Posts Tagged ‘Save Time’

Spending less time searching for what’s lost

Misplaced items produce negative emotions like nothing else. I’ve felt the frustration of not being able to find matches when it’s time to light the birthday cake candles, the anxiety of my eyeglasses falling behind the dresser, and the panic of not knowing where my phone is when it’s time to leave for work (only to realize it was in my pocket the whole time). Over the last few years, technology has helped me quickly and calmly find those things that commonly vanish:
  • For a lost phone that’s nearby, nothing is easier than making it sound right from your wrist. I’ve used my Apple Watch to ping my iPhone countless times. Another trick is to use a skill with an Amazon Echo to call a phone with simply, “Alexa, find my phone.”
    Tiles for finding lost things

    Tiles

  • I have several Tiles (see picture above) I can slip on a key ring to sound upon command from the Tile app on my phone. If a Tile is within Bluetooth range, it will play a tune until I find my keys, wallet, or whatever I’ve tied to the Tile. If the Tile isn’t within Bluetooth range, the app will tell me where it last had contact with the object (for example, that I left my briefcase at the office). Now, if I could just figure out a way to attach a Tile to my TV remote without duct tape…
  • I know people who are constantly forgetting their passwords, or writing them down and losing them. Stop those bad habits and use a secure password manager like LastPass.
  • Receipts are easy to lose, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Since I’m an accountant, it should come as no surprise that I’m ultra-organized and completely digital with my personal finances. This comes in handy when I’m at the auto repair shop and asked when I last replaced the tires. Hubdoc has helped to automatically organize my financial documents, and one of its best features is recognizing the text within receipts. So all I have to do is search my Hubdoc account for “tires” and wallah!
With these tools, I can confidently say with my best Liam Neeson impression, “I will find you.”

Outlook Quick Parts will speed up your e-mail

I’m asked some questions over and over again: What’s the difference between an independent contractor and an employee? How do I check the status of my tax refund? What documentation do I need to support my charitable contributions? This is where Quick Parts in Microsoft Outlook comes in handy. With this feature, I can put prewritten chunks of text into e-mails, similar to a copy and paste. The only problem is that Quick Parts might not be intuitive to a user unfamiliar with it. You can add to your Quick Parts gallery by composing a new e-mail. In the new e-mail window, type the text you’d like to save. Highlight the text, and then go to Insert > Quick Parts > Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery. The text you save can include links. Here’s a genius idea: link to a blog post you’ve written on a given topic. If you use Quick Parts frequently, consider adding it to your Quick Access Toolbar. Do this by right-clicking Quick Parts in the menu, then selecting Add to Quick Access Toolbar. Then, Quick Parts will always by readily accessible at the top of the window, as you can see in the screenshot below. quick-parts-quick-access With Quick Parts, I don’t have to Musculation Zhasni – Changez votre corps qualite testosterone enanthate avec expedition star de la wwe : “le bodybuilding m’a sauvé la vie” reinvent the wheel to answer frequently asked questions. It frees up my time for higher value work.

Three time-saving banking features

Online and mobile banking offer quite a bit more than bill pay, PDF statements and a summary of recent activity.  Some of the best time-saving features aren’t as well known, such as:
  1. Alerts.  It’s common knowledge that it’s a good idea to frequently monitor bank activity for errors and fraudulent activity.  I have signed up for e-mail alerts whenever there are international, Internet, phone or mail order purchases made with my debit card, as well as when purchases and ATM withdrawals exceed a certain amount in a given day.  For a credit card I use once a century, I get e-mails whenever charges exceed $0.01.  Alerts don’t completely replace my manual monitoring, but are more effective than daily booting up my computer, mistyping my password, re-entering the correct password, entering my PIN, selecting the checking account, perusing the recent transactions, and trying to remember what that $100 charge at the electronics store was for.
  2. Mobile Deposit.  Sign the check, open the mobile app, enter the amount, take a picture of the check, and it’s done!  Wow!  That was so much easier than finding a deposit slip, filling it out, driving ten minutes to the bank, waiting behind two cars in the drive-through teller line, and opening that pesky vacuum tube canister!
  3. Bank Feeds.  Today’s personal finance and business accounting software can connect to bank accounts and import transactions on a daily basis, and that’s just the beginning.  Xero, the software I use for my personal finances, easily creates and automatically classifies transactions based on a predetermined set of rules.  It’s been a much better experience than the poke-your-eyes-out manual data entry that I used to do!
What online or mobile banking features make your life easier?

Go To Special in Excel

Just as a GPS is a handy gadget for a stubborn guy who refuses to ask for directions, Excel’s Go To Special feature quickly finds and selects cells in a spreadsheet without all of the U-turns and dead ends.  The Go To Special window can be launched under the Find and Replace button in Excel 2010 and it offers a plethora of options to choose from. One of the most useful abilities of Go To Special is selecting blank cells.  For example, I first select all of the cells in a table (A1:D6 shown below).  In the Go To Special window, I select the Blanks option.  After clicking on OK, the empty cells in the table are selected. With the empty cells selected, I can then change the cells’ background color to yellow, for example.  I can also enter a value for the cells, such as zero, making the value apply to all of them at once by holding the Ctrl key while pressing enter. The Errors option (under Formulas) in the Go To Special screen will select all of the cells with errors.  It’s a fast and effective way of making sure a spreadsheet is error-free.  After all, few things are more embarrassing than giving someone a spreadsheet with errors where there are supposed to be numbers. How have the other Go To Special options been helpful for you?  Please share by leaving a comment below.

Using the Excel SUMIF function to find that out-of-balance journal entry

One of the most underrated Excel functions that I use often is the SUMIF function.  On my Excel function tournament bracket, SUMIF ranks slightly behind the SUM, AVERAGE, IF, COUNT, PMT, and RATE functions.  Still, it has a shot at upsetting one of the higher seeds on any given day. The SUMIF function adds the values in cells specified by a given condition or criteria.  Tim Gavin, a fellow CPA blogger, wrote a great blog post last week for the Sikich Technology Blog explaining how the SUMIF function works.  I won’t reinvent the wheel here, so check out his post for a tutorial.  I simply want to give an example of how I use it. Let’s say I’m cruising along in Excel making journal entries.  Each entry is designated by a letter.  Some entries have multiple debit and credit adjustments.  Work comes to a screeching halt when I check the column totals and realize that my journal entries are out of balance by $200.  It may be easy to spot the difference with only four entries in the screenshot I’ve provided below, but just imagine that I’ve exhausted the alphabet and am up to entry z.  With so many adjustments, finding the discrepancy could become a painful and time-consuming ordeal. Out of Balance Adjustments Here comes the SUMIF function to the rescue.  First, I enter the letters of the alphabet for each journal entry down a column (using the fill handle to drag down the letters sequentially saves some wear and tear on the keyboard).  Then I enter the formula shown below and copy it down for each letter.  The formula adds the amounts for the debit and credit column that correspond to each letter of the alphabet. SUMIF formula The results are in.  Adjustments a, b, and c balance out.  It was adjustment d that threw me off my game. SUMIF results

Reversing the page order in Adobe Acrobat

A coworker stopped by my office seeking a solution to a dilemma.  She had received a large PDF document in reverse order (page 1 of the document was page 100 of the PDF, page 2 was page 99, and so on).  Since backwards workpapers are the type of thing that can drive an accountant to the brink of insanity, there was a lot at stake here. We brainstormed a few possible ways to reverse the page order.  In the past, I had just used the pages navigation panel to rearrange the page order for small PDF files of five pages or less.  However, for a long document of about 100 pages, this idea didn’t seem practical.  We also could have printed off the entire document and resorted the pages by hand, but that didn’t sound like fun. Naturally, I turned to Google.  I searched for “reverse page order in Adobe Acrobat” and ended up in this Adobe forum.  The sixth post in this forum provides Javascript code, which I saved to my Acrobat Javascript Folder.  After How to Create a Bodybuilding Diet uk roids central bodybuilding episode 37 | ironmag bodybuilding blog that, a new item called “reverse” appeared under the document menu (see screenshot below). Within a few seconds, the script put the pages in the right order, and I literally saved one accountant’s world from turning upside-down.

Faster access to Google Apps products

Recently, I had one of those “how did you do that?” moments with a tech-savvy client.  This client, like me, set up his domain with Google Apps.  During a meeting, he told me he wanted to show me a spreadsheet he created in Google Docs.  In the web browser, he typed d.(his domain).com and the browser opened his Google Docs login page. Not long after that, as we were scheduling our next meeting, he typed c.(his domain).com in the browser, and his Google Calendar instantly appeared.  I could not help but look with amazement and say “wow, that was fast! – how did you do that?” I love finding faster and more efficient ways of doing things, so I also set up my domain this way for the quickest access to Google Apps.  Like many of Google’s products, I found it was incredibly easy to set up.
  • Go to your Google Apps domain management page and click on settings. Click on the product to the left that you want to change the URL for (Docs is shown below).
  • Click on the “Change URL” link which will take you to the page you see below.  Click on the second button and change the subdomain to whatever you like.  My client prefers the one letter subdomains, for example, “d” for Docs and “c” for Calendar.
  
  • I then had to go to my domain host’s DNS Management page and add a CNAME.  Google has step-by-step instructions for this.
In a prior post, I wrote about how I set up a Gmail address with my domain.  I also have a short URL for my e-mail.  By typing mail.dustinwheelercpa.com, I go straight to my e-mail page.

A Simple Time-Saving Summation Excel Macro

One of my first blog posts was about how I use macros with QuickBooks reports exported from Excel.  That post also contains a brief explanation of what a macro is, so please read it first if you are unfamiliar with macros. In my work, I often find myself combining similar types of expenses provided by a client on a spreadsheet for a more condensed presentation on a financial statement or a tax return.  The repetitive task of selecting cells, adding borders, and entering formulas became tiring with one particular financial statement I was working on, so I decided to write a macro that would perform those tasks automatically. The video below shows me combining expenses from a spreadsheet twice.  The first, in which I add borders to the cells and enter the sum formula manually, takes 57 seconds.  In the second, I select the range of cells and use a shortcut key on my mouse to run the macro.  With the help of the macro, I complete the spreadsheet in only 11 seconds. There are benefits to using the macro besides just saving time.  It reduces eye movement and mouse clicks, both of which seem to wear me out from using the computer over a period of time. Note: The data contained in this video is completely fictional.  You may want to make the video appear in full-screen mode to better read the text.  If you can’t see the video below, click here.

Customizing the Icon Bar in QuickBooks to Work for You

Do you use the icon bar at the top of your QuickBooks screen?  Do the icons represent the tasks you perform most often in QuickBooks?  If you’re using the default icons, the answer is probably no.

I recently began changing the icons to my most frequently used functions.  It makes a big difference in efficiency when the shortcuts are just a click away rather than three or four clicks away navigating the menus.

Before

Let’s do a quick analysis of a few icons on the icon bar above (in my case, it was the default, though yours may be different).  Let’s say that I don’t use memorized transactions (MemTx) so that icon does me no good.  The register icon (Reg) is a little inconvenient because after I click it a box appears asking me to select which account I want to use the register for.  I don’t really have any use for the add services or payroll buttons (and if you’re worried that you won’t find those options after removing them, don’t worry – you can find them all in the menus).

Take a look at your icon bar.  If you see icons that you have never used or will rarely use, it’s time to give it an extreme makeover.

After

Now here is an icon bar that I can really use!  Let’s say that my business has two cash accounts that are used frequently, so I put two icons on the icon bar that link directly to the register for each cash account.  As an accountant, I look at balance sheets and profit & loss statements daily, so I have those icons there, as well as the general journal to make adjustments.  I think having a backup icon is good just as a reminder because most people don’t backup their QuickBooks files enough. There are a lot of different ways to customize the icon bar:
  1. Right click anywhere on the icon bar and then click on “customize icon bar.”
  2. In the view menu you’ll also see “customize icon bar.”
  3. Make a window appear that you want to have on the icon bar, then go to the view menu and click on “add [window] to icon bar.”
In the “customize icon bar” screen, you can change the icon’s picture to whatever you like.  There’s even a funny picture of a pig (see below) among the icons that I’m trying to figure out a use for … maybe transfers to a savings account?

Do you have any ideas for using the icon bar?  Please leave a comment below.

Five QuickBooks Preferences That Could Make Your Life Easier

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! QuickBooks Preferences
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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)