Archive for February, 2009

Copying QuickBooks Form Templates

A very common question I see in the Intuit Community forums is “I’ve created a custom template for my invoices, can I copy that over to my sales orders and other forms?” Today’s quick tip describes how you can easily accomplish this.

How to Deal With QuickBooks 2009 Online Banking

I’ve written several posts about the problems with the new online banking feature in QuickBooks (here, here and here), and in this article I’m going to provide you with some resources to help you if you have to deal with these problems. (Note that on 3/17/2009 I published a followup article)

How QuickBooks Shows Sales Tax on Invoices

In my prior article on sales tax in QuickBooks I showed you how to set up QuickBooks to properly manage sales tax. Now lets see how QuickBooks displays the sales tax in an invoice. When you add sales tax to an invoice we need it to show somewhere on the printed form so that the customer can see all charges that go into the total.

QuickBooks 2009 Release R6

Just a quick note. Intuit released the R6 update of QuickBooks 2009 today, with little advance notice. There are only two fixes listed for this release:

• If your company file is located in certain locations (some network locations, the root folder of a drive) you would get an error (-6177, 0) when trying to open it. This wasn’t a common problem, and if you ran into it you should have already found that you could move the file to a different location.
• In some cases a sales order would be marked as closed when you used group items or items with different units of measure. If you ran into this problem it was a major hassle, so I’m glad to see that they fixed this. Note that if you have some sales orders showing this problem you still need to repair them – the instructions for this can be found in the Intuit web site at http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/ContentSections/Pages/salesorder

If you have had either of these problems, OR if you work with sales orders and group items (or multiple units of measure) then you should install this update soon. If you don’t have these problems, you can wait to do the update at a convenient time. I should note that I have only used this update for a couple of days – I’ve not seen any new problems introduced, but that isn’t a guarantee. By this stage in their development cycle I don’t expect new major problems to be introduced.

Update later in the day on Feb 6 2009: I’m seeing several messages in the Intuit Community forum from people who got the update and are having problems with printing or the PDF driver. I should note that in MY installation I have NOT run into either of these problems. I have not worked with a system that shows the problems that some are reporting, so I don’t have any fixes for them at this point. If these reports are coming from people with Vista 64 bit systems – note that the PDF driver gets altered back to the standard setting when you install an update, and as I mention in my Vista 64 article, that creates problems that you have to fix.

Setting Up Sales Tax in QuickBooks

I see a lot of questions about sales tax in the Intuit Community forums, so I’ll give a quick overview of how to set it up in QuickBooks.

Some Concepts

If you are going to charge sales tax on an invoice, several things must be set up:

• The sales tax preference must be enabled.
• You need one or more sales tax items and possibly some sales tax groups in your Item List.
• When you create an invoice, you must have a taxable customer tax code selected, a sales tax item or sales tax group selected for the tax, and any taxable charges must be set as being taxable on the detail line.