Hello, QuickBooks Online Edition users!

I'm looking forward to answering your questions regarding how to use QBOE reports to run your business better.

· Profitability

· Cash flow

· Access to financing

· Reducing your exposure to risk

· Even preparing to sell your business...

...these are some of the benefits that can come from stepping back from the day-to-day bookkeeping, analyzing management reports, and making smart decisions to help your business along its path to success.

I keep my files organized by Job #'s. Can I do this in Quickbooks online? The Estimate number sets what the job # will be. I then use this # as my Purchase Order #'s to my vendors and would also like it to be the Invoice #. I want it this way so that when I go to pull up reports I can see if a client deposit was given to this Job #, if a check was written to a vendor and if or when the client has paid the final balance. This will also show me my true job cost and job profit. On a side note, I do not apply the deposit to the job # until I am ready to invoice. I do this for tax reasons.

• DavidStern (Jun 18, 2007 9:17 pm)

At this time, QuickBooks Online does not offer purchase orders or inventory. You can ask to be notified of when Intuit adds this feature – go to http://oe.quickbooks.com/product_info.cfm and click the “Not yet available” banner.

To answer your question, you can override the transactions numbers in QB Online on invoices, using the estimate number from QB Online, although the standard practice is to allow QB online to assign a sequential number for you.

But in QuickBooks, you don’t need to track project transactions by transaction numbers, you can use the Customer:Job name. Almost every transaction type in QB Online will include the Customer:Job column when you turn on “Expense Tracking by Customer” in the Vendors & Purchases Preferences. It is that information that QB will use to track all your transactions that you associate with any Customer:Job name.

In the Customer:Job list, you may want to create sub-jobs that are your job numbers, so the full name of the project would appear like this on reports “Company ABC:#12345-07”.

You can use the standard Profit & Loss report with columns = Customers to see the income & expenses for each job #. Or you can use the Transaction List by Customer as a starting point to create a report that shows all transactions with that Customer:Job #, such as time sheet entries and balance sheet transactions. But you may need to drill down on that report to get detailed information re: if bills have been paid and if invoices for that job are unpaid, invoiced deposits, billed/unbilled expenses; or you may need to use multiple reports to get all of the information you need about each Job #.

We're not tax experts so we can't speak authoritatively to the tax implications of applying the deposit to the job # until you're ready to invoice, but we've never seen that make a difference tax-wise. Usually it has more to do with cash vs. accrual tax basis, or a modified cash basis for tax planning as to whether or not the deposit contributes to net income.

We are a small, but growing business. We provide professional engineering and surveying services, so we use time entry extensively. Some of our projects can be active for a year or even two.

We pull various reports to track the time and costs in our projects. Because both the number of long, large projects, and the number of employees has increased very significantly, we are starting to have problems pulling reports. I can still pull a monthly report of time in all projects, but can no longer pull 2 months at once. Since we are still growing, I anticipate trouble down the road. Are there add-on software products available that work with QuickBooks Online that we should look into? Possibly products that would give us even better Project-reporting information than the spreadsheet we have been using in-house.

To give you an idea of what we are doing and what we need, here is a summary of what we use for our Work-In-Progress reporting. We currently export six QuickBooks reports to a single spreadsheet. These reports include: client balance, estimates (we use as project budgets), income by client, and several time by employee reports sorted by client. These time reports cover different periods - current month, last month, past year, previous years. After much background crunching, our spreadsheet summarizes, for each project, as well as for the whole company, the over/under budget status, the accounts receivable, the direct costs and the time charges. In the past, we have been able to complete and delete projects soon enough that we could handle all active projects together. We're quickly moving to a point where it will not be possible to continue using this report because we will not be able to pull the data in each component all at once. We have been able to extend the life of our system by using "Change columns" to cut back on the amount of detail pulled in the individual time reports, but we need to start looking at a longer term solution.

Do you have any suggestions to keep us from outgrowing QuickBooks Online, but still allow us to pull together this type of important management information into a single report?

Thanks for any help you might be able to give us.

JTS

• DavidStern (Jun 18, 2007 9:55 pm)
• Community_Guru_Stephanie (Jun 19, 2007 7:03 pm)

Hello JTS,

A few thoughts come to mind, and I've also forwarded your question to another person in our firm plus Stephanie @ Intuit to see if they have other ideas - I'll post those if they do.

1. Make sure you don't have a technical problem that's slowing things down. In the help index look up SLOW PERFORMANCE and it lists possible causes.

2. You might need an add-on solution such as the ones listed here for QBOE -- http://marketplace.intuit.com/i-professional-services/v-qb_online/software.aspx

3. Migrating to a desktop platform like QB Enterprise would give you the volume capacity but not the analytics you're looking for - you'd still be doing the crunching in Excel. But if you migrated to Premiere you have more add-on options as shown here -- http://marketplace.intuit.com/i-professional-services/v-qb_prem_2007/software.aspx. You'd need to set up remote access to the desktop software though, of course, a separate issue altogether.

4. In general, it seems like you have a firm command of exactly what you're looking for, so you'll be able to do a good job specifying an add-on product if you go that route. It's a lot of detailed patient work to do that, as I'm sure you know, but I applaud you for "going" there already - it's mission critical for your type of business.

Thank you for your quick response. I will look into the marketplace.

Just to clarify, speed is not the problem. I am actually quite pleased with the speed even as we have grown. The amount of data is growing larger than Quickbooks can pull at one time in some reports. I am starting to get this message more frequently at the bottom of some QB reports:

"This report is too large to display completely. Please use Customize to filter."

It is not just a matter of displaying the data, since when pulled to Excel, the missing data really is not there. So far I can still work around this, but probably not for too much longer.

Thanks again.

JTS

• DavidStern (Jun 19, 2007 7:55 am)
• DavidStern (Jun 19, 2007 4:31 pm)
• Community_Guru_Stephanie (Jun 19, 2007 7:11 pm)

JTS - that's very helpful, your clarification. Thank you. I'll continue to confer with our staff member Carrie Sheret and also Intuit and see what they say regarding capacities. Have you e-mailed tech support through your QBOE? They might be able to do some diagnosis on their end, on your specific data file. - David

JTS --

Here's what Carrie Sheret on our staff said:

Add-on is the way to go. Big Time, EZ Time and Virtual Timecard are web-based time management applications that work with QB Online, as does BillQuick (BQ is not web-based) – don’t know about reporting capabilities – all can be found on the time & expense page in the add-ons pages.

We don’t know if this would resolve all of the reporting problems, as the user doesn’t say if it is only time-based reports that have the issue – the number of estimates and invoices could also be an issue. If that’s the case, then a full-service option like Big Time may be a better solution.

Hope that helps,

David

I love the feature of emailing memorized reports to myself and a set group of Management.

I have a Budget vs Actual report that I want to email myself the 20th of the following month. I need to set the TRANSACTION DATE field to "Last Month". Unfortunately, the only option is "Custom" which would mean each month I would have to manually change the date range each month.

Why do some reports allow me to set "Last Month" or "Last Quarter" and some reports only offer "Custom"?

Thanks
Shel

• DavidStern (Jun 19, 2007 4:34 pm)

Hi Shel,

Good question. I'm stumped as to the why it works like that. Seems pretty straightforward that it should work like other reports so I've forwarded the query to their tech staff.

I will post their response here if I find out anything specific.

David

Hello,

I am sorry that I did not see your response to your reporting issue.  QuickBooks Online Edition (QBOE) has certain size limits when displaying reports and/or saving reports to Excel:

Displaying reports:

    
• Maximum of 256 columns displayed (This is an Excel limit)
      
• Maximum 30,000 cells with data
      
• Maximum 1.5 MG worth of data

Saved to Excel format:

    
• Maximum of 256 columns displayed (This is an Excel limit)
      
• Maximum 50,000 cells with data
      
• Maximum 2.5 MG worth of data

If your reports are being cut off, and you believe it is possibly due to our report limits, here are some workarounds:

    
1. 
       
   If you are looking at a report displayed within QBOE, you can double the amount displayed by simply saving the report to Excel.
   
       
2. 
       
   Since the limit is based on the raw amount of data displayed, you can potentially get more data into a report by eliminating un-needed columns displayed.
   Removing columns:
   a.  Open that you would like to edit.
   b.  Click on the Customize button at the top of the report.
   c.  Go to the Rows/Columns section and click the Change Columns button.
   d.  In the box marked Selected Columns, find any unnecessary columns.
   e.  Click on the un-needed column to select it and click the Remove button in the middle.  This process should remove that column from the Selected Columns area to the Available Columns area.
   f.   Click OK.
   
       
3. 
       
   Segment the report by generating reports with intermediate date ranges. This could work for transaction detail reports that are not grouped or grouped by some date designation (day, week, month).
   
       

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I hope this helps:)

Hi David: I have been cleaning up the books for a new electrical contractor and have run into some questions by the owner. When I run a profit and loss report for example "March" , my figure for my first line item under income (Construction income)is not the same figure i get when i run a sales by customer summary for the same month. Are these figures supposed to be the same? We thought our construction income would be the same as our customer sales. Can you clarify this for me?

Thank You!

Laurie

• DavidStern (Jun 20, 2007 1:16 pm)

Hi Laurie,

Generally yes, they should be the same.

If the income showing on the P&L is higher than the sales by customer summary then usually it means income was somehow recorded straight to the income account without going through an invoice that has the customer's name on it. So you might want to drill down on the income on the P&L and look for transaction type (e.g. any "make deposits"?) or transactions not associated with a customer.

In addition to the P&L and the Sales by Customer Summary reports producing the same number, so should the Sales by Product/Service Summary (depends on which income accounts the Product/Service items point to of course).

So you might want to line up all three reports to help troubleshoot.

Hi David, HELP! Last year we switched from a sole proprietor to a LLC. My accountant needs a report from me that tells how much was billed but not yet paid for as of 6/30/06. Every report I generate shows all the invoices paid for, as they are now... but I need to know what was owed still on that date.

• DavidStern (Jun 21, 2007 5:35 pm)

Hi "Stone" - are you using QBOE or QB Pro? Are you pulling accrual basis reports? If not, that might be your answer right there. Look under the report customization options and switch to accrual. Also, what happens when you pull an A/R Aging Summary report as of 6/30/06? Is there anything (unpaid invoices) showing? Finally, are you using the INVOICE / RECEIVE PAYMENT / MAKE DEPOSITS to record revenue and payments? Or are you going straight to MAKE DEPOSITS without creating invoices? - David

I have a client, he started to use Quickbook 2 years ago, but only use it for tracking sales and pay bill. he never reconcile bank statement, now I am clean he made the mess. I want to track the bank account, Can I set up a new account in next month? or I have to start a new store? what is the best way to tracking the bank account in this point.

• DavidStern (Jun 25, 2007 5:29 am)

Two key questions:

1) do you want to clean up the mess from the very beginning i.e. is the clean up needed to do prior year tax returns?

2) Does your client files taxes on a cash or accrual basis?

Usually in a situation like this the long road ends up being the short cut. Pull together all the bank statements, enter all the transactions that are missing, and reconcile from the very beginning of the account.

How you enter expenses and revenue from prior periods will be determined in part by whether tax is on a cash or accrual basis.

One tricky part is applying payments against invoices. There are multiple methods for working through that - but too detailed and case-specific to describe here.

A final tip: create a clearing account (other current liability) on the balance sheet for each year you're cleaning up, e.g. "2006 clean up clearing" - something very obvious that stands out. Into that account you put all the transactions you're not sure about as you're doing the clean up. This way you can enter them in QB and recon the accounts, then go back later and look at them:

If the numbers in total are small you can probably just write off the discrepancies if CPA approves

If large you can zero in on the important ones and look for patterns.

Hope that helps, good luck! We love doing these, what we call "gnarly recons" -- you just have to be patient (and the client has to be willing to invest in it appropriate to level of benefit).