QuickBooks Online is all about making your business financials easy. And now there is one more tool that makes getting expenses and bills into QBO even easier. Quality Bookkeeping Solutions is now a member of the Hubdoc family. Hubdoc allows the small business owner to bring all financial documents - bills, receipts, bank statements - into one place automatically. Made a purchase? Snap a picture of the receipt with the Hubdoc app. Receive a bill? Forward it to the hubdoc email address associated with your account. If you bank with one of the national banks, Hubdoc checks every evening for any new documents in your bank account. And because Hubdoc is cloud-based, your documents are available to you anytime, anywhere.

Once a document is in your Hubdoc account, information is automatically extracted from the image. Then I review it for correctness, make any necessary changes, and publish it directly to your QBO file. QBO will then have a new expense or bill with the image of the document already attached. Plus, Hubdoc keeps every document in their searchable archives as well. If your company happens to be audited by the IRS, all source documents are easily retrieved. It often takes the audit process, which usually takes several days, down to just a few hours.

Ready to make dealing with your financial documents easy?

An often overlooked feature of QB is document attachments. Supporting documentation can be directly attached to any transaction: scans of bills, deposit slips, spreadsheets for recurring invoices, photos for estimates - I could go on. There are many important reasons to attach documents in QB:

1. This feature provides an excellent resource for your tax preparer. No more need to dig through files (or piles) to find the source documents for any question they might have  - the documents are right there for them to review.
2. Did you ever want to have a "paperless" office? If a piece of paper such as a bill arrives in your office, scan it, attach it to the bill in QB, then get it out of there! The same can be done with receipts and deposit slips.
3. The third way attachments can be helpful is with client communication. Spreadsheets, Word documents, photos, pdfs can all be attached to invoices or estimates sent from QB to clients or customers.

​So how do you do it? In QuickBooks Desktop, look for a paperclip that says "Attach File" in the ribbon at the top of, in this example, a bill.
​Enter the bill information, hit "Save", then click on the paperclip. The Attachments window will open. Here you can drag and drop, browse the computer files, or complete a direct scan of as many documents as needed.

This box already has an attachment which has become a permanent link to an image of the document. One of the wonderful things about cloud-based accounting software is that this image is now stored off-site with bank-level security, but now always available. If this was an invoice being emailed to a customer, the document would then be an email attachment. If the "Show existing" link is clicked, a list of all unlinked attachments in the Attachment center will appear in a column on the right side of the screen. Then just choose the correct one.

Need help working with attachments in your QuickBooks file?
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Intuit has released a series of videos that help explain how to complete many basic tasks in QuickBooks Online. It's a great resource if you are considering switching to a cloud-based accounting solution and would like to "see" what QBO looks like. These videos can also help out those small business owners that have already created a QBO account and need some help getting started. Tutorial topics include:

• Managing expenses
• Tracking sales
• Invoicing
• Payroll
• Receiving online payments
• Preparing for taxes
• Converting a QuickBooks Desktop file to QBO

Well, it took several months of study and a conference in New Orleans to prepare, but I have now achieved advanced certification in QuickBooks Online. "Well, that sounds great - but what does that mean?", you may ask. It means that I have worked hard to become one of the few elite specialists in Intuit's cloud-based accounting software. The next closest one is in Minneapolis! It also means that your small business can have access to a dedicated QBO expert right here in Eau Claire (or anywhere - that's the great thing about the cloud) without having to pay big city prices! 

Intuit has updated the look and feel of the bank account registers in QBO. Some of the biggest changes include:

1.       TRANSACTION ORDER: Newest transactions are on top of the page now. No more scrolling to the bottom to see the latest activity.

2.       ADD CHECK: To add a new check directly in the register, there is an “Add check” link right above the date column. There you can also find a pull down menu for other types of transactions.

3.       RUNNING BALANCE: The running balance has been removed as a default. This is because having it there slowed down the page load. The ending balance can be seen at the top of the page, but if you want the running balance put back under the register’s settings gear (next to the printer icon).

4.       RECONCILIATION STATUS: The ending date of the last reconciliation can be found right at the top under the balance.

5.       SEARCHING & FILTERING: Searching by date has changed. Click on the filter icon. Besides filtering by date, you can also filter by reference (check) number and by amount. BUT to filter by an amount, you must use a currency symbol (dollar sign) in front! The option to filter for greater than and less than is there too. Once you have inputted your search criteria, click Apply. The filtered register can be printed by clicking on the printer icon at the top.

6.       IMPROVED PAGINATION: You can now see how many pages the register has and can choose which page you want to see rather than clicking next, next, next, next.

7.       BANK FEED MATCH: Besides the bigger and easier to read look, I am also liking how the transaction status appears. If a transaction has been matched to something in the bank feed, there is now a big green double arrow icon. This makes it much easier to spot any transactions that haven’t been matched and may need attention.

To install the new register, click on the company gear, QuickBooks Labs, New Registers. Flip the button to ON.

Thanks to Intuitive Accountant, I was alerted to this particular scam that looks like it comes from Intuit. DO NOT CLICK ON ANY LINKS if you receive something like this. Go into your Intuit account in a fresh browser window and check on your credit card information there. See the original post here.

Intuit sent out a press release yesterday announcing one million paid subscribers of QBO. I've been saying for a while that cloud-based software is the future of small business bookkeeping and accounting. It's not perfect, but it's getting better with every update (and I haven't found any software available to the small business owner that could be called perfect anyway). Here's a portion of the press release:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – June 4, 2015 – Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU) announced that QuickBooks Online has more than 1 million paying subscribers, cementing its market leadership as small businesses shift to the cloud.

“Crossing the 1-million paid subscriber threshold is a testament to the commitment of our employees, and of our accountant and developer partners to building an operating system that fuels small business success,”said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Small Business Group. “The biggest thank you goes to our customers for allowing us to be a part of their small business dreams as they move online.”

Intuit has served small businesses and accountants with QuickBooks for more than 20 years. The company was an early innovator in cloud accounting when it first launched QuickBooks Online in 2001. Today, small business owners are turning to the cloud in record numbers. Intuit research shows that:

• U.S. small businesses currently spend an average of four hours per day running their business online. Their top three tasks: accounting, generating invoices and taking payments, and engaging their customers.
• Seventy-eight percent of small businesses will run their business online by 2020.
• QuickBooks Online growth mirrors these trends, posting eight consecutive quarters of accelerating growth, including significant expansion outside the U.S.

Working with developers, accountants and bookkeepers, the QuickBooks team is creating an ecosystem of innovative products and services that make it easy for small businesses of all sizes – from the self-employed to the mid-size enterprise – to tackle complex business management tasks. There are three priorities to deliver for customers:

• Everything works together: Entrepreneurs use an average of 18 apps to run their small businesses. As an open platform, QuickBooks Online ensures that all solutions work together seamlessly, providing small business owners the vital information and insights they need, when they need them.​
• Simplify complex tasks: QuickBooks automates the bookkeeping, so whenever an invoice is sent, a customer makes a payment or an employee gets paid, small business owners can be confident that the information is tracked and updated. For accountants and bookkeepers, this means less time entering data and more time providing valuable business insights to clients.
• Personalized for and by small business: Regardless of size, industry type or geography, small business owners can customize QuickBooks Online to fit their individual needs. They also have access powerful and always up-to-date business insights about their performance at a click of a button.