14 Jan2010
Written by Dustin Wheeler, CPA. Posted in QuickBooks, Tech Tips
With one click of a mouse button, I’ve been able to help some clients be more efficient in their use of QuickBooks. It’s worth taking the time to look through the preferences in QuickBooks and adjust them to your liking. Below are my top five QuickBooks preferences that you should know about!
- Turn off pop-up messages for products and services (under General – My Preferences) – This is new in QuickBooks 2010 R5. If you’re new to QuickBooks and want to know about other products and services you can use with it, you can leave this on. If you’re like me and you know all about the other services QuickBooks offers, check the box to avoid the pop-up windows.
- Automatically recall information (under General – My Preferences) – This can be a big time saver for the information you enter regularly to one vendor for the same purpose like utilities. Type in “power company” and the account Utilities:Electricity comes up automatically. Be careful, though! If you enter bills or write checks to the same vendor for different types of expenses and you’re not paying attention when you enter them in, you could have many misclassified expenses.
- Default date to use for new transactions (under General – My Preferences) – If you’re using QuickBooks in real-time, especially if you’re writing checks from QuickBooks, use today’s date as the default. If you’re entering many transactions after-the-fact, the last entered date as default is generally better.
- Date warnings (under Accounting – Company Preferences) – So, is anybody besides me having trouble writing the year 2010 since we started the new year? Check this box, and QuickBooks will warn you that the transaction you just entered is more than X days in the past. QuickBooks will save you from writing a check dated 1/14/2009 when it should be 1/14/2010. However, if you’re entering several old transactions, such as doing a year’s worth of bookkeeping, you definitely want this turned off.
- Desktop (under Desktop View – My Preferences) – Sometimes, when I open QuickBooks files from clients, dozens of windows open up automatically. This happens because you either have the “save when closing company” preference selected, and all of the reports and input windows you had open the last time you used QuickBooks open up again, or you’re using the “save current desktop” preference, and the same windows open up every time from the last time you selected this preference. If you select the “don’t save the desktop” feature, QuickBooks will open faster because it won’t generate any reports or windows when it starts up. (note to accountants – if you get a QuickBooks file with lots of windows open, go to Window on the top menu, and then click on Close All…yeah, I spent a couple of years clicking on dozens of X’s before I figured out that one)
06 Jan2010
Written by Dustin Wheeler, CPA. Posted in Personal Reflections
There are two books on my office shelf that mean a great deal to me, but I never read them. Sure, I might flip through the pages once in a while, but I don’t use them for reference. They are horribly outdated.
One is titled Accountants’ Handbook, published in 1956. The other is Principles of Accounting – Advanced, published in July 1955. My Grandpa signed the inside cover of the latter with the date 8/21/1957.
Inside the books are several bookmarks. Grandpa used none other than ten-key printouts, something that has gone the way of the dinosaurs these days. I recently gave away my ten-key to another employee since I never used it. Whenever I have to add up numbers, I use Excel.
The books also contain a number of examples of how to complete preprinted forms such as a materials requisition and a cash disbursement journal, which in my world have become antiques. The last time I had to deal with these paper forms was in my Accounting class in high school, since it’s all done through computer software these days.
The books’ antiquity is interesting, but their sentimental value is that they were Grandpa’s. He never taught me anything about Accounting that I can recall, but he defined what an accountant was in my eyes at a young age. When I was in elementary school barely learning basic math, Grandpa would challenge me with something more difficult. His favorite trick would be to ask me an addition or subtraction problem that would go beyond the century mark, for example, 96 plus 7.
As I got older, the questions got tougher. I remember one in particular:
Three friends eat in a restaurant, and the bill is $25. They pay $10 each, and get $5 back in change. Since they can’t split the $5 three ways, each of them keep $1 and give the waiter a $2 tip. So, each of the men paid $9 (10-1), a total of $27. The waiter kept $2. 27 + 2 = 29. From the $30 they paid, where did the other dollar go?
Grandpa laughed as I thought this one out loud, as if he knew the answer and wasn’t going to give it to me.
Impressed with my Grandpa’s number-crunching abilities, I thought that accountants must be really smart. I also admired his kindness, patience, and constant encouragement. There are many reasons why I chose Accounting for my career, and my Grandpa’s influence is one of them.
Grandpa passed away many years ago, but I am reminded of him every day when I pass the two old books as I make my way to my desk.
04 Jan2010
Written by Dustin Wheeler, CPA. Posted in Excel, Tech Tips
Need a loan amortization schedule? There’s a template for that.
Creating a personal monthly budget? There’s a template for that.
Is one of your kids getting married and you’re planning out the expenses? There’s a template for that.
Okay, you get the point and you’re not amused with my not-funny “there’s an app for that” parody, so I’ll stop there.
Friends have sometimes asked me to help them create spreadsheets for all of the above purposes, perhaps unaware of the many templates that exist for Microsoft Excel. Sure, there are some complex customized spreadsheets you should ask a CPA for help with, but for common and simple stuff, you could use a template for free. There are tons of them.
To view a list of templates available in Excel, click on the Office Button on the upper-left corner of the Excel window, then click on New. You might only see a few under Installed Templates, but there are many more you can download from Microsoft Office Online (you’ll see a disclaimer from Microsoft saying that these templates were supplied by members of the Microsoft Office Online community, and Microsoft does not promise that the templates will work for your purposes or be free from viruses and defects).
The most common spreadsheet I am asked to produce is a loan amortization schedule. Excel has a template for this that I am particularly impressed with. All you have to do is enter values such as the loan amount and interest rate in the orange colored cells and the table magically appears. Change one of the values, and the table revises itself immediately. The template is also capable of handling extra principal payments, either regular or occasional, and adjusting for the total number of payments automatically.
If you only want to only use Excel and not any other accounting software, you can download templates for check registers, general ledgers, invoices, sales receipts, balance sheets, and income statements. Doing bookkeeping in Excel doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me and I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, but using these templates is certainly easier than trying to do it from scratch.
You’ll also find several templates that are helpful for tax purposes, such as a mileage log and business travel expense log. Use these templates to organize your information, and your tax preparer will be impressed.
What if you can’t find the template you want on Microsoft Office Online? You might be able to find it among the thousands of templates from Google Docs (Google’s free suite of online productivity software which includes a spreadsheet program similar to Excel). If you’d rather use Excel, you can create the spreadsheet in Google Docs with the template and then save it as an Excel file. I have done this with a few Google Docs templates, and they work perfectly in Excel.
The next time you need to create a spreadsheet, just remember, there might be a template for that.