Enter your invoices as close to the time of service or sale of a product. Once you have created the invoice and sent them to your customer it is important to follow up on the payments. Many times, those invoices can get lost in the mail or misplaced.

Collect emails from your customers and send digital copies of the invoices to ensure timely delivery. Check your A/R (Accounts Receivables) weekly and send friendly gentle reminders. It becomes increasingly difficult to collect as time passes on old invoices.

Pro Tip: Offer alternative forms of payment ACH, credit card, Zelle, or Paypal and let your customers know about these quick payment options

QB Tip: If you provide a reoccurring service have your accounting software automatically create the invoice.

Keeping your books updated close to real time will give you information on how much cash the business has available and if there any fraudulent charges. Entering or downloading bank feeds daily if you have lots of transactions and weekly if your transactions are moderate.

Enter A/R (invoices) as soon as you or the staff provide the services or sells the product and enter A/P (bills) as soon as you receive them to take advantage of discounts for paying early and tracking due date to avoid late fees.

QB Tip: Set up bank feeds so transaction download into your account.

QB Online Tip: QuickBooks online has an option to download transactions automatically with direct bank feeds.

Review incoming banking and credit card transactions daily or weekly depending on number of transactions. This gives you an opportunity to review bank and credit card transactions for accuracy and catch fraudulent charges in real time or missed deposits due to bank error. If your books match your bank, you can monitor your cash balance and avoid costly bank charges due to bounced checks.

After you have reconciled all the transactions to your monthly statement, it is important to print the reconcile report and review the uncleared transactions. Clean up any old transactions.

Checks that are lost should be cleared out and reissued if necessary. The only items that should be in the uncleared section will be current transactions

QB tip: Use bank feeds and clear transactions for quick reconciles at month end.

For example, you purchased some desks and you are not sure if it is an expense or asset. No worries. Classify it as “unallocated expense” and write in the memo section “purchased two desks for $200.00 each for the back office”. You got a new loan and the account has not been set up in QuickBooks, but you want to enter it into the books. Put the deposit in “unallocated income” and write “new loan from USABank please set up new account.”

This will save time, and the transactions you are not sure about are all in one place and your bookkeeper won’t have to ask you later about the transaction.

Quick tip:

Not sure how to classify a purchase or deposit “unallocated expenses” or “unallocated income”. let your bookkeeper or accounting professional categorize them correctly.

QB tip:

Attach the receipt or document to the transaction in QuickBooks.

It seems like it is always a mad dash to collect W-9 in January of the filing year. A tip to avoid the stress is to collect the document in real time.

Quick Tip:

Before you cut that check to a service vendor or outside service provider, request a W-9 right away from the vendor. Even if you are not sure, it is always a good practice to request one anyway. And if turns out you do not need a to file 1099 for them it’s good to have that W-9 as a record of not qualifying for filing. You can download a PDF here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf and email it to the vendor

QuickBooks Tip: You can attach and store that W-9 digital document in the vendor information in QuickBooks. No separate file system needed!

QuickBooks online Tip: QBO has a feature you can invite contractors to fill out their W-9 and sign them electronically, securely inside their intuit account