A QuickBooks credit card register is exactly the right place for your company card expenses to land — but what about those times where you want to take a look at the data in a customized Excel template? You know, the times where you want to drill down with a pivot table, create a time-series chart of certain expenses, or apply some formula-based magic to do a custom audit? We’ll show you how.

QuickBooks Credit Card Register: Grant Access

Before we can help you with just about anything related to QuickBooks, you need to go to Settings → QuickBooks, click on “Connect to QuickBooks”, and follow the authentication steps.

Connect ProOnGo to QuickBooks

By the way, one of the helpful things about using apps from Intuit App Center is that Intuit is the gatekeeper for your data — so you can turn on/off access to any app, any time, on Intuit App Center.

QuickBooks Credit Card Register: Delegating Cards

Once you’ve connected ProOnGo to QuickBooks, if you want to head down the path of running some fancy Excel reports based on your credit card registers, start by going to Settings → QuickBooks and syncing one or more of your credit card registers into one or more usernames in your account. For now, just set up the sync destination for the particular credit card registers that you want to include in your customized report.

Delegate a QuickBooks Credit Card Register

You’ll have to wait a few minutes after setting up this configuration, because it’s entirely possible that your settings will cause us to retrieve hundreds or thousands of credit card transactions, and that’s not quite instantaneous yet.

QuickBooks Credit Card Register: Running a Custom Report

Once you’ve got one or more QuickBooks credit card registers syncing into your account, you’ll find the transactions in Expenses → Corporate Card Expenses. That’s where, for example, you can make edits to any of the transactions and have them sync back into QuickBooks automatically.

However, for the sake of this particular post, what you’ll want to do is set up the Filter button just right so that you’ve focused in on exactly the date range that you want to include in your report.

Then, click the Report button, to send the pile of expenses to an Excel report – most likely a custom Excel report that meets your precise needs:

QuickBooks Credit Card Register – Excel Report

If you’ve got a new Excel expense report template that you hadn’t yet uploaded, that you now want to use, just click the “Make a New Report Format” link that you’ll see after you press the Reports button. Your custom report format can be full of magical Excel formulas, pivot tables, tabs with various computations, etc. Pretty much anything you can do in Excel, is fair game for having in an XLSX that you upload as a custom format.

Your Report: Want to tell us the “why”?

One of the most interesting support topics at ProOnGo is when users show us an elaborate scenario that they are fulfilling with a combination of our QuickBooks feature set and our custom Excel exports. Your ingenuity on that front never ceases to amaze us. We love to hear what specific needs you are fulfilling with those features, because that guides our decision making process for how to make these features even better in the future. So, please do share your insights with us early and often.

QuickBooks Credit Card Registers are best maintained by QuickBooks Online Banking. Online Banking is arguably the most important feature in QuickBooks when it comes to keeping your accounting data up-to-date on a day-to-day basis. Sure, you might need to use ProOnGo to delegate the task of categorizing and adding memos to each of the sync’d credit cards — but at least your starting point is based on transactions that have been sync’d from your financial institution. That should give you a warm fuzzy, to know that you can trust the dates and amounts of the transactions (we’ve literally only seen one situation so far where a bank made an error in what got sent over to QuickBooks).

QuickBooks Credit Card Registers: When online banking is a no-go

You would have to be extraordinarily unlucky to arrive in QuickBooks and find that your financial institution does not correctly connect to Online Banking. There are literally thousands of supported financial institutions. If you are terribly unlucky and find yourself unable to get that connection working, a backup plan might be to go into ProOnGo’s Settings → Credit Cards subtab, and have ProOnGo retrieve the transactions instead. Then, have ProOnGo relay the transactions to QuickBooks.

If you are doubly unlucky, and you can’t get ProOnGo connected to your bank, you are truly in a tough spot — you may have to manually import your credit card transactions into QuickBooks via IIF, CSV, or some other flat file.

Please, please, do not use an IIF

If you are thinking of using an IIF file to import your credit card transactions, please stop in your tracks and throw away that IIF file. We’ve talked on this blog many times about how horrific the cleanup process can be if there is so much as a single character difference in the categories referenced in your IIF file, versus the categories in your QuickBooks file.

CSV Import

A better bet is to use our wizard for importing your credit card CSV transactions into QuickBooks. Follow along with this video to see how it works:

Importing via CSV to QuickBooks Credit Card Registers

This works with both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Pro (and Premier and Enterprise for that matter).

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.

One of the more common questions in the QuickBooks community is how to make the transition from QuickBooks for Mac to QuickBooks Online. While QuickBooks for Mac is undoubtedly a beautiful program, the upside of having your information stored on a cloud and the ability to use third-party apps from Intuit App Center is just too irresistible for some users.

Moving from QuickBooks for Mac to QuickBooks Online does require the use of a PC for a crucial part of the step. So if you do not have access to a Windows computer or cannot run Parallels, BootCamp or another service that allows you to run Windows inside Mac, you might be out of luck.

The following blog post will detail how to transfer your company file from QuickBooks for Mac to QuickBooks Online.

Convert your QuickBooks for Mac file
Because QuickBooks Online only accepts company files from QuickBooks for Windows, we’ll have to first convert our QuickBooks for Mac into a QuickBooks for Windows file.

To do so, you must first prepare the company file for conversion. Because the move from QuickBooks for Mac isn’t a perfect process, we must fix all the known bugs ourselves so we don’t run into any trouble.

• Locate the company file in your file system and copy it to the desktop. You can find where your company file by opening up QuickBooks and choosing Help->Product information.
• Copy the company file to your desktop
• Remove all special characters from the name of the company file — special characters are the bane of every developer’s existence and generally causes errors, so we’ll have to eliminate all symbols like !@#$%^&*
• Open up the copied company file in QuickBooks and delete all memorized (i.e. recurring) transactions and reports. To do so, select Lists->Memorized Transactions and select Edit->Delete Memorized Transaction to delete each one of your memorized transactions. To delete your memorized reports, select Reports->Reports Center. You should see your memorized reports so you can highlight and select the red X.
• Resort your lists
• After you’ve deleted all memorized transactions & reports and resorted your lists, you’ll have to rebuild the company file.
• The last “bug” we’ll have to fix is are transactions that have memos longer than 50 characters.  To do so, you’ll have to run a report that enables you to locate these transactions and modify them.
• Choose Reports->Custom Reports->Transaction Detail
• Under Date, make sure to choose All and under Columns, make sure Memo has a checkmark next to it, then click OK.
• Expand the memo column and edit any memos that have more than 50 characters (including spaces) by double clicking on the memo.
• If you’ve edited any Memos, then you must rebuild your company file again.
• Now we’ll get to the meat and potatoes: actually converting the company file to a Windows format. Go to File->Back Up to QuickBooks for Windows
• Choose a name and location for the file and click Save. Simple. No sweat.

The next steps are done from a Windows machine. You’ll have to upload the Windows file from a Windows machine to QuickBooks Online.

• Move the file from your Mac machine to your Windows machine and save it
• Open up Internet Explorer and navigate to QuickBooks Online and login
• Choose Company->Import QuickBooks Desktop Data
• Choose Other versions of QuickBooks for Windows
• Follow the wizard to download ActiveX, browse your file system for the company file, and you’re all set!

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.