ProOnGo Blog

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!

In your Items list in QuickBooks (Lists => Items Lists), you may have seen “Reimb Group”, and thought “I’m pretty sure I didn’t add that manually — where did it come from?”

Well, you aren’t imagining things. For the vast majority of QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premium installs that we’ve seen, this item arrives “by default”. Although we have no particular inside scoop on why Intuit decided to auto-create the “Reimb Group” item, we can certainly walk you through step-by-step one scenario in which we know it’s used (maybe there are more scenarios that we don’t know about, too).

The particular scenario that we’re familiar with involves passthrough expenses.

Step 1 – Reimburse an Employee

Imagine that you are the owner of a consulting firm, and one of your employees Jim Smith incurs some expenses while working on a project for ACME LLC.  You certainly want to reimburse Jim for the expense (after all, it’s a legitimate business expense), and perhaps you want to pass the cost through to the client, since it was incurred specifically while working on a project for their benefit.

In these circumstances, you’d probably find yourself doing a Write Check to Jim Smith — and don’t forget to follow the best practices:

• Split out the cost allocation for each individual purchase for which you are reimbursing Jim (in this case, one purchase for $21.10 and another for $10.00).
• Be sure to assign the right Customer:Job (in this case ACME LLC).
• Be sure to mark the expenses as Billable (presuming that’s the case!)

Good, you’ve made Jim whole again – paying him back for his business expense – while using the above best-practices to set yourself up for success in the upcoming steps about billing the client for these expenses.

Step 2 – Create an Invoice

Want to connect a third party app to QuickBooks Pro or QuickBooks Online? You’ve already heard what we have to say about steering clear of IIF files. So, if you are already onboard with that advice, what should you look for to know the app has secure access to Intuit’s cloud?

Well, here’s exactly the button you should look for:

This is a button provided by Intuit, to developers that are approved for Intuit’s App Center, and is a good indicator that you are about to Connect to QuickBooks via Intuit’s secure cloud. And, here’s what it looks like in action (click on image for full video):

Although the video doesn’t show it, if you aren’t yet signed into any other Intuit sites, the first thing you’ll see when you click the Connect to QuickBooks button is a sign in page that requires you to enter your Intuit Account credentials. And that’s a good thing. It’s an Intuit-hosted sign-in window that lets Intuit confirm that you are indeed the owner of a QuickBooks company file. That sign-in process is step one of a quick and easy setup process that allows developers like us to get secure access to company files that you authorize, all via Intuit’s secure cloud.

This post goes out to the reader that replied to our IIF vs The Cloud post and said we should go so far as to have a logo or badge that says “No IIF Files Here”. We love your enthusiasm!

Our graphics folks are pretty tied up with an upcoming feature launch, but in the meantime, here’s a simple “No IIFs” badge, and to answer what we know will be the first question, yes you have our permission to reuse it on your own site if you’d like:

Once our graphics folks free up a little, maybe we’ll get them to put together something a little more sophisticated.

QuickBooks is becoming a relatively popular search term on the mobile app stores, compared to a year or two ago.  So, a few months ago I searched iTunes App Store and looked one-by-one through the top 50 results for the search term “QuickBooks”, downloaded each app, and tried to see what the app developer “meant” when writing “QuickBooks compatible” (or similar) in the app description.  As you’d guess, “compatible” means different things to different people:

For 21 of the 50 apps, I couldn’t find any evidence of QuickBooks compatibility at all, but the other 29 apps did indeed seem to have legitimate compatibility of some kind.  What was surprising to me, though, was that out of those 29 apps, 11 of them were “compatible” via IIF files.  I would not have guessed that, because of the drawbacks shown in the video. Aside from the fact that Intuit long ago deprecated IIF files (sometime before January 2009), you wouldn’t want to run any crucial part of your business on IIF files, and I’ll give you my personal “Top 5″ reasons why.

Top 5 Reasons To Steer Clear of IIF Files

What else can we do to convince you that now is the time to make the jump to the cloud? What more do you need than this?

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!

Since you’ve started recording your credit card expenses in QuickBooks the right way with your ProOnGo Expense, you might be wondering how you can make informed decisions with your newly acquired data.  In this blog post, we’ll show you how to create some reports with data from your Credit Card register so you can make more informed decisions.

You need to keep track of what you spend on your company card. Syncing it to QuickBooks is one step; you can easily access all your credit card transactions from the credit card register. What if you want to create a report of those expenses? There’s no ‘Expense Reports’ in the reports list.

Once you know where to look, generating an expense report is easy.

First, go to the Reports tab, then the Report List. Scroll down until you see “General Ledger” – that’s what you need.

Open that up, and click the ‘Customize’ button. Then, from the ‘Lists’ drop down, select the credit card register you want to create the report from.

You can chose to just check out and print the report (Run Report), get the report as an Excel file, or email the report. You’ll see all your transactions and totals.

Now that you know how to customize the reports, you can access a vast amount of information. Say you have a sales man who is assigned to a specific client, and you want to see how much they’ve been spending on their company card. Just run their expense reports!

Go back to the reports page, and scroll all the way down to “Transaction List by Client.” Click the ‘Customize’ button, just like you did for the general ledger report. Like that report, scroll down until you see the Lists section, and then open the Accounts dropdown menu. Just like you did before, scroll down until you see the correct credit card account. Then, select which Client you want to view. Run and print the report, or access it via excel download or email.

Note: Jobs are listed in the ‘Client’ drop down, so to get a list of credit card transactions by job, follow the aforementioned steps, selecting the correct job from the Clients drop down.

How do I export an invoice to Excel from QuickBooks?

Our latest how-to was about exporting information such as lists, registers, and reports from QuickBooks to Excel, so we thought we’d continue on that path and answer a pretty common question: How do I export an invoice to Excel?

The simple answer is: you can’t. At least, not directly. You can, however, export the information inside the invoice to excel. If you want the export to look like the invoice you see in QuickBooks, you need to use a third party app (check out our pals at Transaction Pro).

Here’s the work-around.

First, open the invoice.

Then, press ctrl+Y. This will open up a transaction journal for the invoice. This journal contains the same information as the invoice; it just looks different.

From there, export just like a regular report. Click the Excel button, and Create New Worksheet. Follow the prompt, and you will have just been able to export an invoice to Excel.

Want to print out an expense report but don’t want to fool around with all these IIF/CDV/WTF file types? Just use ProOnGo to create a report with the expenses you’ve already created! ProOnGo can even use your company’s established template.

What’s a group item in QuickBooks? You’re about to find out…

Group Items in QuickBooks are a nifty tool for those companies which have inventories, and therefore use many an item in QuickBooks. However, if you always sell a certain set of items, it can get tedious to list every single item on invoices. Also, it’s easy with so many items and details to leave something out. Using group items solves these problems; group items simplify your process. Instead of adding each item individually, just add one group item – it contains the individual items. You can even decide if, on invoices, you want each individual part to be shown or not.

For example, if your company installs doors for people, you’ll always use a door handle, hinges, and the door itself during the job, so those items will always appear on your invoices. Instead of listing each item separately on an invoice, just create a group item entitled “Door Parts.”

How to set up a group item:

1. Go to the Items and Services list
2. Click Item, then click ‘New.’
3. Under “Type,” select ‘Group.’
4. Name the group item in the “Group Name/Number” field.
5. Add a description if you like.
6. If you select ‘Print Items in This Group,’ each individual item within the group will show on invoices and other printed materials.
7. Add each item to the group – they can be items which are made already, or you can add them on the fly.

Your set up will look something like this:

When you create an invoice, just look for the name of your group item in the ‘Item Code’ drop down list. QuickBooks will show each individual item within the group, its price, and the total price of the group.

Group items are a great way to stay organized and simplify QuickBooks.

Did you know? ProOnGo supports items! Check out a list of QuickBooks fields ProOnGo supports.

Do your independent contractors use Time Sheets in QuickBooks? Now they can use ProOnGo!