Look, no calculator, no matching slips to statements, no filing & no duplicates

It just occured to me that I hardly use my desktop calculator any more.  Since I started using QuickBooks to do the calculations for me, and to check my work for me, the Canon is collecting dust.  I wonder, if I take it off my desk, if I'll even notice it's gone.

What am I doing differently?  When a client hands me their receipts, they usually have a pile of cash paid receipts, which may include receipts paid by Visa/MC.

What I do is key in the names, dates, and totals into a credit card account. Then, since they usually reimburse themselves for the total, I can tell if what they reimbursed themselves for adds up to what the receipts say.  This doesn't always agree, because sometimes, they forget to total the adding machine before they start a tape, and whatever was in the machine before they started isn't on the tape. Clue that this has happened is that there's no *Total at the top of the tape.

After reconciling what they gave me against what they paid themselves, I enter the purchases as a Bill, checking for business reasons, of course

Then it's necessary to offset the total against the credit card account with a Bill Credit using the Pay a Bill window.

Why would I do this?  Because I don't know how many times in 25+ years of doing this, that clients give you more than one copy of the same purchase document.  Now that so many business's use QuickBooks, it's so easy to copy a bill and present the same bill more than once.  And if you code it to Office supplies one time and Repairs & Maintenance the next, you'd never know if you just keyed in the purchases as paid cash and didn't check the dates and amounts and invoice numbers through some kind of a system.

That's what the Accounts Payable module in QuickBooks is for.  The nice thing is that if you clear the Bills against the Bills Paid using the Pay Bills window, you get an Unpaid Bills report that is an exception report.  It reports the exceptions, where there's a Bill that wasn't paid, or a payment for which there's no Bill.

No longer do I use my calculator, but I also no longer spend time matching Visa slips against Visa statements, because the same process works wonderfully for credit card purchases. I can just file away all the purchases alphabetically as I post them, so there's no pile of filing either.

No calculator, no matching to Visa statements and no pile of filing to do later. It's a win-win-win.

For more time saving, controlling moves you can make with QuickBooks, you might want to purchase my video series on Mastering QuickBooks.  There's even a one hour video bonus on exactly how to go about setting up the process I've described above.  You'll find the videos for sale on my website.