Keep your data! How to set up an automatic backups in QuickBooks 2013:

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.

Having to write off bad debt is one of those common business scenarios everyone. If you find yourself in a situation in which you need to write off bad debt from one of our customers, the first thing you should do is make sure you’ve exhausted all resources in attempting to collect.

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.

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!

If you are a small business owner, you may know a thing or two about the challenges of getting employee expense reports into QuickBooks.

It’s not that QuickBooks lacks the right transaction types, fields, or memos (it’s got fields for just about everything imaginable). It’s not that QuickBooks lacks ways to account for reimbursements (plenty of support for that). It’s not that QuickBooks is missing good reporting options for reviewing the P&L impact of your expenses (QuickBooks reports have never been more plentiful).

So, what’s the challenge when it comes to getting employee expense reports into QuickBooks? The answer is multi-user access.

See, although there have come to be numerous of ways to get multiple users hooked into access QuickBooks, the fundamental fact is that QuickBooks Pro was originally built as a single-user application, and some of that history still shines through in it’s current incarnation. So, when you need to find a way to grant very limited access to QuickBooks data, to employees that ONLY need access to enough to be able to file an expense report, you have to think twice about exactly how to get that all set up.

Employee Expense Reports in QuickBooks

At ProOnGo, we’ve got a pretty good answer for that challenge. When you add your team to the Employees tab in ProOnGo Expense, they receive an email pointing them to how to file their expenses in the ProOnGo web app.

Employee Expense Reports: Setup

Your employee list stays nice and neat because during the setup process we “suggest” employees to add, based on precisely what appears in your QuickBooks employee list. So, with very little effort, you end up with your Employees tab set up just right in ProOnGo Expense, and your employees looking at emails telling them how to get started with their expense reports.

Employee Expense Reports: You are the Gateway

As you start receiving employee expense reports in ProOnGo Expense, you still hold the key to approving (or auto-approving) the expenses, and therefore deciding what does and does not continue on to QuickBooks. So, you get the benefit of having employees get access to file reports with QuickBooks-related fields, but you still remain the gateway for what data lands in QuickBooks.

How about trying out one of our 30-days-free packages, inviting an employee or two, and seeing if it’s right for you? It’s easy to get started.

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 small business does client-centered work (and who doesn’t), you are no doubt familiar with the QuickBooks Customer : Job field. Whether you are spending time with a client (time activity), driving to them for a meeting (mileage expense), or incurring a routine expense while working on a deliverable (regular expense)… well, whatever you are doing, you’ll want to make sure that Customer : Job field in QuickBooks is filled out correctly.

Customer : Job – Why does it matter?

Your CPA or ProAdvisor has probably already shared a variety of the reasons why this is crucial to get right in QuickBooks. Amongst the reasons, are these:

• Job Costing: You can’t possibly get that right, if Customer : Job is ill maintained.
• Capitalizing R&D: No chance you’ll be able to capitalize correctly, if you don’t keep track of what got worked on when, and by whom.
• Invoicing: Your business likes to generate revenue, right? The QuickBooks Customer : Job field is the key to a detailed and complete invoice to your clients.

QuickBooks Customer : Job – Made Easier

So, with all of this talk about QuickBooks Customer : Job being very important to your company’s financials on multiple dimensions, why are we all still filling out our QuickBooks Customer : Job field manually? If it’s so important, isn’t there some automatic way to fill it out? Until today, the answer would have been ‘no’. However, we now have a better answer.

When you go to file a new expense in the ProOnGo web app (time, mileage, regular expenses), you’ll notice something new when you click on the Customer:Job drop-down. There will be a hover that appears just above the drop-down, that uses QuickBooks Customer:Job addresses to estimate the closest Customer:Job to your current location. You can simply tap “Choose” to use that Customer:Job:

QuickBooks: Easily finding your nearest Customer:Job

In the future, we may even automatically select the nearest Customer:Job for you (rather than having the hover) — we’re waiting to hear your feedback first — then we’ll improve this feature further!