Taking Your QuickBooks Skills to the Next Level: Advanced Techniques for Professionals

Running a small business comes with its fair share of challenges, and among them, ensuring precise, accurate accounting often stands as one of the most intimidating. Ensuring every financial record is error-free and presented clearly is paramount to your company’s fiscal health and success. Accurate accounting is where advanced QuickBooks skills and techniques become indispensable.

These advanced skills can significantly assist you in effectively managing your company’s finances through QuickBooks. Here, we guide you through several enterprise-level QuickBooks skills to help you optimize your software experience.

QuickBooks Online Advanced User Permissions

QuickBooks Online Advanced offers various user permissions to control access and actions within the software, allowing for fine-tuned control over the features and data that different users can interact with.

You can establish QuickBooks Online Advanced user permissions to allow some users unrestricted access to all transactions while giving others access through custom permissions that limit what they can view. To do this, you’ll set up:

• Administrators: Master and company administrators can access all features and functions, with master administrators also having access to user management.
• User Roles: This allows you to define user permissions by job requirements or role responsibilities, granting access to either edit or view various areas of QuickBooks, including:
  • payroll information
  • inventory
  • purchase orders
  • vendors & payables
  • time tracking
• Project-Based Roles: You can establish custom parameters for users responsible only for specific projects or records such as sales, expenses, and receipts.

Customer Deposits in QuickBooks

When customers make advance payments or deposits with your company, advanced QuickBooks features allow you to record these payments until they’re applied to an invoice or used to offset a future sale. Handling customer deposits in QuickBooks usually involves creating a record of the payment you receive before you provide them with the products or services. You can create a record through Negative Accounts Receivable or Current Liability.

Leveraging QuickBooks to log customer deposits offers several advantages:

• Customizable deposit tracking with custom fields, including dates, methods, and reasons for the deposit
• Automatic reconciliation to match deposit records in QuickBooks with corresponding linked accounts and bank transactions
• Detailed audit trails to help with accountability and transparency
• Real-time reporting to help monitor payment timelines with customer sales and invoices

Job Costing in QuickBooks

Job Costing in QuickBooks is a feature that allows you to track and manage the costs and revenues associated with specific jobs, projects, or contracts. This feature is useful for companies in construction, manufacturing, and other service industries where work is completed on a project basis or with different issue tickets.

There are several steps you can take to accomplish this:

1. Assigning customers or projects in the Customer Center to represent individual Jobs, then issuing the bill or estimate to the Job to apply the cost
2. Creating an Estimate to Sales Order to Create Invoice:
   1. Setting up an itemized Estimate to start the Issue Ticket process
   2. Creating a Sales Order from the Estimate to drive demand for products
   3. Creating an Invoice from the Sales Order
3. Working within a custom template called an Issue Ticket
4. Creating Purchase Orders for each Job

QuickBooks Work in Progress for Job Costing

In QuickBooks, Work in Progress functions help track the value of costs and revenues for projects and jobs not yet completed.

Fourlane offers support to streamline your workflow to facilitate automation for this process. To accomplish this manually, the tutorial above shows you how to:

1. Work in QuickBooks to create a new Job in the Job List under the correct project and customer.
2. Format an Excel sheet to populate the customer name, job level, and relevant cost and revenue information for a purchase order.
3. Link (concatenate) only relevant jobs and job levels on the Excel worksheet.
4. Create Job Work In Progress Summary reports to assess progress along different levels, metrics, and criteria.

How to Run Inventory Reports in QuickBooks

Running Inventory reports in QuickBooks helps track and manage inventory effectively. Advanced QuickBooks skills show you how to run inventory reports in QuickBooks to work with the following:

• Balance Sheet vs Inventory Valuation Summary Reports
• Balance Sheet detail totaled by Item
• Inventory Valuation Detail Report
• Accountant’s Toolbox to Troubleshoot Inventory

Advanced QuickBooks skills help you leverage Inventory reports to do the following:

• View Accrual Basis
• Understand the purpose of a Balance Sheet and use it against Inventory workflows
• Use an Inventory Valuation Summary Report to track the total value of your assets
• Run Inventory Valuation Detail reports monthly to view on-hand inventory with average costs, quantities, and values and track them over time
• Discover inventory discrepancies and flagged items for any issues

Enhanced Inventory Receiving in QuickBooks

QuickBooks offers Enhanced Inventory Receiving (EIR), a feature that helps your business streamline the receiving and managing inventory process. This feature is available in all versions of QuickBooks Enterprise and functions to run through your complete bill history, creating a separate transaction and Item Receipt for the transaction.

Activating Enhanced Inventory Receiving in QuickBooks cannot be reversed. Once on, it can do the following:

• Create a new Current Liability account called “Received Not Invoiced”
• Match items in your inventory to Purchase Orders
• Create a comprehensive, accurate view of checks and balances for inventory
• Segregate warehouse and accounts payable workflows
• Record and sort items by status within the receipt, which helps to process returns and replacements
• Separate transactions by account
• Review and edit received items before receipt finalization

QuickBooks FIFO Inventory Valuation

Inventory costs fluctuate. In Enterprise, Platinum, or Diamond editions of QuickBooks, FIFO (First-In, First-Out) Inventory Valuation is used to value inventory by assuming the first ones added in will be the first ones out, whether sold or used. This process matches the cost of the oldest inventory with revenue, then by new inventory costs.

To activate QuickBooks FIFO Inventory Valuation, follow these steps:

1. Open Preferences, then Items & Inventory.
2. Navigate to Company Preferences and select FIFO as your preferred inventory valuation method.

As you purchase inventory, the software will automatically calculate the cost based on the FIFO method and update records accordingly.

FIFO offers a way to realistically match costs to revenue with a more accurate representation of the cost of goods sold, resulting in higher reported profit margins.

How to Adjust Negative Inventory in QuickBooks

Negative Inventory occurs when recorded inventory levels show that you have fewer on-hand items than sold or used. Your first step should be to determine the cause of negative quantities, which may include the following:

• Selling inventory before ever buying it
• Building assembly after selling items
• Moving items in and out of negative stock

Some jobs or projects require inventory adjustments after a sale or invoice, which makes this Negative Inventory adjustment advantageous for revenue. This tutorial shows you how to adjust negative inventory in QuickBooks.

These adjustments help you to course-correct your records to ensure accurate and sound invoices via these procedures:

• Reconciling bills against transactions
• Adjusting the Quantity/Value on Hand to reflect adjustments
• Verifying inventory valuations to update detailed reports for accuracy

Set Up Webgility with QuickBooks

Combining Webgility with QuickBooks can help streamline e-commerce and accounting processes by integrating the two platforms for better management, tracking, and reporting. Part one of our webinar addresses setup with posting settings, including:

• Templates
• Sales Orders
• Sales Receipts
• Credit Memos
• Purchase Orders
• Build Assembly
• Customers
• Email

Part two walks through the automation of the processes established in part one of the setup. In this tutorial, you’ll discover automation settings that help you via the following:

• Established Scheduler frequency, whether hourly, daily, or weekly, of download, posting, and other automated processes
• Advanced automation to inventory updates, including updates to price
• Out of Sync corrections, including order errors and product creation

Webgility-QuickBooks integrations allow you to automate tasks like inventory updates, sales tax calculations, visible inventory quantities, product sync settings by customer channel, specific information displayed on customer-facing receipts, and more.

Build QuickBooks Skills and Processes with Fourlane

Advanced QuickBooks skills may appear daunting at first. With Fourlane’s support and comprehensive, advanced tutorials, you can expertly navigate through QuickBooks even at advanced levels. Get in touch today to discover the benefits of QuickBooks accounting services with Fourlane.