All Entries in the "General Tips" Category

Correcting the QuickBooks Spelling Dictionary

If you use the spelling feature in QuickBooks you will find that it is easy to add a misspelled word to the dictionary. That is, QuickBooks says that a word is not in the dictionary and you accidentally click Add instead of Replace. The misspelled word is in your dictionary, and QuickBooks doesn’t provide you with a way to delete the entry. How can you fix this?

Using Online Backups to save your QuickBooks Data

In my Backing Up QuickBooks Data article I talked about the importance of a good backup plan for your business. Today I’ll talk a bit about one portion of a good plan, using online backups.

When I’m hired to evaluate a business and their QuickBooks procedures one of the first things I look at is how they are making backups of their data. Not just their QuickBooks data, but all important electronic business information. All too often I find that there is no comprehensive backup and recovery plan in place. Some businesses have a plan, but they aren’t being implemented correctly. The most common reason is that backing up data is time consuming, complicated and a major hassle to perform. That is why I like online backups – they are simple to implement and don’t take a lot of effort to run.

Helpful QuickBooks Tips

Today I’m going to throw out a few miscellaneous small tips that may help you when you are working with QuickBooks. No particular theme, just a random collection.

If any of you have some helpful tips to add, pass them on in a comment here! I’ll add them to the article.

Changing QuickBooks Sales Tax Rates Mid-Year

You have your sales tax items and rates all set up, you have the sales tax rate selected for each customer, you can generate your reports, you are all set! HOWEVER – what do you do if a sales tax rate changes in the middle of the year? Today I’ll talk about some ways to handle this situation. I am going to assume you understand how to set up sales tax in QuickBooks (see my article on how to set up sales tax in QuickBooks).

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)

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.

QuickBooks Tax Accounting for a Small Business

I use QuickBooks to manage my small business, and it is tax time. There are a few reports that can help preparing information for my tax return that I’d like to point out. I was surprised to find in a survey of my clients that many didn’t know about these features.

Backing Up QuickBooks Data

One of the most important tasks for a business that uses computer is backing up your data. Everyone knows that you need to, few businesses do a proper job. In this article I’m going to discuss how you should be handling backups.

QuickBooks Messenger

One of the new features introduced in QuickBooks 2009 is the QuickBooks Messenger, a feature that helps with communication between QuickBooks users in multi-user environments. I’ll give you a brief overview, talk about what it can do and some of its shortcomings, and also talk about how to disable it if you don’t want it.  Updated 1/5/2009