We at Fourlane have learned a lot from our customers when it comes to the problems they run into with their QuickBooks files. With our services, we try to help the businesses we work with identify the true issues hiding beneath the surface, and walk away better off then when they came to us. That’s why with this QuickBooks Insight series, we hope you can identify with the experiences other customers have faced. This week we discuss Fourlane QuickBooks Insights – Chick-Fil-a vs Popeyes.
Today’s QuickBooks Insight Tip #11: Chick-Fil-A vs Popeyes
You do not need to create a vendor (nor an other name) for all the vendors you ever go to. In the long run do you really care how much you spent at Chick-Fil-A vs Popeyes? Is that information going to change your business direction? (Hoping the answer is no).
Instead, use generic vendors for these and put in the memo the actual vendor. We can run reports based off the memo to get data if really needed one day.
Transaction Overload
One of my small non-profit clients that does less than $500,000 in revenues annually came to me one day and said they talked to Intuit and was told they needed to move to QuickBooks Enterprise. Now, in my mind I went straight to someone is overselling this poor client and got frustrated. But the client explained they hit the 13,000 vendor limit so to get more vendors allowed in the system they would need to move to QBES.
They used bank feeds (now their vendor list was mostly created prior to bank rules being around to help pick up suggested vendors) and the feed was creating a new vendor for pretty much every transaction that hit their credit card for several years. So every time they went to get gas, the bank would send the vendor name and the date of the transaction over as the vendor, creating Chevron 03132018; Chevron 03202018; Chevron 03272018 etc.
Our Solution
I showed her how to set up one generic vendor called “Gas” and put Chevron in the memo. Then I created a custom report that had a filter that had Chevron in the memo. I also showed her how to modify the report in case she wanted to look at Shell or for “Airlines” how to look for Delta vs Southwest. This fixed the problem going forward but what about all these vendors.
Another thing we did was merging vendors. QuickBooks added the ability to mass merge vendors. So used that tool to search for Chevron and she was able to mass merge several of these old vendors down. It took some time, but she was able to avoid needing to upgrade to a product she really didn’t need.
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