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.

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.

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).

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!

Just as an alcoholic must decide to accept that drinking alcohol isn’t healthy, the first step to stop procrastinating is really admitting that you have a problem, and that you need to do something about it. Once you’ve admitted you have a problem, it’s time to defeat it! Here are three helpful and fun tools that we use around the ProOnGo offices to help us stay on task.

3 Tools to Help You Stop Procrastinating

#1: CARROT

At first glance, CARROT, with its rib-tickling humor turns into more than just an app that is designed to help you stop procrastinating. Simply put, it is a to-do list that you can download from the iTunes Store for your iPhone. You assign tasks, pick a time limit and CARROT will help you stay on task by expressing joy or frustration in how much time it takes you to complete the task.  One word of caution, when using CARROT: do not upset “her”.

#2: RescueTime

As the name suggest, you will rescue your time using this app that is a Web app. RescueTime monitors your activity on your computer so you can see just how much time you’re actually wasting. Seeing the breakdown of what you do everyday should surely be a motivation to change your ways, as well as spot inefficiencies in your schedule.

#3: Remember the Milk

We’ve been using this app since the beginning of ProOnGo in 2008. Remember the Milk is a simple task app that let’s you schedule tasks in advance so you’re always up-to-date on the next important thing you should be working on. Signing for a basic account is free but the pro account costs $25 a year. You can sync this app with Microsoft Outlook, Android and Apple devices, as well as Google Mail and Calendar.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, a new trend is taking over in the offices of cutting edge companies like Apple, Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing and Google; introducing standing desks into their office place. While these standing desks may look funny, and at first blush seem uncomfortable, standing desks have proven to be a healthy solution to the growing problem of obesity.

The Facts on Sitting

We’ve all been sitting at our desks for the majority of our working life, but did we know it was so bad for us? Pennington Biomedical Researcher, Marc Hamilton, found that calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. He also found insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, which limits our cells’ ability to allow glucose to be turned into glucogen. This means that we end up storing fat instead of burning it.

An American Cancer Society study found that men who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher.

Standing Desk – Should Your Workplace Have Them?

With the benefits of a standing desk at work apparent to many, it’s no surprise that there are several companies that offer numerous  models for the workplace. While some of these models include the ability to adjust the desk’s height, there are others that even have a treadmill attached to the standing desk. Popular companies that sell variants of the standing desk include TrekDesk, ErgoDesktop and SteelCase and so on and so forth.

If you don’t want to buy these desks which can range between $1600 to $4000, there are also DIY methods by which you can make one yourself.

But the verdict is out: Yes, a standing desk is the obvious cure to the sedentary lifestyle problem, and it’s probably a good idea for your workplace to consider using these desks. Even if you are unable to incorporate a standing desk, using little tricks like getting up and walking around for 2 minutes every hour have dramatic effects on your long-term health. The improvement in your health might not be life-changing upfront, but small investments have been shown to pay off big dividends in the end.