No, this isn’t a pre-St. Patrick’s Day prank. Green files are far better for your business in a number of ways.

When I say “green” files, I don’t mean that they are green in color. I mean that they are ecologically-friendly. When I say “green” files I’m referring to scanning your files and paperwork and storing it online instead of in those giant filing cabinets that seem to multiply like rabbits in a busy office.

Online file storage companies offer a variety of services relating to storing and sharing your files. Now, I should make a clarifying point here: Some sites tend to have a greater emphasis on sharing. Sites like Box.net and YouSendIt.com are sometimes lumped into the online file storage industry but these sites are primarily there to help you ship big files from one place to another.

Instead, I’m referring to sites where you sign up and you get what really is a giant electronic filing cabinet where you can store all of your files safely. There is some form of sharing that can do with each one but the emphasis is on secure storage and convenient access. There are several reasons to use this type of service:

• It’s secure and disaster proof; far more so than the filing cabinet you keep in your office
• It’s a better use of space; you don’t need big, ugly filing cabinets taking over your office
• It can be a cheaper alternative; less time is spent on searching for files (and files never go missing)
• Most importantly, it’s an eco-friendly solution that helps to minimize the amount of paper that is not recycled. Rather than storing paper that was once a mighty tree, and only referring to that piece of paper once every year or two, you can shred the paper, recycle it, return that paper to the earth or reuse it again to save a tree, and instead store an electronic copy in a far more environmentally friendly way. No electronic trees will ever be killed to start your paperwork online!

I’ve reviewed four online document storage companies below:

HyperOffice (http://www.hyperoffice.com/online-document-storage/) offers a number of services including online document storage, and is really an ideal company to use when you have a distributed work team or you do a lot of file sharing and might need other types of services as well. Their pricing is based on users and comes as part of a package of other services. Prices start at $44.99 per month for 5 users and businesses  get about 1.25 GB of storage space.

Net Documents (http://www.netdocuments.com/) offers 3 tiers of online storage service. They give subscribers one filing cabinet for basic users and unlimited filing cabinets for the upper 2 tiers. Documents can be tagged for easier searching, they can be reviewed online, there is mobile access, documents are fully searchable, there are check-in and check-out controls so you know who has the latest version, and there are several security features to manage who can see what. Their basic level costs $20 per user per month (and a minimum of 3 users is required) and their professional level costs $30 per user per month. Their third tier is a custom pricing solution. They offer an initial 3 GB of storage, but if you add additional users you get additional 1/2 GB of storage. This is a very feature-rich solution and ideal for businesses that want to manage and control documents.

FilesAnywhere (http://www.filesanywhere.com/) offers a free plan, a basic plan, and an advanced plan with a very user-friendly, customizable price estimating system that allows you to choose how much space you need. The free plan offers 1 user 1 GB of space. I would recommend one of the paid options since one of the advantages of storage is the ability to share the document with others without the eco-unfriendliness of having the document delivered to their office. With the basic and advanced plans, prices start at $2.95 per month for 1 GB and $7.95 per month for 5 GB respectively, and users and gigabytes can be increased as necessary (with a rate adjustment). There are other features that the basic and advanced plans have, too, like higher security and version control.

DocLanding (http://www.doclanding.com) offers 3 tiers of services – free, standard, and premium. The free plan offers 256 MB of storage, the standard plan offers 1.25 GB of storage for $9/month and the premium plan offers 1.25 GB storage for $20/month. DocLanding doesn’t seem to limit the number of users who can access the files, which makes this the most cost-efficient system of the ones I’ve reviewed, although there might be some concerns around who has access to what documents. One of the key differences between the standard plan and the premium plan is the level of support. The standard plan gives users access to online support only while the premium plan gives users access to 2 hours of telephone support.

So, which online document storage service is right for you? Each one offers a different combination of services and prices for your needs – some with a greater focus on enabling web teams and others with a greater focus on managed access and searchability.

Although one of these might be right for you, any one of these services is right for the environment if you replace your current paper storage with an online document storage solution.

It’s time to turn all of your files green!



The junk mail – usually marked “to current occupant” – doesn’t even get opened. It goes into the shredder. The newsletters, fliers, newspapers, and magazines get sorted into a “likely to read” and “unlikely to read” piles for the coffee table or the recycling bin respectively. And then there’s the other mail: Bills, reminders, letters from Mom. It goes into a “must open” pile. It’s the stuff you have to read and act on. Unfortunately, even that pile can be a big stack. And once you’ve acted on it, you sometimes still need to keep it around. Bills and tax forms, for example, are things that you probably don’t want to through out. You act on them but, after that, you might need them for tax purposes or reference, so they go into a file folder. Those file folders can swell over the year. By the end of the year, you’ve got a filing cabinet drawer devoted to papers you hope you never need again but can’t throw away. Problem is, these papers need to be kept around for various bookkeeping, tax-related, or review purposes… perhaps for a few years!

You end up with stacks of paper. STACKS. Not only is it messy and inconvenient, but a small forest was eradicated to convert it into paper. Not good. Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax isn’t very happy about that. And neither should you be.

Enter mail scanning services.

The greenest way to handle your mail, allowing all that mail of yours to be reviewed and processed electronically and returned to the earth from whence it came. (Oh, and besides making sure that we leave some kind of earth for our children, there are other benefits too). Mail scanning is a service offered by a company you can hire who will receive your mail on your behalf and make a digital image of it. You can view it securely, online, you can act on it, you can store it, and you free up all that space in your office. And it’s eco-friendly.

Your mail can still be processed, of course, but now it can be processed anywhere you happen to be, as long as you have access to email. And, you can store, retrieve, sort, and act on your mail conveniently and still have room for a fake potted plant where your ugly gray filing cabinet once stood.

Your bookkeeper will love you, too, because they can receive your bills, invoices, tax forms, and all that “bookkeepy” kind of stuff online without adding ANOTHER box of paper to their fire hazard of an office.

It’s a good service and, as long as companies send out paper mail, it’s a way to help manage what comes into our homes and offices. (And for growing businesses who are trying to manage the expense and time of a mail clerk or admin assistant, this is one way to bring those costs down).

They work like this:

First: You rent a mailing address from the company and have your mail sent there (instead of to your home or business address).

Second: What happens next separates mail scanning services into two different categories. One category of company will just open and scan everything that comes in as it comes in. The other category of company will scan the outside of your mail and you will instruct them as to what to do with each piece. The former is faster, the latter is more private. Check with the companies you are thinking about and ask them which service they provide.

Third: The actions that happen next depend on the company. With almost all of your mail, you can read and act on any mail yourself that you want (such as a bill). Or, if you get a check, you can have them send it to you or (in some cases) deposit it for you. Packages and parcels can be sent to you. And the physical mail that has been scanned? It can be filed, sent to you, or shredded, your choice.

I went out and searched for reputable mail scanning services that you can hire to help you clean up your inbox and filing cabinet and save you time and money. There were 4 that I thought were high quality, high value services and I’ve briefly reviewed them here, but be aware that some of this information might change and is only offered here as an overview. There might also be other companies out there that you prefer, but I chose ones that offered the clearest and most accessible information online.

• Earth Class Mail (http://www.earthclassmail.com/). Service levels are based on the number of pieces of mail received with 2 plans – at $19.95 and $39.95.
• Mailbox Forwarding (http://www.mailboxforwarding.com/features.php). Services are offered at $9.95, $19.95, and $39.95.
• Virtual Post (http://www.virtualpostmail.com/). They have lower promotional prices but they have 5 tiers priced between $9.99 and 59.99.
• Paperless Mail (http://www.paperlessmail.com/). Services start at $9.95 for individuals and $129.95 for businesses.

Mail scanning services are an under-utilized way to save time and money and office space and the environment. I think as companies become more virtual, we will see more of these services offered in time.

1. Open up a free document storage account, so that you can get all your tax documents in one place. Preferably one that has sharing capabilities; all the easier to share with your accountant and bookkeepers. My recommendation: DocLanding, it is free to start (you only need to pay once you exceed certain storage requirements) and you can set up file cabinets and file folders, and the sharing permissions are very detailed. You can share whole cabinets, folders only or documents-only.

2.  Scan a copy of last year’s Federal and State Tax Return and upload it into your document storage. This would be 2008’s tax returns. If you have NOT filed 2008, you have bigger problems than organizing 2009 but you can use these steps to prep a 2008 folder too!

3. As your 1098’s, 1099’s, and W-2’s come in, scan copies and upload them to your document storage unit.

4. Begin to gather all your donation details: Date donated, amount donated, name and address of donation recipient. Upload that into your document storage unit.

5. Outline the following information into a document: Your Full Name (as it appears on your social security card) your social security number, date of birth, profession, home address, phone number, name, social and date of birth of spouse and any dependents. Upload that into your document storage unit.

6. Outline any past due taxes and/or payments that you have made into a document and upload that.

7. If you are self employed or have a small business that gets put on your personal return (typically a sole proprietorship or one owner LLC), prepare the information you will need for your Schedule C. Hopefully you have your bookkeeping up to date. This can be done by making sure all accounts are reconciled and making a PDF copy of your profit and loss, and balance sheet for the year and uploading that into your Document storage center. However, if you don’t have a bookkeeping system, it gets kind of dirty. Your options are to:

• Hurry up and create one now. I recommend IAC-EZ for Freelancers and Micro Businesses, or contact us over at IAC Professionals if you don’t want to do it yourself.
• Manually tally up the numbers. This would mean going through your bank statements and totaling up business expenses into their appropriate tax categories.

Schedule C & Common Expense Categories:

• Advertising
• Automobile Expenses
• Commissions & Fees
• Employee Benefits
• Insurance (other than health insurance; that goes in Employee Benefits)
• Interest Expense (not Mortgages)
• Mortgage Interest
• Legal & Professional Feels (Lawyers, Accountants etc.)
• Office Expenses
• Rents or Leases (this includes vehicles, equipment, office, itemize these out)
• Repairs & Maintenance
• Office Supplies
Taxes & Licenses (not income tax)
• Travel
• Meals that were company event related
• All other Meals
• Utilities
• Telephone & Internet Expenses
• Salaries & Wages
• Independent Contractors
• Bank Service Charges
• Dues & Subscriptions

Income: You do not need to itemize income into details, but you do need to make sure not to overstate income if you receive a 1099. So, make sure when reporting your income, you state which income is reported on 1099’s and whatnot. Or only report the non 1099 income.

Get this data together and upload to storage.

8. If you have an S-Corporation or are a partner in an LLC, you will be getting a K-1 (kind of like a W-2 for a business owner). You will need to receive these prior to filing your return. Make sure you scan these in and put them into your document storage unit.

9. If you work from home, you need to claim your home office deduction. The things you will need documented: Total Square Feet of House, Total Square Feet of Office, Total Rent Paid (if you pay mortgage then don’t worry as this is shown on your mortgage interest statements), Total Utilities paid, Total Repairs & Maintenance on house, Total Taxes and/or Insurance on the house. Add to your document storage.

10. If you have children and paid for child care you will need the name and address of the person or entity you paid, as well as their phone number, social security number or tax id number and total amount paid for the year. Add to your document storage.

11. Make sure to file 1099’s for any Independent Contractors that you have paid. Have them fill out the W-9 and make sure you have their total amount paid for the year, and you can file their 1099’s at www.efileforbusiness.com. Add to your document storage.

12. List of tax payments made and date for estimated tax payments throughout the year. Add to your document storage.

These items will vary by person and entity, not everything is applicable to every person, however. If you follow this checklist you will be in good shape to share that online storage with your accountant and have everything prepared for you in a snap.

Important Deadlines to Remember:

1/15: Due Date for Last Estimated Tax Payment.

1/31: All Contractors must receive their 1099’s and all employees must receive their W-2’s.

3/15: Corporation deadline for filing tax return.

4/15: Personal deadline for filing tax return.

QuickBooks is an accounting application and FreshBooks is an invoicing application. They are two different things, but in the end to have your data matching in both, there could be a ton of double entry resulting in valuable time consumed and strenuous effort.

You can have your data accurate in both, while not matching in both. Matching and accuracy are two different things. For all of the numbers to match up, it is a matter of accuracy. To have all of the details such as sales items etc. it would be a matter of matching.

In this blog post, I will begin to show you ways to get accurate data from FreshBooks into QuickBooks.

This blog post is Part 3, if you have not read the previous posts, I suggest that you do:

Part 1: Methods 1 & 2 to getting FreshBooks Income into QuickBooks

Part 2: Method 3 to getting FreshBooks Income into QuickBooks

Also useful, is my post: Handling Credit Card and PayPal Processing Fees in QuickBooks, which has a short segment relating to FreshBooks as well.

On to the good stuff!

So, you have your income or receivables in QuickBooks, you may have even taken out your PayPal or Merchant Processing Fees. However, you don’t have your sales tax anywhere, as a matter of fact, it is showing as an Income and we all know your Sales Tax is NOT an income.

Well let’s correct that, shall we?

Just to recap… if you charge sales tax, your sales tax is included in the numbers that you entered from FreshBooks, so it is very important that you remove your sales tax from your revenue/income accounts and allocate it to your sales tax payable account.

1. Go into your FreshBooks Account

2. Click on the Reports Tab

3. Click on the Tax Summary Report in the first column

4. Select the month in Question that you want to enter.

5. In the Revenue section, you have to pick either Billed (Accrual) or Collected (Cash Based) – the choice you pick will be determined by the income entering method you have elected to use (based on previous posts). If you selected Methods 1 or 2 where you are accounting for your receivables you will select the Billed (Accrual) method. If you selected Method 3 where you are only accounting for your payments received you will select the Collected (Cash Based) method.

6. Once you have the amount/totals from your report (sorry I can’t give you a screen shot, I don’t have sales tax inside of my company) go into QuickBooks, select Company from the file menu and Make Journal Entries.

7. Enter the end date of the month you have pulled your sales tax details for.

8. In the first row from the account drop down box, pick your Income Account (mine is IAC Professionals Service Revenue), tab over to the debit column and enter the total of your sales tax from your sales tax report.

9. In the second row from the account drop down box, pick your Sales Tax Payable account (this should always be Sales Tax Payable) and in the credit column enter the total of your sales tax from your sales tax report. In this row you will also need to enter the name of your Taxing Agency in the Name Column. If it is not yet in your Vendor List, click Add New and create it. For example, mine would be State of Florida Sales Tax Department.

10. Press Save and Close

This has removed the actual sales tax portion of your revenue, out of your revenue and into your sales tax liability account, enabling you to use the ‘Pay Sales Tax’ feature inside of QuickBooks.

Do you have any questions or specific circumstances that I did not help you with? Feel free to comment on the post with your question(s) and I will respond personally!

Many merchant accounts (these are the people that permit you to accept credit cards) just take a monthly debit out of your bank account at the end of the month, these are easy to account for, you simply enter a withdrawal in your account register for the amount debited and categorize it as Merchant Processing Fees, which should be a COGS or an Expense (this varies by where you are located and your industry, check with your accountant if you are unsure).

However, what about those merchant accounts that take the percentage before you even get the money, similar to Paypal? This makes it more difficult to track, however, I do have an answer.

(I want to say that I recommend that the following is done even if your fees get debited as a whole so that you can process the flow of your income.)

1. Open up a new bank account inside of QuickBooks, call it Merchant Account, or PayPal, or Google Checkout (whoever your processor is). Don’t hesitate to set up multiple, as a matter of fact many of my clients have multiple, so I set up an account titled ‘Merchant Accounts’ and then I have sub accounts titled PayPal, Google Checkout, Chase Paymentech under the main ‘Merchant Accounts’ account.

2. When you receive your payment for services (via Invoices or Cash Receipts) don’t deposit directly into your checking account, deposit it into the merchant account it goes into, because let’s be honest, it is not in your checking account yet.

3. As the monies show up in your checking account, transfer the funds from your merchant account to your bank account. This also makes it easier for PayPal when you may accumulate funds in the account and only make random transfers from the PayPal account.

4. Accounting for your fees/costs – can be done in one of three ways:

• If you get lump sum fees at the end of the month debited from your checking account, don’t worry about doing anything differently, just record that transaction once it posts.
• If you are using a service like Google Checkout or PayPal you can ’see’ how much they take out via their transaction reports, so at the same time you make that transfer from your ‘merchant’ bank account in QuickBooks to your ‘checking’ bank account in QuickBooks – you can make a withdrawal entry from your ‘merchant’ checking account for your merchant processing fees.
• If you are using a more standard merchant services provider, you rarely get daily reports, and rather get monthly reports, at the end of every month when you get your reports, take the cost of the fees they charged you off of the statement and make a lump sum withdrawal from your ‘merchant’ bank account for your merchant processing fees. This is a good way to reconcile too, making sure you received all your monies, because at the end of the month after you enter the fees, the only thing left in your account should be any undeposited recent payments.

For my FreshBooks followers:

I promised you a follow up to my recent ‘making FreshBooks and QuickBooks play nicely posts’ – if you have not read them yet, check them out:

Making FreshBooks work with QuickBooks and vice versa Part 1

Making FreshBooks work with QuickBooks and vice versa Part 2

My suggestion for you all in regards to credit card processing fees is to do the same thing that I suggest above – create additional accounts for your merchant processing accounts and rather than depositing the payments received directly to your bank account, place them in their appropriate merchant account as the ‘middle man’ before it hits your bank account, and follow one of the three options above for recording the appropriate fees.

Do you have any questions or specific circumstances that I did not help you with? Feel free to comment on the post with your question(s) and I will respond personally!

Stay tuned, in the upcoming week I am going to talk about allocating Sales Tax in QuickBooks for FreshBooks users, incorporating it into my previously suggested methods for recording receivables and revenue.

QuickBooks is an accounting application and FreshBooks is an invoicing application. They are two different things, but in the end to have your data matching in both, there could be a ton of double entry resulting in valuable time consumed and strenuous effort.

You can have your data accurate in both, while not matching in both. Matching and accuracy are two different things. For all of the numbers to match up, it is a matter of accuracy. To have all of the details such as sales items etc. it would be a matter of matching.

In this blog post, I will begin to show you ways to get accurate data from FreshBooks into QuickBooks.

This blog post is Part 2, if you have not read Part 1, I suggest you do so, as it covers Methods 1 & 2.

In methods 1 and 2 we spoke of various ways to get your data into QuickBooks assuring that you have your Accounts Receivable accounted for. Now, we understand those two methods may not be ideal, and not everyone wants (or needs) to track their Accounts Receivable in QuickBooks – after all they track it in FreshBooks. We also understand that Cash Basis companies only have to worry about income after it is received.

So, let’s talk about Method 3, shall we. Method 3 is all about getting your paid income into QuickBooks from FreshBooks.

Method 3: Getting Money Received (Cash Revenue) as a whole into QuickBooks

This method is ideal if:

• You do not need to track accounts receivable in QuickBooks.
• You only want income data in QuickBooks after it is received (when it becomes cash revenue).
• You file taxes on a cash reporting basis (not accrual)

Step by Step Instructions:

1. Log Into your FreshBooks Account

2. Click on the Reports Tab

3. In the second column, click on the Revenue by Client report.

4. Select the year that you want to report on, highlight all clients, select total collected, and then click View Report.

5. Open QuickBooks

6. Set up a generic or general client in your Customer Center. My general client is called ‘FreshBooks Receivables’ (If you don’t know how to do this, visit my blog post on setting up a customer in QuickBooks)

7. Click on Company in the main menu bar and then Make Journal Entries

8. Select the end date of the month you are going to be recording sales, for this example we will be doing January 2010. So I would enter the date of January 31, 2010.

9. From the account drop down pick your Income account (mine is Accounting Services Income).

10. Tab over (or move with your mouse) to the credit column and enter your payments collected total for the month you are entering. You will get this information from the Revenue Report that you previously generated from FreshBooks, it is your total at the bottom for the month in question.

11. Go to the second row and from the account drop down box select your bank account that the funds went into and in the debit column enter the same amount (in most cases QuickBooks will automatically fill in that amount for you).

12. Tab over to the Name column and enter your general client name that you set up in Step 6.

13. Check to make sure that your entry looks similar to this:

14. Press Save and Close

What has happened now is you have your entire month income inside of QuickBooks. The income is sitting in your bank account.

Now, there are some rules about this:

• You must wait until the end of the month.
• If you want to track revenue by ‘client’ rather than just the general revenue, you would do the same thing as above but change Steps 6, 10 and 12.
  1. Step 6 would no longer be necessary.
  2. Step 10 would become: Tab over (or move with your mouse) to the credit column and enter your payments collected by client for the month you are entering. You will get this information from the Revenue Report that you previously generated from FreshBooks, it is next to your clients name, in the month column you are entering.
  3. Step 12 would become: Tab over to the Name column and enter your client name that you set up in Step 6.

Problems you may be thinking:

1. Not all of my income goes into the same bank account.

Answer: That is fine in Step 13 you can have multiple rows, not just two. So let’s assume that my $8,337.40 deposit was split between three bank accounts. I would still have the Row 1 be the credit column, but then Rows 2, 3 and 4 would each have the bank account that the monies went into and the specific amount. See here for an example:

2. Not 100% of my invoice payments go into my bank account, because I accept credit cards or Paypal and they take a percentage of the revenue.

Answer: If you accept credit cards or Paypal you have to understand that your money goes into a ‘different’ bank account before it hits your real bank account. Think of your merchant account as being a bank account or your Paypal account as being a bank account. In the next blog post I will explain how to deal with this in detail.

3. What about sales tax? All of your methods are recording sales tax as general revenue or income and I know it is not.

Answer: You are correct. We must make an entry to appropriately allocate your sales tax. I will cover this in detail in a follow up blog post as well.

Stay tuned, in the next week I will be writing two more blog posts:

• How to handle accounting for credit card processing or Paypal fees in QuickBooks (with a special segment on relating it to the suggested FreshBooks entries)
• How to handle allocating your sales tax in QuickBooks from FreshBooks.

QuickBooks is an accounting application and FreshBooks is an invoicing application. They are two different things, but in the end to have your data matching in both, there could be a ton of double entry resulting in valuable time consumed and strenuous effort.

You can have your data accurate in both, while not matching in both. Matching and accuracy are two different things. For all of the numbers to match up, it is a matter of accuracy. To have all of the details such as sales items etc. it would be a matter of matching.

In this blog post, I will begin to show you ways to get accurate data from FreshBooks into QuickBooks.

Method 1: Getting Receivables as a whole into QuickBooks

This method is ideal if:

• You do not need to track the accounts receivable balance by client inside of QuickBooks, but want to track your accounts receivable as a whole.
• Have no issues with documenting your invoicing on a monthly basis inside of QuickBooks.
• Are okay with entering your payments received on invoices, once the payments are actually received from your customers.

Note: I offer this as an option, because maintaining who owes you what in QuickBooks is not that big of a deal, because you track that same data inside of FreshBooks. However, tracking your accounts receivable total is necessary for some companies, such as accrual based entities.

Step by Step Instructions:

1. Log into your FreshBooks Account

2. Click on the Reports Tab

3. In the second column, click on the Revenue by Client report

4. Select the year that you want to report on, highlight all clients, select total billed, and then click View Report.

5. Open QuickBooks

6. Set up a generic or general client in your Customer Center. My general client is called ‘FreshBooks Receivables’ (If you don’t know how to do this, visit my blog post on setting up a customer in QuickBooks)

7. Click on Company in the main menu bar and then Make Journal Entries

8. Select the end date of the month you are going to be recording sales, for this example we will be doing January 2010. So I would enter the date of January 31, 2010.

9. From the account drop down pick your Income account (mine is Accounting Services Income).

10. Tab over (or move with your mouse) to the credit column and enter your sales total for the month you are entering. You will get this information from the Revenue Report that you previously generated from FreshBooks, it is your total at the bottom for the month in question.

11. Go to the second row and from the account drop down box select your accounts receivable account and in the debit column enter the same amount (in most cases QuickBooks will automatically fill in that amount for you).

12. Tab over to the Name column and enter your general client name that you set up in Step 6.

13. Check to make sure that your entry looks similar to this:

14. Press Save and Close

What has happened now is you have your entire month income inside of QuickBooks. You should be able to see that the balance exists for your general client, and see the revenue reported in your Profit & Loss Statement.

You are not done yet! When you receive payments from your customers on these open invoices, you have to record this in QuickBooks. This is easy though:

15. Get a notification from FreshBooks that you have received a payment.

16. Open up QuickBooks

17. Click on Customers & then Receive Payments from the main menu.

18. Pick your general customer name in the Received From field, enter the amount received, the payment method, the date it was received, and then in the Memo line, I like to personally leave the real clients name and invoice number.

19. Click Save and Close.

20. Don’t forget to deposit your money in the Banking -> Make Deposits menu, all customer payments are automatically stored in Undeposited funds in recent versions of QuickBooks (in some older versions, you could pick the account you want it deposited to at the received payments screen).

Method 2: Getting Receivables on a per client basis into QuickBooks

This method is ideal if:

• You want track the accounts receivable balance by client inside of QuickBooks.
• Have no issues with documenting your invoicing on a monthly basis inside of QuickBooks.
• Are okay with entering your payments received on invoices, once the payments are actually received from your customers.

It is the same process as outlined above in method 1, with the following changes:

1. In Step 6 you will either want to skip this step or set up your actual clients name if they are not already in QuickBooks.

2. In Steps 10 and 11 you will only enter the amount for the specific client in that month, rather than the total revenue.

3. In Step 12, rather than entering the ‘general clients’ name, you would enter the specific name of the client.

4. In Step 18, rather than picking the ‘general clients’ name, you would select the specific name of client from whom you received payment.

It should be noted that with this method you will have to do an individual entry for each client, as QuickBooks does not permit combined General Journal Entries involving accounts receivable and multiple customer/client names.

In my opinion: It is not necessary to record things as in method 2, because you are already maintaining client specific accounts receivable information in FreshBooks. Entering your data as outlined in method 1 will assure your data is accurate, just not identical as it relates to client specific invoices and balances.

Before you pick one method over the other, I want to state that there are more ways than just these and I will be outlining them in upcoming blog posts.

Some of you may not want to have to enter your accounts receivable (the invoicing) and the payments received (the money received), this is especially applicable to cash based reporting companies, whose income is only income once the payment is actually received. So, rather than having to enter all the invoicing totals and then payment receipts, you can enter just payment totals. There are several ways that this can be done. Stay tuned and I will outline them in an upcoming blog post.

Step by Step:

1. Open QuickBooks

2. On your Menu bar click Customer Center

3. Click New Customer & Job and then New Customer

4. At a bare minimum enter your customer name up top in the Customer Name field

5. Enter any other additional information that may be pertinent or that you will need. I always say the more the merrier, but some companies may have an external CRM system or outside Invoicing application and may not need all of the full details of every customer inside of QuickBooks.

6. Press Okay and Voila! You have a new customer.

Note: Instructions and Screen-shots in this blog post are based on QuickBooks Premier 2009, visuals or steps may vary by edition.

What better time to re-start a blog than with a whole new logo and design?

Stay tuned for application reviews, bookkeeping tips, and the whole nine yards.