Top 10 Thursday features 10 of the most interesting articles that I found the previous week. There is so much news and information available on the web – it’s difficult to read everything and stay up to date. As I read articles on the web – I’ll share some that I feel are important.
General Business:
- Losing focus? 9 ways to concentrate at work
- Why to-do lists set you up for failure
- Have a pet? Perhaps they can help you out at work {sorry this is just a really cute YouTube video}
Bookkeeping, Accounting, Payroll & Taxes
Construction News
- Checking and Documenting Federal Debarment Status of Vendors
- Asphalt group questions life-cycle cost analysis procedures
- Check out the January issue of Construction Digital
Marketing & Social Media
- 8 Easy Ways to Boost Your Website on a Budget
- Easy Tips for Smart Social Media Strategy {YouTube video}
Well, there’s our Top 10 most interesting articles for last week – do you have some interesting news that you’d like to share?
Working with taxable and non-taxable items and customers in QuickBooks sometimes just freaks people out and causes them to over think the entire situation. I’m frequently asked how to do this by people who are setting up our AIA billing program – here’s a question that I received recently.
I am getting ready to set the AIA billing program {Construction Application for Payment Solution} up tomorrow and just have a few questions.
Should the income items each be posted to an income general ledger account? Or will I use the subtotal line to point to an income account? If I have to post each income item to an income account – I will have to do 2 sets of them, one for wholesale (no tax) and one for retail (taxable) and I would like to avoid this if possible. I guess though we will have to post them to an income account…..thoughts?
Should we use the group items to setup our labor and materials for the schedule of values? For example, when we bill the customer- we only want DEMOLITION to show up, but for our purposes we have the DEMOLITION broken into labor and material. It seems like this would be a good place to use group items?
Each of your QuickBooks Items/Cost Codes should be set up and linked to BOTH and Income and an Expense/Cost of Goods Sold Account otherwise you’ll never get any decent job costing reports.
Subtotal Items do not link to either an Income or an Expense Account – they simply add up the numbers above it and display the amount on the Estimate and Progress Invoices that you create.
Unless you want to track Wholesale and Retail Income individually on your Profit & Loss Report, there is no need to create two sets of Items. QuickBooks can handle both taxable and non-taxable customers and sales using the same item list. You’ll just want to make sure that you have two Sales Tax Items – one that actually charges the Sales Tax Rate and one that has a 0% rate for Non-taxable sales.
Below is a YouTube video that demonstrates the procedure and shows you what your Sales Tax Liability Report will look like if you do it correctly.
As for using group items to track labor and materials for a specific cost code, there are a couple of different options that you could use, depending upon the amount of detail that you want to track. But group items are definitely the way to go if you want to job cost more information than you want the customer to see.
I hope you’ve found this article to be informative, if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share it with others on your favorite social media network using the buttons below.
The size of your QuickBooks file and the number of DB File Fragments determines the health of your QuickBooks company data file. Most people don’t periodically check the health of their QuickBooks file to help prevent data corruption – mainly because they don’t realize that they should or even how to go about it.
Monday’s blog post – Basic File Maintenance Before & After You Upgrade – talked about checking your current file size and health before before you upgrade to a new version of QuickBooks. In reality, you should periodically check this information just to see how healthy your file is or isn’t.
To check the size of your own QuickBooks file – with QuickBooks open press the CTRL and the 1 keys at the same time OR press the F2 key at the top of your keyboard – this will open a Product Information window; similar to that shown below, paying close attention to the circled areas – file location, file size and DB (database) file fragments:
Right click on the image to enlarge it
The screenshot above provides the following information about our own company data file:
- File Size 180932 K or roughly 180 megs which is a fairly large file; this is confirmed by the fact that there are 17583 total transactions in the file
- DB File Fragments 3 – anything under 20 DB file fragments means that your file is pretty healthy, while anything over 20 means your file is sick!
There are some things that you can do to try and repair you QuickBooks file yourself:
- Rebuild you company data file and check the Product Information Window after to see if the number of DB file fragments has been reduced
- Create and restore a Portable company file {watch our YouTube video} and check your results
- Seek the help of a professional to repair your data file – such as QuickBooksUsers.com or QB or not QB
Keeping your QuickBooks data file healthy means that it will perform better!
We hope you found this tip to be helpful, if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share it on your favorite social network.
{this is a YouTube video forwarded to me by a friend and is just too funny}
