Get QuickBooks Ready for the New Year: Things You Should Do in December

December is a busy month, but you can take steps now to improve your use of QuickBooks in the New Year.

December always flies by. You’re completing your end-of-year work while making time for holiday obligations, and you know your customers and vendors (and employees, if you have them) are experiencing the same.

We recommend you set some time aside to:

• Chase down overdue revenue

• Take action that can accelerate receivables in the New Year

• Expand QuickBooks’ usefulness starting in January

Here’s what we suggest.

We talked last month about reports you should be running at the end of the year. If you haven’t already, open the Reports menu and click Report Center. Take a good look at A/R Aging Detail, Open Invoices, A/P Aging Detail, and Unpaid Bills. It’s important to keep your vendors happy and to encourage customers to catch up with their unpaid bills.

There are many ways to contact customers about invoices they haven’t paid. You can call them. Email them. Send an actual letter on paper. There’s a Collection Report in QuickBooks that will tell you which customers are overdue and how much they owe. You can customize this report to include contact information. 

We like Statements. These documents contain a history of invoices and payments for either a given period or for all open transactions as of the statement date. Open the Customers menu and click Create Statements. You have a lot of control over who gets statements and what they should contain. There’s also a link to finance charges in this window. Let us know if you want help setting these up.

If statements don’t work, we recommend making personal contact of some kind.

You might be able to avoid having to chase down late payments if you use some of QuickBooks’ tools. Encouraging customers to make their payments on time is easier than having to contact them after the due date. You know how uncomfortable that can be. So here are some suggestions.

➜ Allow customers to pay invoices online through QuickBooks Payments.

Think about your own bills. Do you pull out a paper checkbook when you’re paying a utility or department store bill? Maybe you pay through your bank’s website or your vendors’ online payment tools. Your customers would probably like the same options. You can set up an account with QuickBooks Payments and let them submit electronic payments in numerous ways, including credit or debit card, ACH payment, and Apple Pay or Venmo. You’ll know when customers view and pay their invoices.

➜ Assess finance charges.

As we mentioned earlier QuickBooks has built-in tools that allow you to charge late fees for tardy invoice payments. There are a lot of decisions to make when you go this route. We can help out here.

➜ Improve your invoicing system.

Are you using QuickBooks’ default invoice template? It’s fine, but you can do better by personalizing it a little. This can get complicated if you try to add many fields or modify the layout, but you can at least:

• Add your logo

• Make sure your address and the customer’s address in the header are complete

• Get rid of unnecessary fields (do you really need a SHIP TO box?)

Design and content modification changes are more than cosmetic. Every email and piece of paper and form that goes out to customers reflects on your company’s attention to detail and aesthetics. Make sure your invoices are accurate and, above all, send them out as soon as you can.

QuickBooks is such a massive program that there are probably tools you’re still not using. Reminders is one. They can save time, help organize your workdays and keep important obligations from slipping through the cracks. To set them up, open the Edit menu and select Preferences, then scroll down to Reminders and click. With the My Preferences tab highlighted, check the box in front of Show Reminders List When Opening a Company File. Then click the Company Preferences tab. In the window that opens, you can specify which Reminders you want to get, and when. 

If you take nothing else away from this column, think about setting up a new 10-15 minute routine every time you open QuickBooks. We tend to just plow right into doing whatever prompted us to open the software. Take the time to get a quick overview.

• Click the Insights tab next to the Home Page. Look for Open and Overdue Invoices under Income. You can come back to these later and deal with them. You’re just seeing what work needs to be done. Look at the chart under Expenses to see if anything looks out of line.

• Open the Income Tracker, which will tell you more about the status of your money than the Insights page did.

• Look at the data in the colored bars at the top of the Bill Tracker page to see what might need attention.

• Check out one report if you sell products: Inventory Stock Status by Item. Look in the Reorder column to see if anything needs ordering (you may have set up a Reminder for this).

If you have any more questions, we are here to help!

For more information, please contact the Accounting Team or email the office at info@totalbizcare.com to make an appointment.

To view more about the TBC Accounting Team, please visit our Accounting page or our QuickCare℠ page.