ProOnGo Blog

Nobody we know likes to fill out QuickBooks timesheets. After all, you work hard enough as it is, and the red tape of having to document “time spent” feels like a recurring task that’s always slipping to the bottom of the to-do list. Unfortunately for those of you that dislike the task, there are actually a lot of good reasons why many companies require it. Maybe your company needs timesheets in order to substantiate client invoices, to capitalize the right amount of R&D expense, or to allocate labor costs to different cost centers.

Whatever the reason, our goal will be to help you file your QuickBooks timesheets with minimal hassle, speeding you through the red tape and getting you back to work.

QuickBooks Timesheets – Manager Settings

If you are a manager, do your team and yourself a solid, and remove any unnecessary columns from your company’s timesheets. For example, although many companies use Item-tracking and Class-tracking in QuickBooks, some don’t. If your company doesn’t, you should hide those timesheet columns so that your employees don’t get confused (or frustrated) by the columns that are neither relavent nor helpful for your particular company’s accounting policies.

So, you’ll want the “Master Administrator” of your company to go to Settings → Other, and look for the section thats called “Timesheet Columns” (depending on your access rights, you might have a lot of settings available, so just Ctrl+F to find the “Timesheet Columns” section):

QuickBooks Timesheets – Managers’ Settings

…there, you can show/hide entire columns, and these settings are global for all employees in your company (now does it make sense why this setting is only available to Master Administrators?). Pat yourself on the back for helping your employees cut through the clutter, by avoiding the unnecessary columns in their timesheets.

QuickBooks Timesheets – Employee Settings

If you are an employee, unfortunately it’s going to be beyond your access rights to decide which fields are and are not required for your company’s accounting processes. We have to keep your CFO and accountant happy, otherwise they’ll hunt us down (and you) with a stern scolding.

But, although you can’t eliminate entire columns, you can at least resize the columns the way you want. Why? Because, for example, maybe you know from experience that your manager is going to ask you for a super detailed memo – and thus you want the memo column to be extra-wide. Or maybe you know that you generally don’t log any hours on Saturday or Sunday (good for you!), and you want to shrink those columns down to be barely visible. No problem. Just grab the divider between the columns and resize however you like:

QuickBooks Timesheets – Employees’ Settings

QuickBooks Timesheets – Employee Power User Tips

If you are an employee and you want to get into some real time-saving shortcuts, here are a few additional suggestions for you:

• On the Time Expenses subtab, when you click “Add New”, did you notice that there is a way to import from Google Calendar? If you already maintain your Google Calendar in great detail, that can be a real time-saver when it comes to pre-filling your weekly timesheet.
• In the Weekly Timesheet subtab, if you are the kind of employee that tends to work with the same project or client for many weeks running, you might consider getting a default Memo set up, that you then only have to customize on an add-needed basis. You’ll have to ask your manager to set up the default (the manager has that ability in the Employees tab), but it’s easy to do.
• Do you find yourself filing your timesheet in ProOnGo every week, but you don’t end up using the expense or mileage tracking features? Then, hang onto and use this short-link, which takes you to the sign-in screen first, but then immediately takes you to the Weekly Timesheet tab so that you save a few clicks every time.

Thanks for reading, and if you are in a rush to start filing timesheets now, you can easily create a 30-day free trial account here. As always, let us know if you have any questions!

We’re always looking for ways to make your QuickBooks timesheets as easy as possible, so if you think of anything more that we could be doing to help, we’re all ears!

Want to see our private label capability designed specifically to delight the ProAdvisor crowd? What better way than to watch a quick preview before going through the sign-up process. Here’s a demo video, less than 60 seconds, that takes you through the steps of setting up a private label subsite:

Ready to get started? Visit our ProAdvisor page to begin setup. You could be up-and-running in just a minute or two.

For those that prefer a walkthrough via screenshots, here’s a link that goes through the same process screen-by-screen with helpful captions along the way.

ProAdvisors, if you haven’t signed into accountants.intuit.com recently, you are missing out! There were a bunch of new offers on apps that landed in the “My ProAdvisor” tab this week. On that page, there are some especially great offers in there on the top apps from Intuit App Center.

Here’s where to look:

App Offers for ProAdvisors

The apps that are featured on that page are some of the longest-standing apps in the QuickBooks community — apps that are deeply integrated with QuickBooks, by developers who truly know and care about the intricacies of getting data into and out of QuickBooks in a user friendly way.

ProAdvisors – Want to Private Label?

At ProOnGo, we thought long and hard about what kind of offer to put forward. A discount? A freebie? A longer trial period? All of that seemed too “bleh” in a world where apps are constantly running price-related specials. It would have been the easy thing to do, but it just didn’t seem exciting enough.

Instead, we thought, how about giving you more brand power when it comes to keeping your name and your brand in front of your clients throughout the year? How about opening the door to letting you bundle the power of ProOnGo Expense, with your brand instead of ours, in a way that lets you price it in combination with your services? From that basic premise, our private label program for ProAdvisors was born:

ProAdvisors Private Label Setup

You can get started here — but if you’d like to see exactly how quick and easy the setup process is, look at the screenshot walkthrough here.

ProAdvisors – Push the Boundaries

If you go through the process of setting up a private label subsite and you find that there is some UI element or style that you wish you could customize, that you don’t see a way to change, just let us know! We’re very interested in expanding and improving this offering. Get started with setup today, and let us know what you think?

This post goes out to the 55,000+ ProAdvisors who live and breathe QuickBooks day in and day out. We speak your language. We’ve been building and refining our QuickBooks compatibility for years, and we appreciate the unique and valuable contribution that you make to the community. You are the go-to-experts for the 4.5 million QuickBooks-powered companies who (lets face it) sometimes need a little nudge in the right direction when it comes to straightening out an income statement, structuring an item list, creating a job costing strategy, or any one of the 1000s of other things that QuickBooks can do.

We thought it was about time to outfit you with your own subdomains off of ProOnGo.com, so that you can provide a private label branded experience to your clients. The idea is that you pass through the full value of ProOnGo Expense to your clients, but with your brand front and center, so that as your clients gather their expense information they are subtly reminded that you are their right hand when it comes to QuickBooks and QuickBooks add-ons. As the ProAdvisors that make so many small businesses keep their QuickBooks processes on the straight and narrow, we think you should have some special perks when it comes to our solution.

So, effective immediately, we now have a private label offering for ProAdvisors.

ProAdvisors & Private Label Opportunities w/ ProOnGo

One of our favorite parts of our new private label offering is how “instant on” it is. Literally, you could decide to give it a try now, and have it fully set up in under five minutes. We think ProAdvisors will appreciate the speedy self-service setup process. Start by going to www.ProOnGo.com/proadvisor and pick a package. Then, just a few short steps stand between you and your ability to roll out the solution to your clients.

First, choose your subsite name, upload your logo, and give us a hint about the basis for your desired color scheme:

Step 1: ProAdvisor Private Label Setup

Second, choose a color scheme that’s “just right” for you, upload your logo, and choose your subsite name:

Step 2: ProAdvisor Private Label Setup

Third, sign into your new site and try it out:

Step 3: ProAdvisor Private Label Setup

Once you’ve got your new site in hand, you are ready to start inviting your clients to sign in. Your billing relationship with your clients is yours and yours alone: we don’t interfere with however you choose to bundle this add-on with your services. Your only responsibility is to pay the fees for the package you sign up for, but you choose how you price and bundle it to your clients. Ready to get started? Head on over to www.ProOnGo.com/proadvisor. ProAdvisors, let us know what you think!

When it comes to filing expenses, it helps to know your way around your Chart of Accounts, Class List, Items List, Customer:Job List, and sometimes even your Payroll Item List. Why? Well, although you may be able to squeek through your current expense reimbursement cycle with nothing more than the Write Check feature in QuickBooks, and a placeholder Account for each transaction, that’s not going to cut it for the long term. Eventually you’ll have to get all of those transactions categorized correctly, probably the afternoon after you meet with your accountant to prepare a quarterly or annual return.

Chart of Accounts – Keeping it Clean

The first day that you signed on to QuickBooks Online, or the first day that you installed QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise, you were asked what Industry your company is in. For example, “Legal Services” vs “Manufacturing”. That set the stage for your Chart of Accounts being populated with a hierarchy of industry-appropriate accounts. It’s just a “starting point”, but many people stick with that “starting point” for months or years before tailoring it to more unique needs.

If you are like most small business owners, even though you may have made incremental changes to your Chart of Accounts, we’ll bet that you left the Uncategorized Expense account in there somewhere:

Chart of Accounts Uncategorized Expenses

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having an Uncategorized Expense account — sometimes it’s better to explicitly mark an expense as Uncategorized rather than guess a category — but eventually you do need to go into that Uncategorized Expense account to go through each transaction and “get it right” (potentially with help from your accountant).

So, the question is, has your Uncategorized Expense account been growing unchecked? To find out, run a simple Income Statement report — in QuickBooks Online an easy approach is to go to Reports → Profit & Loss:

Chart of Accounts Doing a Health Check

…then scroll down until you see Uncategorized Expense, and see how many dollars you’ve expensed on that account. Surprised at the number you see there? Read on.

Keeping it Clean: Uncategorized Expenses

Although we can’t do much about your weeks, months, or years of old Uncategorized Expenses, we can help you avoid getting into this mess again. Here are three strategies to help you get your expense categories right next time, from the start, without a lot of effort.

• Let us Categorize Them: If you are using our credit card sync feature, which opens up compatibility to about 18,630 financial institutions, you can have us auto-categorize your inbound transactions.
• Hide Your Rarely-Used Categories: If your Chart of Accounts has, say, 100+ accounts — but you typically only use 10 of them for expense reports — unclutter by hiding some of the rarely-used accounts.
• Set up Smart Defaults: If your sales folks, for example, are almost always supposed to file expenses against Meals & Entertainment, why not set up some default choices for that employee’s Chart of Accounts drop-down? Go to your employees tab, and tap the Gears icon next to the employee’s name, to set up default category choices.

We’re hoping these bits of advice will help you keep your expenses well categorized from the start. Anything else we can do to make it easier? Let us know!

If you have out-of-pocket credit card expenses that are destined for QuickBooks for reimbursement, you’ve probably lived through the challenge of doing a weekly or monthly scrub of your categories for your credit card expenses, going from an intuitive thought like “I think this was probably a lunch expense” to pouring over your Chart of Accounts, and realizing that you should be expensing against (for example) your Sales:Client Meals account.

What a pain.

You spend carefully, you try to spend all of your time on client-facing activities, but yet you find yourself scrubbing the categories on your expenses on a recurring basis — with a cadence just infrequent enough that by the time you get around to doing it you have to refresh your memory about your Chart of Accounts setup.

Credit Card Expenses: If only the categories…

If only those credit card expenses were categorized automatically! And, it would be better still if they were categorized to your custom Chart of Accounts, to know that you use a specific QuickBooks Chart of Accounts entry called “Sales:Client Meals” instead of some generic category like you might see on a credit card statement (e.g., “Restaurant”).

With ProOnGo Expense, all of that is “no problem”. In Settings => Credit Cards, there is a Categories button that gives you a one-time setup step where you tell us a little bit about what “generic” categories (inbound from your credit card transactions) should be matched to each particular QuickBooks Chart of Accounts category. This one time setup is simplified by the fact that the first time you open it, we auto-match as much as we can, saving you from most of the configuration effort.

Once you’ve tied off the loose ends, you’ll end up with a popup that looks something like this:

Credit Card Expenses: Category Matching

And, that’s a beautiful thing, because it means (for example) that any “Auto & Transport:Auto Insurance” expense that arrives will automatically be ascribed to your “Insurance Expense” QuickBooks category.

With credit card expenses pre-filled from your financial institution, and auto-categorization tailored to your QuickBooks Chart of Accounts, you should be spending very little time on your expense report.

If your QuickBooks setup is like most, your Chart of Accounts probably got it’s start by accepting the default industry-specific settings when you first installed QuickBooks and chose your industry type (e.g. Manufacturing vs. Professional Consulting vs. Retail vs. dozens of other options).

Over they years, you probably added and removed certain Chart of Accounts entries as your business evolved, and your CPA likely helped you along the way. So, it’s safe to say that you’ve seen your Chart of Accounts 100s of times if not 1000s, and that you’d be more than a little jumpy if you saw it change unexpectedly.

ProOnGo Expense does not Modify Your Chart of Accounts

That’s why ProOnGo Expense does not currently have any functionality that causes accounts, customer:jobs, items, or classes to be automatically added to your QuickBooks file. We wouldn’t want to automatically add something to your carefully crafted accounting data without having your explicit permission. There are a few scenarios where, in the future, we think we might want to suggest certain changes to your QuickBooks lists — but if we ever go down that road you can be sure that any modifications to your lists will be preceded by explicitly asking your permission.

Your Team & Your Settings

Imagine that you have an employee that just had a lunch expense with a client, and the employee gets around to filing the expense but has trouble figuring out what Category and Class to tag it with. Would you prefer to:

Your policy/decision on this front requires a moment of thought. There is no “one size fits all”. If your team is very experienced and relatively familiar with accounting, you might think about trusting them with option (a). Whereas if your employees are relatively inexperienced and have no accounting experience, you would almost certainly want to go with (b).

Updating Your Settings to Fit Your Decision

To put your thought process into action, start by sending your employees a really strong hint about where you stand on this. We give you a great way to signal your flexibility, or lack thereof, in Settings => Options => Allow Freeform Entry:

Freeform Entry: Forbidden Employee Modifications

If you leave all of these checkboxes unchecked, that means that users will have to choose from the drop-down list of pre-defined options — for example, if they are filing an expense where they are unsure of the correct Chart of Accounts choice, they’ll have to choose their best guess as opposed to typing in a freeform name that they think should become a new account.

To “Check” or not to “Check”: The Consequences

If you choose to checkmark some of the checkboxes, that means users will be able to do freeform entry (only in the fields you checkmark). However, and this is a crucial point, even if you allow users to do freeform entry we still don’t auto-create those new Accounts (or Classes, Items, Vendors, Customers, or Jobs) in QuickBooks. We would never want to surprise you like that without you explicitly agreeing to it.

So, the “Allow Freeform Entry” merely gives your employees the ability to type in a proposed value, but it would still be on you to see their newly-proposed value and decide whether you want to add it to QuickBooks or not. You’ll hit that “fork in the road” when you go to send the expense to QuickBooks — the preview screen will show an error next to any Chart of Accounts choice that was freeform, and that’ll be your reminder to either add that Chart of Accounts entry to QuickBooks manually, or to stick to your current gameplan and as a consequence you’ll probably end up doing a fix-up to choose a valid Chart of Accounts entry for the expense in question. (you could ‘deny’ and send it back to the user to correct, but most small business owners we know just make the correction on-the-fly)

Which Fields Support the Allow Freeform Entry Toggle

The “Allow Freeform Entry” toggles (there are 8 of them), correspond to the drop-downs that appear in the expense editor popup in the web app (the Allow Freeform Entry setting does not yet propagate to the mobile app – but stay tuned for an update). So, basically anywhere in the expense editor that you see a drop-down, is an input field where you as the Master Administrator for you company can determine whether you do or do not wish to allow freeform entry:

Freeform Entry: The Expense Editor Fields it Pertains To

Just to be abundantly clear about the consequences of the setting: if you leave the checkbox unchecked, that means that the user will only be able to choose from the pre-filled options (which, of course, originate from QuickBooks). If you checkmark the checkbox, that means the user could optionally choose to type in some freeform text in the freeform edit area, or could choose a pre-filled option:

Drop-Down Box: Editing vs Choosing from Options

We hope you enjoy the fine-grained control over which fields should allow freeform entry, and which should not — your Chart of Accounts will thank you!

If you are the unlucky recipient of expense reports from dozens or hundreds of people, you’ve probably come to have a healthy respect for the concept of workflow. For example, having an employee draft their expenses, submit them to you, and then you approve or deny based on some established rules.

However, perhaps your organization isn’t yet that big — maybe you are a 1-5 person company with a need for expense reports (a pretty typical size for a company using QuickBooks). If that description fits your company well, you probably don’t need all of the traditional ‘workflow’ that a bigger company would require. This post will give you some advice about how to use workflow accelerators in ProOnGo, to reduce or in some cases eliminate the need for the button-pressing that provides “checks and balances” for larger organizations.

Expense Reports Workflow Accelerator 1: Auto-Submit

If your employees primarily use our receipt reader to submit their out-of-pocket expenses, it’s likely that they send in their receipt image, categorize, and then come back later and submit it to you. Why would they come back later to do the ‘Submit’ step? Because as fast as our receipt reader is, it’s still not instantaneous, so employees sometimes use receipt reader and then just ‘check in later’ to Submit all of the completed expenses that result from the receipt reads.

So, although their expense reports are free of having to do manual data entry, they still end up taking two separate ‘actions’ on the way to getting the expense report submitted to you.

However (you guessed it) there is a shortcut way that employees can use, to cause their expense reports to be submitted automatically upon completion of a receipt reader run:

Workflow Accelerator 1: Auto-Submit After Receipt Reader

So, employees could (for example) use their receipt reader email address to email us a receipt, knowing that we’ll run it through receipt reader and then automatically submit it to their manager upon completion. It’s a handy time-saver for employees that use receipt reader a lot.

Expense Reports Workflow Accelerator 2: Auto-Approve

Going along with the storyline that these workflow accelerators are for relatively small businesses… If you are in such a small company that there is no real concept of ‘approving’ or ‘denying’ an expense — i.e. there is a level of trust that dictates that all expenses will be presumed to be ‘approved’ unless/until that trust is broken… Well, then you should try our “Auto-Approve” setting, to cause all expenses to transition from the Submitted => Approved state automatically, without any effort on your part.

Workflow Accelerator 2: Auto-Approve Expenses

If you stitch together the use of this setting with the use of the first workflow accelerator, suddenly you’ve got receipt images flowing through Receipt Reader => Submitted to Manager => Auto-Approved by Manager, all without anyone so much as clicking a button or typing a keystroke.

Expense Reports Workflow Accelerator 3: Auto-Send to QuickBooks

Want to really take it to the next level? This one is for the most advanced of users, so if you are new to ProOnGo Expense you should get used to the normal workflow before you turn this one on. However, when you are ready, know that you can turn on auto-send-to-QuickBooks, causing expenses to send to QuickBooks automatically after they are approved. This auto-send is only supported for the Write Check reimbursement method, and is normally used with the “Append to Existing Unprinted Checks” feature (so that you don’t end up accidentally creating 15 expense reimbursement checks in QuickBooks, all destined to the same employee).

Workflow Accelerator 3: Auto-Send to QuickBooks

Turn on these settings in combination with the first two workflow accelerators, and suddenly your expenses are taking a terrific ride with very little effort. Your employees expenses go from Receipt Reader => Submitted to Manager => Auto-Approved by Manager => Sent to QuickBooks => Ready to Print as a Reimbursement Check. Expense reports don’t get much easier than that: for those keeping score, with all of these settings on, all that employees have to do is take a picture and send it to receipt reader — and everything thereafter happens automatically, all the way to the point of having the expense in QuickBooks Pro or QuickBooks Online Edition (or Enterprise or Premier for that matter).

If your QuickBooks Chart of Accounts has Account Numbers next to it, you may be in the habit of thinking about account “24000″ instead of “Payroll Liabilities”, or account “60400″ instead of “Bank Service Charges”. Of course, these are just examples, your Account Numbers and Account Names are custom to your own situation.

QuickBooks Chart of Accounts: With Account Numbers

For awhile, in ProOnGo Expense we only referred to the name of the account (and not the account number), on anecdotal evidence that more QuickBooks users have account numbers turned off (default) than turned on (actively turned on in preferences). And, it seemed intuitive to us that our users would probably find the account names from their QuickBooks Chart of Accounts to be more “friendly” than the accompanying account number.

Your QuickBooks Chart of Accounts is Your Business

However, we’ve been told by a vocal and important minority of our user base, that some of you have had account numbers turned on in QuickBooks for so long, that it’s disorienting to see your accounts in ProOnGo without adjacent account numbers. We listened.

The result is a new “Pro Tip” about how to turn on account aliasing in ProOnGo in a way that pre-pends the Account Number prior to the QuickBooks Chart of Accounts name. Here’s what to do.

First, in ProOnGo, go to Settings => QuickBooks => Account Aliases. That’s where you go to set up aliases for your QuickBooks Chart of Accounts (you can also suppress accounts there if there are some that you don’t want to show through at all). In this case (the goal being to enable Account Numbers), start by adding rows for everything in the QuickBooks Chart of Accounts that you want to use as a possible account for expense filing:

QuickBooks Chart of Accounts: Alias Setup Step 1

The left-hand side is normally where you enter a friendly name, perhaps simplifying something like “Meals & Entertainment – International” to “International Meals”. Many business owners like to do this to make the expense reporting process feel a little less burdensome, the idea being that shorter and simpler names make the process less intimidating.

However, for some users, just the opposite is desired: some companies have their account numbers so ingrained in their processes, that employees assume something is amiss if they don’t see an account number attached to their expense category options. If you are on point for expense reporting processes at a company like that, just press the “Numeric Aliases” in the top-right, and that will cause the alias text to be filled out for you, with account numbers conveniently pre-pended to each account name:

QuickBooks Chart of Accounts: Alias Setup Step 2

So, although our QuickBooks Chart of Accounts aliasing feature has traditionally been intended for companies looking to shorten their category names and make them less formal, this feature does double-duty to also empower advanced companies to show their Account Numbers alongside their Account Names anywhere in our UI where a category drop-down appears.

If you are an international QuickBooks user, you’ve probably already learned more than your fair share of tricks and tips for managing GST and/or VAT in QuickBooks, dealing with currency conversion, and more. You’ve probably shared intricate and valuable advice on the Intuit Community Forums. And, well, been a little patient when (occasionally) the help files seemed to reference some U.S.-specific feature.

This post is a cheers to you, our International QuickBooks & ProOnGo Expense users!

ProOnGo Expense for International QuickBooks Users

If you’ve been using ProOnGo Expense outside of the U.S., and have connected it to your QuickBooks Online company (or maybe your QuickBooks Pro company), we want to thank you for the journey we’ve been on together. See, you are always the first to let us know when some page in our web app fails to render your character encoding correctly. That’s geek-speak for saying that your accented characters like Ñ end up looking completely wrong, like perhaps �.

We’re happy to report to you that we’ve recently completed our most thorough testing ever, for the character encoding techniques that allow you to get your work done, with the characters you need, be they in a Customer:Job, Class, Item, or Account. Here’s one of the many test cases that we used during our effort to improve this aspect of our web app:

International QuickBooks Users: We handle character encoding

See the Customer:Job shown in that screen? We’ll admit that “Lots of Accents é á í ó ú É ñ Ñ ü” probably isn’t a normal name for a Customer:Job, but that’s an example of the kind of test cases we used throughout our system to make sure that international QuickBooks users get a good experience when they add-on ProOnGo Expense to QuickBooks, for filing receipts, mileage, and time.

If you catch us with any screen in our web app that doesn’t handle international characters correctly, please let our support team know, and we’ll be pleased to correct it!