ProOnGo Blog

Because we have an awesome QuickBooks credit card sync, we’re all about using credit cards in QuickBooks the right way. If your credit cards aren’t set up correctly in QuickBooks (check out our post about downloading credit card transactions) not only can you not use our awesome QuickBooks app, but you can get some pretty messy financial reports. Here are some common mistakes people make when dealing with credit cards in QuickBooks, and the right way:

Mistake: Not Using the Credit Card Register

People are often confused as to how to deal with the credit card statement they get in the mail. They wonder how do I enter the expenses in QuickBooks? How do I pay my credit card bill? Because they’re confused, they enter the charges in a number of crazy ways (check out our previous blog: How NOT To Record Credit Card Transactions).

Basically, if you aren’t using the credit card register, you’re doin’ it wrong.

To correctly record a credit card charge, just click the ‘Enter Credit Card Charges’ button on the home page of QuickBooks!

Here it is in QuickBooks Pro:

And here it is in QuickBooks Online:

Mistake: Entering Check or Vendor Bill With One Lump Sum

I’ve seen a few people make this mistake: they pay the credit card bill by entering in one check or vendor bill, with one lump sum.

There are a few problems with this method, all dealing with lack of detail. First, this method doesn’t explain what the charges were for. In a year, if you went back and looked at this charge, you’d be totally confused – what exactly was this for, again?

Also, this makes job costing for these charges impossible. You could enter in a line item for each charge and assign it to a customer:job, but that seems awfully time consuming, doesn’t it?

Finally, the dates are skewed by this method of entering in credit card charges. It will seem like every item on the credit card statement was purchased the day you wrote the check – which is incorrect!

In order to get accuracy in your credit card charges, you should be using the credit card register and entering the charges as they happen (or let Online Banking do it for you!).

Mistake: Entering Debit Card Transactions as Credit Card Transactions

Sometimes people get confused about debit cards vs. credit cards in QuickBooks. After all, plastic is plastic! However, the nature of these charges are different. When you use a debit card, you’re pulling money directly out of your bank account. When you use a credit card, you’re borrowing money from the credit card company. So, these charges need to be recorded separately.

You should check out our more detailed blog about the correct way to enter debit card charges in QuickBooks, but here’s a brief overview of how you SHOULD be recording debit card transactions: open Write Check, and enter in the transaction. Then, where you see “Check Number,” just enter in “DEBIT,” “DBT,” or whatever you want to designate that it’s a debit card charge.

Note that the credit card register has nothing to do with the process of recording debit card charges.

Hopefully this provided a tad bit of insight about the common mistakes people make when dealing with credit cards in QuickBooks, and will help you avoid them yourself!

Do your employees use company cards? Let them categorize and edit their own credit card expenses with the credit card sync feature of our app! Also, check out all of the ways we integrate with QuickBooks!

We at ProOnGo talk a lot about QuickBooks online banking, because we love it! Company cards are something that virtually every business uses – after all, the only people carrying around a checkbook these days are the same people who are bumping MC Hammer on their walkman. It is no longer hammer time.

Hopefully you’re already recording your expenses to your credit card register in QuickBooks by clicking the “Add Credit Card Charges” button. This screen will look pretty familiar to you:

Normally you’d record expenses through this screen, then go to the Credit Card register to see all of the charges.

If you’re already doing everything right, why make the switch to online banking?

Online banking is faster:

A pretty normal way businesses run, expense-wise, is by use of expense reports. Employees spend money, then submit their receipts along with a list of expenses to their manager. This is time consuming and can easily be pushed aside if the employee in question has more important work to do. So, you’re left waiting for the expense reports. By the time everything finally gets recorded, you could have fallen days, weeks, or even in some cases months behind.

Once you finally get the expense reports, it then takes time to enter in all the information to QuickBooks.

Online banking eliminates all the bother of what I’ve just described. When you have online banking set up, QuickBooks constantly downloads transactions from the bank as they happen. So, there’s no more waiting for expense reports from your employees, who will be very happy to not have to fill them out anyway.

Online banking is more accurate:

When you use online banking, the transactions are downloaded directly from your bank, so you know there won’t be any errors. If you’ve had to manually enter in tons of expenses, you know the feeling of frustration that occurs when the ending balance that you created doesn’t match that on the credit card statement. You also know that it’s virtually impossible to not make a single mistake while entering in so much information. Avoid all of that by using online banking, and letting QuickBooks do the work for you.

Using online banking allows you to also use add-ons:

There are a plethora of apps and add-ons which sync to QuickBooks, but they all require online banking to work. Apps can fit a variety of needs and even make QuickBooks fun!

ProOnGo is all about making expense reporting easy, so it’s no coincidence that we sync with your credit card online banking. By giving you access to your credit card register right on your smart phone, we’re taking the convenience and availability of online banking to the next level. Instead of logging in to QuickBooks and spend time categorizing a list of expenses, why not do it right when the expense is incurred? Your employees can file and categorize their expenses too without gaining access to your QuickBooks company file. Even better, do all of this from your smart phone!

If you’re interested in online banking, you can check out our instructions on how to set up credit cards in QuickBooks.

Did you know: When you have online banking set up, you can use ProOnGo to sync with your credit card register, allowing you and your employees to categorize, edit, and add receipt images to your credit card transactions from any smart phone, any where, and at any time. Check out our Credit Card Sync.

People record credit card expenses from their company credit cards to QuickBooks in all sorts of crazy ways. If you’re using a company credit card (as opposed to a personal card), you need a way to record those credit card transactions in QuickBooks. The correct way to record company-issued credit card expenses is to use the credit card register, but not everyone does that.

Here at ProOnGo, we’re the experts in all things expense. If you’re trying to reimburse an employee for out of pocket expenses, check out this post. If you’re interested in recording expenses incurred on your company’s credit card, this post is for you.

Here are three common ways that people incorrectly record expenses in QuickBooks:

Vendor Bill to Credit Card Company

In this case, you would create a Vendor Bill, with the credit card company (AmEx, Visa, etc) as the Vendor. Then you would fill out all the line items with each individual expense and hope the end result matches your credit card statement. The thought behind this is okay – when you use a credit card, you’re spending the credit card company’s money. That’s why you get a bill from the credit card company rather than from the place you spent money (McDonald’s, Marriott, etc).

This method is, however, inefficient. If you’ve ever spent time keying in transactions, you know that errors are common. So, not only are you spending too much time entering in individual transactions, but if the vendor bill and credit card statement don’t match, you’re also spending time trying to find where on earth you made an error.

Vendor Bill for Each Transaction

This method involves a whole lot of vendor bills; you create a vendor bill for each transaction, with the vendor being the place you spent money (eg Pete’s Puggle Place). Writing a Vendor Bill for each transaction is even more inefficient than creating one big Bill. Say you’re on a business trip, and you spend money in 20 different places. This method would require you to create 20 different Vendor Bills, then Pay Bills for every single one of them. It’s easy for a transaction to get lost or forgotten in all the hullabaloo, and it’s virtually impossible to reconcile these expenses with your credit card statement. It’s a big mess.

Write a Check

People get used to Writing Checks for expenses. It’s a good way to record money coming out of your bank account, and can be used to record debit card transactions, and to reimburse employees for out of pocket expenses. For company credit card transactions, though, this shouldn’t be the case.

The most common thing people do is to write a check to the credit card company whenever they get their credit card statement. They fill out each individual expense as a line item on the check, and then compare that to the credit card statement. This is essentially the same thing as the first example, which was issuing one big vendor bill. So, writing a Check to the credit card company has the same pitfalls of issuing a Vendor Bill to to the credit card company; there’s too much data entry and it’s far too subject for error. Plus, it’s very time consuming.

So, what IS the right way to record your credit card transactions in QuickBooks?

The easiest, fastest, and most accurate way to record credit card transactions is to use online banking. By using online banking, all of your credit card transactions are posted to a specific credit card register, and it’s easy to reconcile these charges at the end of every month. Plus, you can categorize the expenses right in the register by client, class, item, etc. There are no errors, since it’s coming right from the bank, and the information is constantly updated.

Check out this blog post about setting up credit cards in QuickBooks, and then take a peek at ProOnGo’s credit card sync feature, which pushes all of the convenience of online banking in QuickBooks right to your smart phone.

Did you know: When you have online banking set up, you can use ProOnGo to sync with your credit card register, allowing you and your employees to categorize, edit, and add receipt images to your credit card transactions from any smart phone, any where, and at any time. Check out our Credit Card Sync.

One thing that sets ProOnGo apart from other expense programs is its unique workflow. Employees submit their expenses to managers, who can then approve or deny the expense from their mobile device, and even send it to QuickBooks.

A lot of users are now taking advantage of our awesome credit card sync feature, and are left wondering about the workflow of those expenses? They want to know, am I supposed to approve/deny credit card expenses just like I do for reimbursable expenses?

First, you should understand a little bit about how our Credit Card Sync works. You and your employees spend money using a card that you’ve decided to connect to QuickBooks, and QuickBooks syncs the transactions into a credit card register automatically. From there, it syncs to ProOnGo – in the ProOnGo app, you and your employees can edit the expense. Those edits will go back to QuickBooks and live happily ever after.  That way, your employees don’t have to come find or sign into QuickBooks, they only have access to this specific subset of your company’s QuickBooks information.

The question of workflow happens when those expenses are sent to ProOnGo – they arrive in the app as “Submitted” – and we’ve been getting the question “what exactly does that mean?”.  Well, lets start with what it doesn’t mean:

• Whether you approve of the expense or not… it’s still a transaction that deserves to be in the credit card register in QuickBooks.  I.e., even if you believe the employee spend was a poor decision, the fact is that the transaction did indeed occur, and thus no matter what you do with the workflow state in ProOnGo, we won’t delete the credit card transaction from QuickBooks.
• Your monthly statement from your credit card provider still has to be paid… regardless of whether or not you are happy about the particular expenses that the employee transacted this month.  And, of course, changing the workflow state in ProOnGo, doesn’t change that.

So, with that in mind, what does it actually mean, to “Approve” or “Deny” a credit card expense that is sync’d between ProOnGo and QuickBooks?  Your own business rules are the key to answering that, but here is one answer that is gaining popularity amongst our user base:

• A “Denied” credit card expense means… that although the transaction will live on in QuickBooks, and will have to be paid by the company when the credit card statement is paid, the company will manually withhold the amount from the employees’ paycheck or otherwise require the employee to reimburse the company for the “Denied” expense.
• An “Approved” credit card expense means… that the manager has looked at the expense, memo, and categorization, and is satisfied.  Thus, the manager Approves the expense, and adjusts his/her expense filter to show only Submitted expenses, to make it easy to spot which transactions have not-yet-reviewed memo and category choices.  We bet that managers are busy folks, and that they won’t instinctively remember which 758 credit card transactions out of 1,043 in total, have been scrubbed to ensure that the employee did a good job of selecting the appropriate categories.  So, the Approved/Denied decision and the Filter, should add some sanity to that process.

So, use our credit card sync feature to not only be kind to your employees (who will benefit from the pre-filled transaction list), but also to be kind to your managers (who will be able to keep track of which credit card expenses have been adequately categorized).

For more information about other aspects of ProOnGo Expense’s workflow capabilities, check out this blog post.

Setting up credit cards in QuickBooks is almost as easy as using them; you can create credit card registers and sync them with your online banking for accurate and up-to-date information (not to mention less data entry) in less than ten minutes. All you need to know is where to go.

QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop look a little different, but the process is the same. Here’s how to set up a credit card in QuickBooks Online using QuickBooks Online Banking (we’ll get to desktop in a moment):

You know the Banking tab? Hover over that and select Registers. To create a new register, you simply need to enter in a new name and click OK

QuickBooks will lead you from there. When it asks “What type of account would you like to set up?” you select Credit Card and hit ‘Next.’ On the next screen, make sure the button by ‘Yes’ is filled, and then hit the ‘Finish’ button. QuickBooks will then lead you through a wizard that syncs your credit card to the register you created.

In QuickBooks desktop, the setup is similar.

Go to the Banking tab, then select ‘Use Register.’ Or, just press ctl+R. Enter in a name for your new credit card register, and click OK. QuickBooks will ask you if you want to set up the register.

Click Set Up and fill in the requested information.

Next, set up QuickBooks Online Banking and  sync your online banking information to this register. To do so, go to the Banking tab, then hover over Online Banking. Select ‘Set up account for online services.” From the first window that pops up, assign the card to the account you just set up.

Hit the ‘Next’ button and follow the prompts – QuickBooks will need your online banking information, and once you provide that your transactions will appear in that register.

Easy peasy!

Did you know: ProOnGo syncs directly with your company cards, so you and your employees can edit, categorize, and add receipt images to your QB credit card transactions from any smart phone, any where, and at any time. Check out ProOnGo’s Credit Card Sync.