2 minor annoyances

1) You can't create bills or mark bills as paid from the online banking centre when the account is a Credit Card. I don't really see why you can't do this, because you can do it if it's a bank account.

2) Can't pay multiple A/P accounts from one cheque. This one really puzzles me, but sometimes we track bills using different A/P accounts from the same vendor (Revenue Canada - CPP Payable & Income Tax Payable) and pay them using one cheque (payroll source remittance). QB is unable to accomodate for this. I don't use the payroll feature built-in to QB though.

Bug in Company Snapshot

This is a minor bug, but if you add a Purchase Order account to the Account Balances section in the Company Snapshot, it improperly display $0 as the balance, even though there is are open purchase orders with a balance.

This might be due to the fact that Purchase Orders are non-posting? Its strange, but double clicking on the account item in the Account Balances section shows a report that shows the proper balance.

Successful Upgrade to 2010

The upgrade went smoothly. I like the new Company Snapshot, although quickzooming on the graphs is kind of "ghetto", for lack of a better word. Its slow and very DOS-looking. I was expecting something a bit more slick.

I turned on MultiCurrency and met my first problem, you can't change the currencies of existing accounts.

I had been using an account to hold my US credit card alongside an exchange rate expense account to manage the exchange rates. Turning MC on made my account default to CAD and I couldnt' change it.

I actually ended up going back to a non-MC backup. Using an expense account to manage the difference in currency value for USD vs CAD works fine for us, since the two currencies are close enough in value.

Enter bill payments from credit card screen

I rely quite heavily on the ability of QuickBooks to download transactions from my bank/credit card account, from which I create the transactions in QB to match.

However, one of the annoying things about the screen for matching downloaded statements with your credit card transactions is that you cannot pay a bill directly from it.

Instead, you have to exit the screen, find the bill in the "Pay for Bills" screen, mark it as paid with a credit card, and then go back to the Credit Card screen to see that it matched up.

For bank accounts, this is not an issue, as when you come across a payment, you can select from two radio buttons, one of which is, "pay for a previously created bill". I'm not sure why you couldn't have this same option for credit card transactions. We pay most of our bills with credit cards.

Reconciliation for payments

The recent work on the payments for CA and upcoming UK had me thinking about how we handle the processed payments in QuickBooks using an external provider (Elavon).

Basically, for Elavon, we have set it up so that we manually perform what they call "Settlement" each week, which is where the funds are actually downloaded into our bank account from the merchant provider.

Here is our process:

1) Enter Settlement option in the payment terminal and print Report

2) Report lists all transactions over the last period (1 week for us).

3) in QuickBooks, open the Record Deposits window and compare the entries with the Report printed from the Terminal

4) Compare the total amount with the total amount in the Record Deposit Window.

5) It pretty much always matches up for us, so just Record the Deposit in QB and confirm the Settlement on the Terminal and we are good to go

6) Monthly we receive a statement for the fees charged during that month. We simply enter this as an an expense in the Merchant Account Fees (COGS) account that is created by default.

All I really wanted to say was that it actually works really well for us, and is easy to follow and see what is going on. We don't care about the transaction fees for each individual transaction, so entering them at the end of the month works out just fine.

Entering Bills BEFORE receiving inventory

I know that QuickBooks is able to handle these two situations:

1) Receiving Bills & Inventory simultaneously
2) Receiving Inventory before a bill

But it doesn't seem to handle Receiving a bill before the inventory, which is a situation we have often encountered. For example, for dresses, we usually have to pay 50% deposit up front, and then the remaining 50% before shipment. Therefore we have usually paid the full amount before receiving any bill. Unfortunately, if we want to create bills from purchase orders in QB, we have to wait until we receive the product before entering the transacations for the bill and bill payments that may have occurred months ago.

It would be great if QB allowed you to enter the bill first and record payments against it before we've received the actual items themselves.

The Write Cheques Window is dated

I rely fairly heavily on the ability of QuickBooks to download transactions from my online bank account. One of the things I notice though, is that when you try to add expenses paid with the bank account, it forces you to "write a cheque".

To me, this is very dated, as I rarely actually write a physical cheque. Most of the debits from the bank account are through some form of electronic direct payment, or an automated withdrawal.

I've certainly gotten used to writing a cheque, but its not something that's natural for me, and the interface does not feel natural for recording an electronic payment.