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.