you are sure that all you need is the Weekly Timesheet, or that all you need is the Corporate Card subtab — you could go into the Employees tab and tap the “Gears” icon to toggle on/off various sections:

Toggle On/Off Visibility of Tabs

However, we thought we’d at least explain the purpose of each section, before you decide which ones to show/hide and which ones you will use most often.

• All Expenses: This contains everything you’ve filed… mileage, time, corporate card expenses, out-of-pocket expenses.
• Corporate Card Expenses: This is where your credit card transactions arrive for cards issued by your company (sure there is some one-time setup involved, but after that they just magically arrive on a day-to-day basis). You wouldn’t want to clutter this subtab with ad hoc transactions from your personal cards, because this subtab is purely for corporate card expenses where there is no reimbursement to you because the company pays the bill to the credit card provider directly.
• Out of Pocket Expenses: This is where you file expenses that are from out-of-pocket spend for which you expect the company to approve and reimburse you. It barely matters what payment method you used at the time of the transaction (cash? personal debit card? personal credit card?) because that’s beyond the scope of what your company should know or care about. The point is, it’s for expenses that you paid out-of-pocket, that the company needs to reimburse you for
• Mileage Expenses: If your company reimburses you for mileage that you’ve driven on your personal car, for company business, then this subtab is for you. This is where you can document each trip that you make that you deserve reimbursement for.
• Time Expenses: If you occasionally need to track your time, but you don’t habitually need to do that on an “every week” basis, then this subtab is for you. This is a great place to go to file a occasional time activities (perhaps you rarely do billable work but once in awhile you do).
• Weekly Timesheet: Are you the kind of company where each person needs to file a full record of how they spent their time throughout the week? This subtab is for you — it’s a way of bulk-filing time activities in a traditional “weekly timesheet” format.

Keep sending in suggestions about how you want us to grow our solution next, and we’ll keep working to meet your needs!

Keep your data! How to set up an automatic backups in QuickBooks 2013:

The fact is – bad things do happen to good people. Man and machine are not perfect and mistakes, even catastrophes happen. One such catastrophe for small businesses are computer crashes.

The business data is the heart and soul of the business, it goes hand in hand in the operation. Loss of data, even if the data is just temporarily inaccessible, can lead to profit loss, hurt your reputation, and even lead to litigation.

Even though most of us business owners know that we need to do regular automatic backups, the fact is that many, if not most, don’t do it. So let’s take a moment how to perform these backups on a regular basis using your QuickBooks 2013:

QuickBooks offers 2 different automatic backups

1. IDP – Intuit Data Protect (online automatic back-up – subscription based)
2. Local Backup – automatically backup your data when you close your QuickBooks company  file.

The following will show you how to backup your QuickBooks company file locally and set up a recurring backup, so you can trust that your data is always backed up.

How to setup QuickBooks to automatically protect data locally

Follow these instructions to have QuickBooks back up your company file daily or on specific days and times. You can schedule an automatic backup to a network drive, USB flash drive, or Zip disk.

Important: For a scheduled automatc backup to take place, the computer you use to run QuickBooks must be on, but the company file you want to back up cannot be in use. Be sure to schedule your automatic backups accordingly.

First, browse to File->Back Up Company->Create Local Backup to open the backup wizard.

Click Options to set your backup defaults (such as where you want to save your local backup) and then click OK. The backup defaults you set when you click Options are for manual and automatic backups only. You will set your options for scheduled backups in the steps that follow.

Select Next, then make sure to select ‘Only schedule future backups” and then click Next.

Under “Back Up On a Schedule” click New.

If you don’t want to keep a lot of backups so you can conserve space on your hard drive, click the checkbox to limit the number of backups and enter a number in the field provided. For example, if you choose to keep three backups, QuickBooks deletes the earliest backup when it goes to save the fourth backup. If you don’t specify a number, QuickBooks saves all of your backups.

Next, enter a Description for your scheduled backup. This name appears in your list of scheduled backups so you can easily find it later. The description is mainly used by bookkeepers that have multiple company files. Then, click Browse to select the folder where you want to store your backup copies. This can be on a network drive or on portable storage media such as a USB flash drive or Zip disk.

Then, you’ll select the time, weekly frequency, and day(s) for the backup to take place. For example, if you want to run your backups daily, select every day of the week and run the task every “1″ week.

After you’ve set the frequency, click Store Password and enter the requested Windows login information. QuickBooks requires the Windows login information so it can run the scheduled backup. If you don’t enter login information for the backup location you selected, the backup fails due to a Windows permission failure.

Click OK to return to the previous window. The backup appears in the list in the Backup on a schedule section of the window. Click Finish to close the wizard.

Note: Scheduled backups will automatically include the date and time the backup was created in the file name. The date and time stamps are necessary for QuickBooks to manage the number of scheduled backups to retain on the system.

Having to write off bad debt is one of those common business scenarios everyone. If you find yourself in a situation in which you need to write off bad debt from one of our customers, the first thing you should do is make sure you’ve exhausted all resources in attempting to collect.

Bad debt doesn’t necessarily mean you have a customer that is out to get you. Your customer may be going through a bankruptcy, so it’s important to reach out to your customer, obtain as much information about the situation, and see if you can come to an agreement to pay part of the debt, work out a payment plan, or get in line behind other creditors.

If all of that fails, there are two methods of writing off bad debt. Which one is good for you largely depends on how you currently do your accounting. The two options are:

1) Cash Accounting
2) Accrual Accounting

The following will detail how to write off bad debt for each of these situations.

Write Off Bad Debt – Cash Accounting

Void Invoice

The main difference between accrual accounting and cash accounting when writing off bad debt is how you count your income; with cash accounting, an open invoice is not considered to be income yet.

So to write off bad debt with cash accounting, all that needs to be done is to void the invoice.

Browse to Customers->Customer Center and select the name of the customer on the left hand side. Next to Show, select Invoices from the dropdown and double click on the invoice you wish to write off. Once you’re looking at the invoice you’d like to write off, just select Void.

Write Off Bad Debt – Accrual Accounting

Credit Customer with Bad Debt

With accrual accounting, as soon as an invoice is sent out, it is counted as income. So in order to write off bad debt, you must issue a Bad Debt credit to cancel out the invoice income.

Before you do so, you must make sure you have Bad Debt listed as a Product/Service item. To do so, browse under Company->Lists then choose Products and Services List. Then select New and enter ‘Bad Debt’ next to name. Choose ‘Bad Debts – Expense’ (or similar) next to Account and select Save.

Now that you’ve added Bad Debt as a Product & Service item, you’re able to write off the bad debt.  Select the Customers tab, then under More, choose Refund or Credit. In the pop-up, choose Credit and make sure “Give credit for something already billed to the customer” is selected. Then enter in the Customer name and under Product/Service, choose ‘Bad Debt.’ Enter in the description that you’re writing off bad debt and in the Rate column, enter in the amount you’re writing off. Select Save and you’ve successfully written off the Bad Debt!

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As with all accounting practices, it’s always best to consult your accountant before you make any changes to your books. Speak with your accountant or a QuickBooks Pro Advisor to ensure you’re using the best method for your business.

One of my favorite parts of working at ProOnGo is the commitment to continuous improvement, and the positive way that impacts the team, our partners, and especially our customers.  Recently I particularly noticed this in our work on our user interface for weekly timesheets, but that’s just one small example. What’s important about this example, though, is that it’s in an area of the product that at the outset you might think of as ‘boring’ or at least ‘not innovative’. Weekly timesheets have the connotation of being an age-old tradition that no one likes, and that no one is willing to improve. Not true. We’re super interested in improving it (that’s why, for one thing, we added import from Google Calendar a couple months ago).

Anyway, we’re truly interested in making your weekly timesheets as pleasant as possible, and when I found a screenshot from November 2011 showing our original format, I just couldn’t resist posting the “old” and the “new” formats for the sake of comparison.

Weekly Timesheets at their Inception

When we first created weekly timesheets, it was specifically by the request of a customer who had dozens of employees who needed to file QuickBooks timesheets, and at the time there was a change in product offerings from Intuit that led the customer to go out looking for a 3rd party solution (us!). Here’s what we pulled together in literally a few days of rapid development, to get that customer up and running:

Weekly Timesheets UI as of November 2011

That was “good enough” to get our first few weekly timesheet clients up-and-running, especially those that were in a race to get QuickBooks timesheets filed via us as a 3rd party app. However, at it’s initial launch, it was missing a lot of bells and whistles.

Weekly Timesheets in March 2013

Fast forward to today, and our weekly timesheet UI has improved in numerous ways. First, see for yourself:

Weekly Timesheets UI as of March 2013

Did you notice how much more pleasant, let alone functional, it looks?

• We turned the “Submit” button green after realizing that employees filing their timesheets are often “on the run” to get out the door for the day, and this visual cue made it measurably more likely that they’d press the right button after filling out their timesheet.
• We went to great lengths to de-clutter the UI surrounding the timesheet. There were too many stray words and UI elements surrounding the original timesheet format.
• We added a running total just below the timesheet rows, so that employees can easily see whether they are rocketing towards their 40 hours (or whatever the expectation may be).
• We added inline editing of a per-row memo, which of course is crucial for the manager that ends up approving it and sending to QuickBooks, and then for the CPA that ends up doing various audits on the QuickBooks timesheets over on the QuickBooks Pro, Online, Enterprise, or Premier end.
• We added a subtab bar below the tabs, to give context to the fact that Weekly Timesheets are just one of many types of time and expense capabilities that we offer
• Beyond support for Customers, Jobs, and Items, we added support for billable/non-billable, classes, and payroll items. The latter two aren’t pictured in this screenshot, but it’s just a matter of turning them on in settings.

I don’t want to bore you with the other site-wide style changes, but suffice it to say that we’re hard core about giving you the smoothest most pleasant expense filing experience available, and that certainly includes your weekly timesheets.

Did we miss anything? Anything you need in our Weekly Timesheet UI that we haven’t yet done? Give us a shout and we’ll be happy to help.

If you’ve arrived at this post, you probably got here by searching for: “payroll item id or name is required for time card employee”. That’s an error related to Payroll Items. It’s one of the most “popular” error messages that we relay through our UI to users syncing to the Intuit Cloud. Why so “popular”? Because the employee setup process in QuickBooks often leads CFOs and business owners to make a rushed decision regarding the manner in which employee time activities are handled. And, for each new employee, that can lead to this error message the first time the employee in question files a timesheet. Let us explain.

The Moment that You Set Up an Employee

Lets start from, well, the beginning. You find yourself in QuickBooks in a rush to enter some transaction related to a new employee. You realize that you never set up the employee in the first place. So, you rush to Employee Center and click "New Employee" and hope to get away with just entering the employee’s first name and last name for now, since you are in a rush.

You navigate away from the Employee Information pane after entering in the employee’s name, and you are hit with your first decision regarding the configuration of the employee in QuickBooks:

QuickBooks Employee Setup – First Question

Lets be candid: as a small business owner, when you are in a rush to get to the finish line on one of your many varied tasks, will you actually put thought into what to answer in this popup, or will you just click what looks like the easiest option ("Leave As Is")?

Without rushing to judgment about you in particular, we’ll say that in our experience most small business owners seem to be pressing "Leave As Is" on this popup. That seems natural enough. In all likelihood you added the employee because you were in the middle of some other QuickBooks task when you realized that you had forgotten to enter the employee on their first day — so the whole roundtrip to Employee Center was a detour from what you were doing in the first place.

If you are a clicker of "Leave As Is", chances are very good that you’ll also end up overlooking the other key decisions that are configured in the Employee Info tab, including one that is crucial for determining how the employee’s timesheets are handled, and numerous decisions related to Payroll Items.

Payroll Items & "Leave as Is": Crucial for Timesheets

That "Leave as Is" might work OK for a few days, but sooner or later you’ll probably find yourself helping the employee file their first timesheet in ProOnGo, and it’s possible that you’ll end up hitting an warning like this one when you send the weekly timesheet to QuickBooks:

• “payroll item id or name is required for time card employee”

Why the error? Because when ProOnGo sends a timesheet to QuickBooks, it’s crucial for QuickBooks to know whether/not the time is intended to flow into the employee’s payroll, or rather whether the timesheet is simply for other recordkeeping purposes (like knowing how much of the employee’s time is billable to each client). So, if your default setup in QuickBooks includes a checkmark in the following spot, QuickBooks will assume that the employee’s timesheets are required to have Payroll Items for each row. And for good reason: you’ve told QuickBooks that the time activities are expected to flow into payroll. That can only mean one thing: you’ll absolutely have to include Payroll Items in each time activity.

Use time data to create paychecks?

It’s fine if you intend to require Payroll Items in each timesheet row (we support that!), but we find that many people accidentally turn “on” the “Use time data to create paychecks?” checkbox in QuickBooks, without realizing that it triggers the consequence that timesheets are required to have Payroll Items for each time activity.

So, if you’ve recently hit the error “payroll item id or name is required for time card employee”, now you know the decision you need to make:

Do you want to include the employee’s time as an input to payroll?

• If ‘yes’, then that’s terrific, but make sure you also require employees to fill in Payroll Items with each time activity.
• If ‘no’, then be sure to uncheck the “Use time data to create paychecks?” checkbox in QuickBooks.

Then, you’ll be well on the way to having employees file their timesheets, and an error-free experience when sending those timesheets from ProOnGo to QuickBooks.

If you have to rebuild your company file, it’s most likely to fix damage and ensure no damage to your company file & lists in the future. Rebuilding a company file has the potential to do a lot of damage, so before you rebuild your file, you must first make sure you have resorted your lists and that you have a backup copy of your company file. It’s very important to never cancel or abort the Rebuild Data Utility as it will corrupt your company file.

Here’s how to rebuild your company file:

1. Select File->Utilities->Rebuild Data and select OK to create a backup
2. Select Local Backup
3. Click Options and locate where you’d like to save the backup
4. Select Complete Verification and choose OK, then choose Next.
5. Enter in a name for your backup, making sure you do not include any special characters (!@#$%^&*) and click Save. QuickBooks will begin the backup and automatically start the Rebuild Data Utility.

That’s it! Now, you’ll no longer be stumped if anyone tells you to rebuild your company file in QuickBooks!

If you’re reubilding your company file, you may come across the instruction to resort lists in QuickBooks for Mac. Resorting lists in QuickBooks may not seem like something that is necessary as you might not notice any difference in the order of your list items. But resorting lists isn’t for you, it’s for QuickBooks. Resorting is often used to fix any damage to your lists that could hurt the process of Rebuilding your company file.

If you’re given instructions to Resort Lists, there are three lists to be concerned with: Master Name list, Chart of Accounts, and Items and Classes list.

To Resort Master Name List:

1. Go to the Banking->Write Check
2. Click in the Payee field and select Command (Apple Key) + L. That will bring up your Master Name list.
3. Make sure All Names is selected at the bottom
4. Go to Edit->Resort List and click OK.

To Resort Chart of Accounts, Items & Classes Lists:

1. Go to Lists->Chart of Accounts
2. Make sure All Accounts or Include Inactive is selected at the bottom
3. Go to Edit->Resort List and click OK.
4. Repeat steps 1-3, only for Items & Classes.

Once you’ve resorted your lists, you’re ready to rebuild your data!

Nobody likes waiting, especially when it comes to QuickBooks expense reports. The employee filing the expense reports doesn’t like waiting. The manager or business owner receiving the expense reports doesn’t like waiting. The CPA doesn’t like waiting.

This is where “the cloud” comes to the rescue. See, for many people the phrase “the cloud” is a marketing term that smacks of ambiguity — so we get plenty of questions along the lines of “really, what’s better about filing QuickBooks expense reports with help from ‘the cloud’?”

Background Sync for Your QuickBooks Expense Reports

One of the best things about having cloud-based connectivity to QuickBooks is that we can handle certain tasks for you “in the background”, with no effort on your part. For example, we check with the Intuit Cloud frequently to see if you’ve updated your Chart of Accounts, Customer List, Items List, etc. — if if you have, we sync the updated lists into ProOnGo in the background (thanks, cloud!) with no need for you to click anywhere or dig through settings.

Similarly for time activities, checks, vendor bills, and credit card transactions that you edit in ProOnGo and send to QuickBooks — as soon as you take an action in ProOnGo that causes us to send something to QuickBooks on your behalf, you can close ProOnGo immediately and know that with the help of the cloud we’ll send all of those transactions to QuickBooks without you having to stop, stare, and wait.

Knowing Your Cloud Connection

So, where do you go in ProOnGo to see how recently we’ve checked in with the Intuit cloud to sync your latest lists or to send transactions towards your QuickBooks file? The answer is a “drawer” that hangs off the left edge of our web page when you are signed in:

Background Sync: QuickBooks Expense Reports

Notice the specific “timestamps” next to each of the items there? That’s the “answer key”, to all of your questions about when we most recently synced to or from QuickBooks.

Got end-of-month or end-of-quarter processes for running “summary” expense reports? Many companies do. Sure, usually your employees are the ones that are running expense reports and submitting them for approval. However, a large number of our clients decide to have a CFO or controller run an aggregate expense report on a recurring basis, as well. Why? We imagine just for the peace of mind of having all of the team’s expenses encompassed in a single report.

We’ve noticed a few common patterns in the questions we receive from folks doing these types of aggregate expense reports, so this post aims to clear up some of the common questions.

Question: "What’s that gray background in the employee tree?"

This question pertains to the right-hand-side of the Filter popup, usually accessed via the “Filter” button the the “Expenses” tab. In that space you’ll see a treeview of the hierarchy of managers and employees in your company.

So, what does it mean when there is a gray background behind one of the employees in the hierarchy? Like this:

Advanced filter for employees

The Answer is that it means that this employee is currently marked as "Inactive" in the Employees tab:

Inactive Usernames in Employees tab

Even if the employee is inactive, you can still include the employees expenses in your Expense tab filter and your expense reports.

Question: "How Can I Produce Detailed Expense Reports for a Customer?"

Sometimes an aggregate report is done for the purpose of satisfying a curious client who wants to see every detail of the expenses that you are passing through, or the time activities that you are billing. Although this is often handled via an Invoice in QuickBooks, comprised of line items sent from ProOnGo — there still are plenty of folks out there that demand a Excel formatted line-item summary attached or enclosed with an invoice. So the question we receive is: "can ProOnGo do this", and if so, "how"?

The answer is that it’s a very easy two step process: first find the "Secondary Filter" drop-down and choose "Client Name"; second, checkmark next to the particular client that you have in mind:

Advanced Filter for a Specific Client

…then just press the Filter button to close the popup, and your expense list (and therefore any expense reports you run) will be filtered down to the expenses tagged to that particular client.

Question: "Can I Run Reports in More Than One XLSX Format?"

This question comes from folks that use www.proongo.com/excel to upload a tailored Excel spreadsheet format, and therefore to add it as a new report format in ProOnGo. The question is, basically, "can I upload two or even more custom Excel templates"?

The answer depends on which ProOnGo plan you signed up for. Currently the business “gold” plan includes support for multiple custom Excel spreadsheet templates.

Anything Else?

Got any additional questions about running aggregate expense? Let us know. We’d be happy to do a follow-up post with any further questions that come our way!