• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

QBGarage.com

The QuickBooks Specialists

  • Home
  • Blog
  • KnowledgeBase
  • Company
  • Show Search
Hide Search
You are here: Home / Archives for KnowledgeBase / QuickBooks Products / Configuration & Preferences

Configuration & Preferences

How Do I Invoice a Customer for Reimbursable Expenses?

Chief Mechanic · September 1, 2010 ·

In order to easily invoice a customer or client for reimbursable expenses, you first need to make sure your QuickBooks installation is properly configured for this task.  Your configuration depends on how you intend to account for reimbursable expenses.

For more information on handling reimbursable expenses, see our related articles on enabling automatically invoicing customers for reimbursable expenses, what distinguishes a reimbursable expense from other expenses, removing expenses from the list of billable expenses to be invoiced to a customer, and finding out which reimbursable expenses haven’t been billed to a customer.

In addition, note that a key preference setting to enable the approaches discussed in this article is not available in QuickBooks Pro. See our article on the feature differences between QuickBooks Pro and Premier for more information. That means QuickBooks Premier is required to use these methods.

There are 2 general approaches to account for reimbursable expenses:

  1. record the amount your vendor bills you in an expense account and the amount you invoice the customer or client in an income account
  2. record the amount your vendor bills you in an expense account and the amount you invoice the customer or client as an offset to this same expense account

The first approach allows you to track both the revenues and the overall level of expenses for that account; it’s the preferred method, especially if you charge customers more than the amount of the corresponding vendor bill.  The second tracks only the net level of expenses for that account.  It’s a simpler method used by some firms that bill a customer the exact amount of a corresponding vendor bill and monitor the balance of a general ledger account to track reimbursable expenses for which a customer has not yet been invoiced.

For either method, the first step is to set a QuickBooks preference to enable you to easily create invoices for reimbursable expenses.  Click on the Edit->Preferences menu selection to open the Preferences window.  On the Company tab, click on the Time & Expenses sub menu.  Be sure that under the Invoicing options block, the preference to Create invoices from a list of time and expenses is checked.  This preference must be set before entering vendor bills for which you plan to seek reimbursement from a customer or client by issuing an invoice.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Preferences Time & Expenses Invoicing

Setting this preference and the role of the other preferences in the Invoicing options block are discussed more fully in our article on enabling automatically invoicing customers for reimbursable expenses.

The remainder of the steps to invoice a customer or client for reimbursable expenses depends on the method you choose to account for such expenses.  The first 2 methods record the expense and revenue separately; the third method records the revenue as an offset to the expense account.

Method 1 – Record Both the Expense and Revenue Separately With An Optional Markup

If you select the preference Track reimbursed expenses as income as shown in the above screenshot and assign a different Income account to each General Ledger Expense account for which you want to track reimbursable expenses, you can record both the expense and revenue associated with reimbursable expenses in different accounts.

To use this method after you’ve enabled the preferences and made your account assignments, record vendor bills on the Expenses tab of the Enter Bills window.  Enter an Expense account for which you’ve matched an Income account and enter a Customer:Job.  The Billable? checkbox will be selected by default once you enter a Customer:Job.  Click the Save & Close or Save & New button to record the bill.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Enter Bill Reimbursable Expense Tab

Click on the Customers->Invoice for Time & Expenses menu selection to display a list of all customers with unbilled reimbursable expenses.  This menu selection only appears if you correctly set the preference described earlier.  To produce an invoice for the reimbursable expenses for a customer, select that customer’s name and click the Create Invoice button.  If you want to selectively invoice for reimbursable expenses, click the Let me select specific billables for the Customer:Job checkbox before clicking the Create Invoice button.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Invoice for Time & Expenses 2

Click on the Expenses tab to select the unbilled expenses for this customer.  On the Choose Billable Time and Costs window, you can change the Markup Amount or % and the Markup Account used for this transaction.  If you enter a % in the Markup Amount or % field, QuickBooks will treat your entry as a percentage; otherwise, it will be treated as a dollar amount to be added to the expense cost as markup.  Click the Ok button to add these expenses (including the markup) to the customer invoice.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Choose Billable Expenses

There are 2 advantages to this method:

  1. The description you record with the vendor bill is the description that will be included on the customer invoice 
  2. You can choose to markup billable expenses by a default percentage or override that default with a different percentage or a fixed dollar amount

If you expect that the description you enter with the vendor bill will appear on a customer invoice, it will be easier to record an accurate description for the reimbursable expense while you’re recording the vendor bill.  The limitation to this method is that you have to create a matching Income account for each Expense account for which you will record reimbursable expenses.  If you have a large number of Expense accounts that require matching Income accounts, expect to add a large number of accounts to your Chart of Accounts.  In addition, by recording reimbursable expenses on the Expenses tab, there is no Item associated with the expense, so they won’t be included on Item-based sales reports, such as the Sales by Item Summary or Sales by Customer Detail reports.  On balance, though, the combination of connecting the expense description to the customer invoice and the flexibility to manage the markup for reimbursable expenses makes this method the preferred approach to record and invoice for these expenses.

Method 2 – Record Both the Expense and Revenue Separately Using Items

You can also record both the expense and revenue from reimbursable expenses separately using the Items tab of the Enter Bills window.

First, make sure you have created a General Ledger Income account to track reimbursable expenses.  In this example, our account has an Account Type of Income.  It’s for Reimbursed Freight & Delivery and, since it’s for just 1 type of reimbursement income,  it’s is a Subaccount of our more comprehensive Reimbursement Income account.  Likewise, create a corresponding expense account that you want to associate with this other income.  You should have a general ledger income and expense account for each type of reimbursement income you want to track at the financial statement level.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 GL Edit Account Reimbursed

Create an Item with a Type of Other Charge for each reimbursable item type for which you’ll invoice your customers.  Check the box to indicate This item is used in assemblies or is a reimbursable charge.  Doing so will allow you to record both the Income Account and Expense Account for this Other Charge Item.  Otherwise, you’d only be able to enter an Income Account.  The Income Account should be set to the Income account you created to track for your revenue from this type of reimbursable expense; the Expense Account should be set to the corresponding expense account.  In this example, we’ll use the Freight Reimbursement item.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Edit Item Other Charge Reimbursable

That completes the preliminary steps to invoice a customer for reimbursable expenses.  Now, we need to record the vendor bill.  In order to track both the revenue and expense for reimbursable expenses, you need to enter vendor bills on the Items tab, as shown below.  Enter the standard vendor bill information, but keep in mind that the Memo or Description will not make their way to your customer invoice.  Instead, the description on the customer invoice will come from the definition of the Item, which in our example is Freight and Delivery Reimbursement.

Click the Items tab.  Enter the Other Charge Item you previously created for this type of expense, which in our example was Freight Reimbursement.  To associate this bill with a customer or job, update the Customer:Job field.  When you do, the Billable? column will be checked by default.  Click either Save & Close or Save & New to record this transaction and save your work.  In this example, we’ll record a $100 expense for overnight delivery and associate it with a specific customer, Balak.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Enter Bill Reimbursable Item

Click on the Customers->Invoice for Time & Expenses menu selection to display a list of all customers with unbilled reimbursable expenses.  This menu selection only appears if you correctly set the preference described earlier.  To produce an invoice for the reimbursable expenses for a customer, select that customer’s name and click the Create Invoice button.  If you want to selectively invoice for reimbursable expenses, click the Let me select specific billables for the Customer:Job checkbox before clicking the Create Invoice button.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Invoice for Time & Expenses 1

The Create Invoices window will appear with the reimbursable expenses you selected already filled in.  On that screen, click Save & Close or Save & New to record the invoice for those reimbursable expenses.  If you need to change what reimbursable expenses are being invoiced, you can click the Add Time/Costs… button to change which reimbursable expenses are included.

Another approach to billing for reimbursable expenses is to simply to start customer invoicing from the usual menu selection, Customers->Create Invoices, and enter the Customer:Job.  If that Customer:Job has outstanding billable time or costs, you’ll this window:

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Billable Time

If you make the Select the outstanding billable time and costs to add to this invoice? selection, you’ll see the Choose Billable Time and Costs window, where you can choose which costs you’d like to include on this invoice.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Choose Billable Expenses

Unfortunately, you’ll need to check each of the 4 tabs to see under which tab the expenses appear, because until you actually select an expense (as we’ve done in the screenshot above), QuickBooks displays zero dollar amounts.  The dollar amounts displayed are the selected dollar amounts – not the available amounts.

With this method, the description of the actual expense is not connected to the description that appears on a customer’s invoice.  For some businesses that want to control the information that appears on a customer’s invoice, this is the preferred method because it insures that a consistent expense description appears on every customer invoice.  However, this approach does not automatically calculate a markup.  The customer invoice will automatically be completed with the actual expense cost, not the actual cost plus a markup.  Adding a markup or changing the expense description would require manually changing the invoice line item after completing the steps described above.

Method 3 – Record the Revenue as an Offset to the Expense Account

Some firms that don’t markup reimbursable expenses opt for a simpler approach of sending both the debit from the vendor bill and the credit from the customer invoice to the same account.  This approach enables a firm to monitor the balance in that account to verify that all reimbursable expenses have been invoiced to a customer.  If the account has a debit balance, some customer invoices haven’t been recorded.  If you don’t match an Income account to the Expense account for which you invoice reimbursable expenses as described in the first method, you’ll end up with the result of this approach – except that your markup will be sent to a different General Ledger account.

Under this method, after setting the preference discussed above, record vendor bills normally from the Vendors->Enter Bills menu selection.  On the Enter Bills window, record required vendor bill information, but be sure to record a Memo for the transaction.  Like the first method, the Memo you record will become the description on your customer invoice.  On the Expenses tab, choose your general ledger account number for this expense.  To make this expense a reimbursable expense, associate it with a Customer:Job by updating that field.  After doing so, the Billable? field will be checked by default.  Click Save & Close or Save & New to record the transaction.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Enter Bill Reimbursable Expense

As discussed above, click on the Customers->Invoice for Time & Expenses menu selection to display a list of all customers with unbilled reimbursable expenses.  Choose the customer you are invoicing for reimbursable expenses, and click the Create Invoice button.  QuickBooks will display the Create Invoices screen for that customer, pre-filled with the Memo and amount recorded with the original vendor bill.

Under this method, the vendor bill recorded a debit to the expense account, and the customer invoice recorded an equal and offsetting credit.  This approach generally is not recommended if the amount you charge customers for reimbursable expenses is greater than what your vendor bills you.  If you do elect to use this method, it’s a good idea to have a separate expense account for non-reimbursable expenses of the same type.  This allows you to monitor the balance in a separate reimbursable expense account, which should reach a $0 balance when all vendor bills and customer invoices are recorded.

When accounting for reimbursable expenses, keep in mind that if you delete or void the customer invoice for reimbursable expenses, the reimbursable expense remains marked as having been billed.  To change that status, you’ll need to modify the Billable? field in on the vendor bill.

Vote This Post DownVote This Post Up (+2 rating, 4 votes)
Loading...

Does QuickBooks Have Limits On the Number of List Items and Transactions That Can Be Entered?

Chief Mechanic · August 26, 2010 ·

Yes. There are 2 kinds of limits: physical and practical. Let’s consider each in turn.

QuickBooks faces these physical limits:

  • 2 billion transactions
  • 10,000 accounts in the GL chart of accounts
  • 14,500 names (customers, vendors, employees, and other names – combined)
  • 14,500 items (which include inventory items)
  • 10,000 classes
  • 100 price levels

The above list highlights the most important physical limits of QuickBooks; it’s not an all-inclusive list. The physical limits of Enterprise Solutions are considerably higher. For details on all of the physical limits of both QuickBooks and Enterprise Solutions, consult this Intuit knowledge base article.

To find out how your own company file stands relative to these limits, press F2 from within QuickBooks to display the Product Information window. On the right side, you’ll see the List Information. In this example, the company file has 134 (out of 10,000) GL accounts, 217 (out of 14,500) total names, and 106 (out of 14,500) Items.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Product Information  List Information

There are important practical considerations as well. According to Intuit, QuickBooks is designed for small businesses with fewer than 20 employees and $2 million in annual revenue. However, those are general guidelines. Bigger firms reliably use QuickBooks. What impacts whether you should use QuickBooks or its more powerful relative, Enterprise Solutions, is the size of your data file today and how that data is expected to grow over the time period for which you want to keep all transaction data in 1 file.

Intuit suggests estimating 2 Kb per transaction and projecting the size of your data file over several years. Keep in mind that a sale paid for with 1 check results in 3 transactions (invoice, payment, and deposit), and each AP transaction results in at least 2 (vendor bill and payment). This estimate does not include the data that list elements themselves (e. g., customers, vendors, or items) will add to overall file size.

In our experience, the performance of QuickBooks can degrade if overall company file size exceeds 100 Mb. Intuit suggests a practical limit of growth of 15 Mb per year (or about 7500 transactions).

As a company grows, QuickBooks includes a utility to remove fully paid and reconciled transactions in a process referred to as “cleaning up.” This process reduces the size of the QuickBooks company file. That’s why it’s important to consider the time period you’ll keep old transaction data in your company file. If you’ll clean up your company file every 18-24 months, the number of transactions you can store without hitting the practical limitations of QuickBooks will be considerably greater.

Some longtime QuickBooks users engage in a process of making a backup copy of a company file and then cleaning it up with a cutoff date. The backup copy preserves history transactions for those rare instances where they may be useful, but the company file for everyday use has been cleaned up and no longer includes stale, fully paid transactions. That results in improved performance.

The guidelines on practical limits we’ve discussed here aren’t unbreakable rules, and the limits are influenced by factors we didn’t mention, most notably the hardware performance of the computer on which you run QuickBooks.

Vote This Post DownVote This Post Up (-1 rating, 1 votes)
Loading...

What Are Special Account Types?

Chief Mechanic · August 23, 2010 ·

QuickBooks maintains approximately 13 different Special Account Types. These types are assigned to individual accounts in a company’s chart of accounts. The assignment of a Special Account Type to an account permits that account to carry out a special function.

  1. AccountsReceivable
  2. UndepositedFunds
  3. InventoryAssets
  4. AccountsPayable
  5. PayrollLiabilities
  6. OpeningBalanceEquity
  7. RetainedEarnings
  8. UncategorizedIncome
  9. CostOfGoodsSold
  10. PayrollExpenses
  11. UncategorizedExpenses
  12. Estimates
  13. PurchaseOrders

Special Account Types and the assignment of those types to accounts are not visible to a typical QuickBooks user.

However, a typical user can determine which account is assigned a Special Account Type by recording a transaction that should impact the balance of an account functioning as an account with a Special Account Type and tracking which account balance was affected. For example, an expense transaction of $100 in the prior year should impact the account functioning as RetainedEarnings. Be sure to delete these test transactions once you’ve completed your testing.

It’s important to understand that an account’s Special Account Type is independent of its name. That is, an account can be named Undeposited Funds but not have a Special Account Type of UndepositedFunds. This situation typically occurs if accounts were renamed and preferences changed over time. If QuickBooks creates a new account that’s a Special Account Type and the default QuickBooks name is already in use, it will place an asterix at the start of the account name, as in *Undeposited Funds. If you observe accounts that start with an asterix, it’s likely that these accounts are the actual accounts assigned Special Account Types.

Vote This Post DownVote This Post Up (+1 rating, 1 votes)
Loading...

What Is the Undeposited Funds Account and Why Should I Use It?

Chief Mechanic · July 25, 2010 ·

The Undeposited Funds account is an Other Current Asset account that’s automatically created by QuickBooks to record funds received by a company that are not immediately deposited in a bank account.

When you record customer payments by clicking on the Customers->Receive Payments menu selection, you’re recording individual receipts. In actual practice, these individual receipts are grouped into a bank deposit that consists of funds from several customers. By using the Undeposited Funds account as a holding account, your accounting for customer receipts can match actual practice and simplify bank reconciliations. A customer receipt results in a debit to Undeposited Funds pending deposit in a bank account. Receipts from several customers can be grouped by clicking on the Banking->Make Deposits menu selection and selecting those receipts that make up the total deposit. Making a bank deposit in this manner results in a credit to the Undeposited Funds account and insures that the transaction recorded in your bank account register matches the actual deposit made to the bank. If customer receipts had not been first put in Undeposited Funds as a holding account, each individual receipt would appear as a deposit in the bank account register. That doesn’t match actual practice and complicates bank reconciliations because the amounts recorded in the bank register won’t match what appears on the bank statement.

In order to use the Undeposited Funds account, you first need to enable this preference. Click on the Edit->Preferences menu selection to open the Preferences window. Click on the Sales & Customers sub-menu on the Company Preferences tab and check the box on the Use Undeposited Funds as a default deposit to account. Note: Enterprise Solutions users will find this preference on the Payments sub-menu.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Undeposited Funds Preference

To display the transactions in the Undeposited Funds account, first click the Lists->Chart of Accounts menu selection (or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + A). Double click on the Undeposited Funds account to display the register for that account. Alternately, you can select the account in the list and use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + R or click the Activities button and choose Use Register on the pop-up menu.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Undeposited Funds Register

You can safely rename the Undeposited Funds account that QuickBooks automatically creates without changing the function of this account. Likewise, simply assigning the name Undeposited Funds to an account won’t by itself cause it to behave like this special account. Depending on preference settings, QuickBooks creates and assigns special account types to certain general ledger accounts, and these special account type settings aren’t clearly marked in the program.

A common QuickBooks bookkeeping problem can occur if the Use Undeposited Funds as a default deposit to account is selected but deposits are not made using the Banking->Make Deposits function. In that situation, customer AR reports will be accurate because customer receipts have been recorded, but the bank balance will be inaccurate because those payments have not been grouped into bank deposits and recorded in the bank account. Examining the Undeposited Funds register will usually reveal the source of the problem. The Undeposited Funds account balance should only reflect those funds that have been received by a company but not yet deposited in the bank. If the account balance reflects an unusually high balance, that indicates that either funds aren’t being deposited in a bank account immediately – or that some of the required processing steps when using the Undeposited Funds account have been skipped.

Vote This Post DownVote This Post Up (+11 rating, 15 votes)
Loading...

What Is Class Tracking and How Do I Enable It?

Chief Mechanic · April 4, 2010 ·

A class in QuickBooks is a single-purpose tool to classify income and expense transactions. Class tracking is not used for balance sheet accounts. It’s also not a way to group customers, jobs, or vendors. To do that, use a Type, which can be managed on the Lists->Customer & Vendor Profile Lists menu selection.

To use class tracking, it first must be enabled on the Accounting sub-menu of the Company Preferences tab on the Edit->Preferences menu selection; just check the box for Use class tracking. To have QuickBooks request the appropriate class for a transaction, check the box for Prompt to assign classes.

QB_Premier_2009_Prefs_class_tracking

Keep in mind that class tracking is a single purpose tool – it can’t be used to track unrelated aspects of your business. Proper use of classes depends largely on your business reporting needs. Classes can be used to track:

  • locations
  • product lines or service types
  • partners in a professional services firm
  • funds for a public sector or non-profit enterprise

Since classes can be applied to both income and expense transactions, class tracking enables producing a Profit & Loss statement for each class.

QuickBooks supports sub-classes, or nested classes, up to 5 levels deep.

If you use class tracking, you’ll want to:

  • carefully consider your reporting requirements before you use class tracking
  • assign classes to both income and expenses
  • create a “miscellaneous” or “other” class to classify transactions that don’t fit another, more specific class
  • consistently assign a class to all transactions so that your class-level reports are accurate
  • create an “unclassified” class for transactions not yet classified – QuickBooks reporting won’t allow you to filter for transactions that have no class assigned

To manage your classes, click on the Lists->Class List menu selection.

Vote This Post DownVote This Post Up (+2 rating, 10 votes)
Loading...
  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4

Accounting

  • Financial Accounting Standards Board

Developer

  • Intuit Developer Network Forums
  • qbXML Onscreen Reference

Intuit

  • Enterprise Solutions
  • Intuit
  • Intuit Marketplace
  • QuickBooks
  • QuickBooks Online Community

QBGarage.com

Copyright © 2008–2023 QBGarage.com · Privacy · Terms & Conditions · Site Help