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.

Mid Summer Update

I haven't posted anything in a while, and the reason is that its been pretty smooth sailing for the last little while.

I guess we have gotten accustomed enough to QuickBooks that we are just concentrating on the daily operations of the business.

Most of our daily interaction with QuickBooks is familiar enough that we don't really notice it too much anymore.

We are still looking forward to getting Multicurrency, as more and more of our transactions are occuring in US dollars as we deal with new Vendors. And we are still disappointed with the current implementation of Sales Orders, but we are working around it for now.

Looking forward to multi-currency support

We just recently signed up a for a US credit card, since many of our suppliers deal in USD.

Currently, since QB 2009 does not have multi-currency support, I am manually entering conversion rates for every single transaction made. This is most definitely tedious and tiresome. I'm not sure if this is the best way to do things for now, but I'll definitely be looking forward to MC support in the next version of QB.

Grouping Sales Orders into One Purchase Order

We thought about beginning to use Sales Orders to track items that customers have purchased but we need to order for them.

We were hoping that after taking several sales orders, you would be able to search for them by vendor, group them up, and create one purchase order. It only makes sense, since if I have 3 or 4 outstanding sales orders from the same vendor, I'm only logically going to submit one purchase order to them.

I was really disappointed to find out that QB does not have an easy way to do this. You can create a report and see exactly how many sales orders you have open and group them by Vendor, but you can't multi-select them and create one purchase from 5 sales orders, for example.

Email Campaign Manager

One of the features that I would find really useful is an Email Marketing campain manager in the Customer Centre of QB.

Sending out mass emails isn't as easy as it sounds.  First it is difficult to draft up a professional looking email with good content.  Unless you are a marketing major, this is something that every small business owner is going to struggle with.

Second, there are little tricks that are used to ensure that your email does not get filed in someone's spam folder.  These can be found by googling, but it is likely that a SBO would not know them, and would not even realize that most of his/her customers are not receiving email at all.

Lastly, it is hard to track the success of your email campaign (unless you have really specialized tracking content as a part of the email). 

Having an Email Campaign Manager that makes it easy for SBOs to send out emails about specials, discounts, promotions, new products etc would add a lot of value to QuickBooks.

Confusion when Receiving Payments

I'm posting this because my wife is continually getting confused when using the Receive Payments window.

When she opens up 'Create Invoices', and she would press 'Prev' to get the last created invoice.  However, she then opens up 'Receive Payments' she presses 'Prev' by instinct, and expects to get the last invoice created.  Ofcourse, we know this is not true, and instead you get the last payment received.  After observing that the name of the customer is not correct, she then proceeds to edit the details of the Receive Payment window... thinking that she is creating a new payment entry, when in fact she is editing the old one.

Then when she clicks Save (and clicks through the warning), we have just lost an old payment.

I know this is as designed, but in my opinion, it really shows the weakness of the whole "Prev/Next" buttons in the invoice and payments windows.

Interesting Observation #1: Sales Dashboard

Angel uses a separate spreadsheet to track her orders and sales.  She uses colors to track which orders have been paid for but not ordered yet, ordered but not arrived, arrived and awaiting alterations etc.

I told her you could probably use QB and the inventory tracking to achieve a similar result, but she preferred the spreadsheet method as it gave her at a quick glance the status of all her orders and other information.  She uses it as a sort of dashboard, that easily allows her to keep track of things from a high level.

No support for Quick method GST

I know that QuickBooks handles all your GST items and calculations for you, however, I'm also aware that there are a number of small business owners that are using the Quick Method for GST filing (including myself).

The Quick Method means that the SBO simply remits a reduced rate for GST instead of having to calculate GST collected and Input Tax Credits.  

I'm sure that there are a lot of contractors out there that are using this method, and I'm really surprised that QB does not handle this at all.

This basically means you will have to calculate your GST remittance manually, and then enter a adjusting journal entry to correct the balance afterwards.

Manually entering GST items

For most operations of quickbooks, it attempts to calculate the GST amounts automatically.  This works for most cases, however, when we receive products overseas, it does not work out well.

The reason, is because we will usually receive the GST amounts in a separate bill from the shipping company.  With this, there is no real way to manually enter the GST amounts.

The reason why we need this is because the GST amount could vary depending on the value that Canada Border Services Agency decides that our shipment is worth.  If we receive a $100 bill from UPS after receiving our goods, it could very well composed in the following fashion:

GST : $50

Duties: $30

Brokerage fees (and GST on brokerage fees): $20

This is just a fake example, but it demonstrates that if you try to manually add a standalone GST item, QB gives you a warning that you may be filing GST incorrectly, and should use the File GST feature.  I end up using a general journal entry.

I figure you can probably just ignore this warning and it would probably still work, but it doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Automatic Depreciation

I was kind of surprised that QB did not seem to handle automatic depreciation of assets, or allow you to enter some sort of schedule of depreciation.

The suggested solution, seems to be to use the Fixed Asset List to manually record your depreciated amount each year.  While this works, it seems a bit primitive, and it seems like it would be the perfect place to add some sort of method for entering, for example, a yearly percentage of depreciation, and have quickbooks automatically calculate the amounts, and make the entries for you.

Gave up on EasyStart

Well, we gave up on EasyStart almost immediately because it does not have online banking, which for me, I rely on heavily because I don't want to reconcile my bank statements by hand.

Overall, there are things I definitely prefer with Easy Start for these reasons:

- less clutter in the interface, easier navigation

- i liked you could list invoices/receipts like an actual list.  I've never been a fan of how QB shows Invoices as a 'stack' with Next/Prev buttons.  It's just not very intuitive and makes it hard to browse through items.  This actually gave me an interesting idea, what if QB viewed invoices similar to the coverflow feature of iTunes?  I think that would be a really slick addition, that would give the interface a renewed look, and make browsing easier.

- way too many menu items in Pro/Premier.  It reminds me of Microsoft Word, and how its difficult to remember exactly which submenu you would find a certain item.

I would've been completely satisfied with EasyStart if it had online banking downloads, but I guess that's a good reason to keep this feature in the more expensive flavors.

Customizing templates with layout designer

My last post also prompted me to post something specifically about Layout Designer.  It has been great!  It was really easy for my wife to create custom, professional looking invoices that actually looked quite different than the standard QuickBooks ones.

As I mentioned before, I was actually kind of surprised that this is available in the lower-level EasyStart.  It seems like something that should be reserved for Pro or higher.

A few other comments about our experience with the layour designer:

- it was a bit difficult explaining to my wife the difference between a 'label' and a 'field'.  ie, something that is static, versus something that is dynamic (different on every invoice).

- the main table of the invoice, with the columns & headings is a bit cumbersome to use.  Especially since you edit the table area in a completely different way than when you edit a label, or add a new field.

I can see why some customers would be upset about not being able to bring their templates forward from pre-logan, they probably spent a lot of time customizing them to their needs (as we did)

Switching from Premier to EasyStart

I started off my wife by using Premier (Retail) flavor, but found that she is getting confused once in a while, its a bit too much for a new user to absorb.

I switched to the EasyStart flavor, after some initial investigation, and found that it handled all of our needs, and has a simpler interface!

I wanted to make sure it still had the layout designer for customizing templates, which it still does (which actually surprised me a bit).

I will report back in a few weeks to see how her experience with EasyStart is, and whether it has helped or not.

Entering a payment during Invoice Creation

One of the flows that we encountered, is that when we create an invoice for someone, we are also accepting a deposit at the same time.  However, in order to print the invoice with it showing the deposit paid, we must do this:

1. Create an invoice. Close it.

2. Receive a payment against the invoice. Close this.

3. Go back to the invoice and print it, to show that a partial payment has been made against it.

It would be great if you could accept a payment immediately from within the invoice window.  So that you don't have to close it, and re-open it and look for it again.

Entering Expenses

My accountant and I had a tough time trying to figure out a way in QB to enter expenses that were made on my personal credit card.

What we wanted to do was enter an expense, and then directly increase the Partner Equity account by the same amount.  Basically, treat the transaction as if I had injected Equity into the company by giving it this item, or paying for this expense.

Instead QB seems to want me to transfer funds from equity to a bank account, and then proceed to pay the bill with the bank account.  Unfortunately this would not match up with my bank records, as I technically did not transfer anything in and out of that account.

We ended up making a general journal entry, whereby we increase the Expense account and the Partner Equity account directly.

Introduction

Greetings all,

The purpose of this blog will be to document my experiences in setting up a new company, from scratch, using QuickBooks 2009.

The company is called Novelle Bridal (http://www.novellebridal.com), a retail store specialing in wedding gowns and accesories.  We are located in Edmonton, AB and will be opening in February of 2009.  The store is run by my wife, Angel, with help from me.  We are currently in the stage of finishing up renovations, and trying to get the store ready for its Grand Opening.

I will try to document all the joys and pains of using QuickBooks, as well as allow readers to ask questions about my experiences.

Here is a little information about our store :

About us

At Novelle Bridal Shop, we believe that each bride should be the center of attention with all spotlights on them.  So, we invite you to come experience this dazzling moment with us. We strive to create an atmosphere of sophistication by offering a professional, fresh, and clean environment for our brides. Our over-sized bridal suites are designed to provide an intimate, comfortable and very personal ambience for the brides and her shopping companion.  

We carry an exclusive collection of wedding gowns that are all about elegance, romance, glamour and classic simplicity. Each dress is custom made for you. We offer the highest flexibility to personalize your dress as we work closely and directly with our own manufacturers to create that perfect dream dress.  

Our friendly and knowledgeable consultant provides exclusive one-on-one appointment sessions with the understanding of the particular needs of every bride-to-be. In order for us to provide you with our undivided attention, we strongly recommended that you make an appointment.