You’ve filed expenses, submitted them, and even gotten reimbursed. So what do you need those old expenses for? Why bother with archiving expenses? Think about if you DID keep them around. You’d have shoeboxes on shoeboxes full of old receipts and expense reports, cluttering up all the space in your desk you could otherwise use for storing other important documents (or a secret potato chip stash). Plus, you wouldn’t ever really know if all the receipts are in there, or if a few got lost along the way. If it’s such a pain, why even bother keeping them around?

1. Because computers crash, that’s why.

I’m sure you have a record of all your expenses saved on an excel file, and feel pretty good about that. It’s right there whenever you want it. No sweat, just double click on the program, click “open,” select the expense report, and —

— that’s all she wrote. Your files are gone, your computer is dead, and even the nerd you hired to fix it looks discouraged. That may be due to the fact that the only woman interested in him speaks in l33t, though. Either way, things don’t look good for your expenses.

2. Audits Happen

In the immortal words of rapper Ludacris, “Just like gangs collect taxes on the street, the government collects taxes, marks their territory!”

Ludacris, CPA

Your company is getting audited, and everyone is very excited about it. Your boss is so excited that he’s demanding to see proof of your expenses by tonight. You kept your receipts, right? Or, at very least, you know which box they’re in, right? No? Looks like tonight you’re going to be digging through files instead of going home to watch Roseanne reruns. You can decide which is worse.

3. You never know who will mess something up.

You’ve submitted your expenses to your boss, who has approved them and sent them off to the book keeper who has entered them in the books and reimbursed you. You cashed your reimbursement check and used the money to buy a sweet new pair of alligator boots. Months go by, and you’ve forgotten all about the expenses. You haven’t worn those boots in weeks, and not just because your wife won’t make eye contact with you when you do. All of a sudden, you get a memo that you need to re-submit those expenses. Maybe a file was corrupted, maybe an intern messed something up, or maybe your CPA is just a jerk.

Either way, you need those expenses, and you don’t have them. Looks like you’re going to spend another night digging through receipts and cursing your book keeper.

Here’s a good idea: Archive your expenses with ProOnGo. Not only does ProOnGo help you file your expenses in a more timely and so less irritating manner, but it saves your expense data for you on secure servers. Any time you want your data, it’s there for you, thanks to ProOnGo Expense.

There’s just one problem.  ProOnGo gives you the option to reimburse your employee via either Write Check or Create Vendor Bill, and you aren’t sure which to pick.  To start deciding which technique is right for your company, a good starting point is to talk about the business exchange that is underway:

1. An Employee Paid for a good or service on behalf of the company
2. The Company Benefited from the good or service
3. The Employee Needs to be Reimbursed, to cover the cost of the good or service,

If you are at step 3, and if you are sitting in front of QuickBooks, you are probably thinking in very practical terms about how you need to get QuickBooks to print out a check that you can hand your employee, with as little hassle as possible.  It’s at that point that most QuickBooks users recall the existence of “Vendor Bills” and “Write Check” as two different ways to get QuickBooks to print out a check.

Both of those methods are valid techniques for reimbursing your employees, so we’ll try to provide a balanced explanation of some of the factors that might cause you to choose one or the other approach.

First, lets talk about the fundamentals of a vendor bill.  Normally, when your business mail arrives every day, you probably have a couple bills to add to the pile.  And if you are super organized, perhaps you enter those as vendor bills in QuickBooks, even if you know you won’t pay them immediately (I know lots of small business owners that pay their Net 30 bills on day 25, and I know far fewer that pay them on day 1).  If that sounds like you, perhaps you like to hold on to your $ until you absolutely have to part with them, but more likely there is some structural reason for your decision — like that your accountant goes through and prints out checks twice a month for all pending bills — or that you reserve every second Friday for your financial cleanup.  Whatever the reason, if you have a normal cycle of receiving vendor bills, entering them into QuickBooks, and then paying them on some pre-defined rhythm, you might be inclined to handle your reimbursements with that same general flow.  And that’s fine (but bear in mind, your employees will want to be paid back relatively quickly, usually within 10 days of expense approval).

Second, lets talk about the fundamentals of a Write Check.  Writing a check is often much more of a spontaneous event than a vendor bill.  In the normal course of business, perhaps you discover a need to make an immediate payment for an unexpected expense, and payment is due immediately (perhaps you are purchasing something from a retailer or a supplier with inflexible payment terms).  So, you crank out a check immediately, print it out, and hand it over or mail it out.  You probably could have done a vendor bill, but in your rush to make payment, you went straight for the fewest number of clicks in QuickBooks, and that was the Write Check technique.  Most business owners have done this from time-to-time (some do it in a rush, but some do it as a general policy).  The general approach of “Write Check” works for expense reimbursement as well, and tends to work especially well in smaller companies that don’t have a need for any kind of sophisticated cash management strategy that dictates a particular cadence for paying bills and reimbursing expenses.

We’ll bet that on average, more QuickBooks users end up running their reimbursements via Write Check as opposed to Vendor Bill.

In ProOnGo, when you run your reimbursements, the choice is up to you: Vendor Bill or Write Check.  We’ll take care of getting all of the information into QuickBooks so that you get to skip straight to doing the reimbursement.

Did you know: You can use ProOnGo to reimburse your employees using Vendor Bills, Checks, or both! Check out how we sync to QuickBooks (not JUST reimbursable expenses!).

Just last week we released a brand new version of our iPhone and iPad application, and earlier this week, we released a brand new version of our Android application. Both of these updates contained crticial features for QuickBooks users; support for Items and Classes.

Items are used for products and services, mainly for time tracking. A user would mark an expense with an Item to designate what type of service they performed for the client, or what product the expense is used for.

Classes are just another metric for QuickBooks users to label their expenses with. For example, a baker might use a Class to determine what type of pastry they are selling so they can create a break down of their most popular pastries. Or a consultant might use Classes to keep track of what type of consulting work they are spending the most time on.

Login to ProOnGo.com and set up your QuickBooks Connection to start using Items and Classes in your expenses!

We just created a new video to demonstrate our Category Aliasing. Category Aliasing is used when you’d like to change how an expense account appears in your expense list without effecting it inside your QuickBooks account.

You can access the Category Aliasing via the ProOnGo Web Portal under Settings->QuickBooks->CofA Aliasing.

If you have any questions, feel free to shoot us an email: Support@ProOnGo.com