QuickBooks, Excel, Cash Flow and Technology!

When should you record the expense when you’ve paid for a whole year up front?

What about the cost of the items? How is that accounted for?

So the question is whether or not QuickBooks 2012 is worth the upgrade

Before you run a mission you have to consider one important thing. What do you want people to do?

Empire Avenue gives you points for actions to encourage activity..

Relax! The hoop you have to jump through is pretty wide. All that is required really are 2 pictures. One you already have –

One of the challenges of setting up and maintaining your QuickBooks file is keeping the information organized

We make investments in hopes of gaining in net wealth and share price, but the main goal of anything “social” is to be.. well.. Social!

We are all traveling at 1,000 miles an hour on the web so the important thing here is not to make people think.

The question always comes up as to how to handle owner contributions and distributions in QuickBooks

So tell me what YOU think about these changes. Do you like them? Why or Why not?

The question comes up as to how one remembers to collect this retention at the completion of a job.

I staged my own protest back in 2003 when I started my own company.

The bottom line of course is that the report from QuickBooks should give you the information you are looking for.

The main things to be concerned with are choosing a theme, which layout you like, which modules you would like to have on your channel and then how to place them.

I know that I have struggled and still do struggle with how to organize and schedule my social media content.

Camtasia can look overwhelming when you first open it up.

So now you have duplicated income (once on the invoice and once in the deposit) and you have a receivable on the books that shouldn’t be there.

The only thing you can do wrong in terms of social media for business is not use social media for your business.

In this video you will see how I use Tags in Evernote to group bookmarks by various categories.. Evernote also lets you use “sub-tags”..

..there were a number of people who had suggested that they would like to see a report in QuickBooks that is already there but not in the usual place where one would go to run reports in QuickBooks.

How can a profitable business possibly go under?

Free Live 1 Hour Webinar Friday October 28, 2011 at 3pm Pacific Time!

This really applies to all social networks not just Empire Avenue.

The Statement Of Cash Flows is broken up into 3 sections and it is important to understand what these sections are telling us about the company.

This enables me to quickly and easily categorize and reference information about the people I want to connect with.

In terms of function the statement of cash flows is really a reconciliation of your accrual basis net income to your ending cash balance. It explains the difference between the two.

This gives me a nice place where I can put them away and also take them out and find them easily when I need them.

..your dividends per share (what you pay out to your shareholders) are calculated based on your daily activity..

If you’re like me then you want immediate access to everything all of the time.

Most QuickBooks users I have worked with want to know first what does their Profit and Loss look like?

Which Social Network is The BEST one?

Of course you could have the best “To Do” list solution in the world and it won’t make any difference if you don’t set aside the time to get these things done.

One mistake many bookkeepers make is that they enter a bill for everything.

It’s about the “people” more than the platform for me.

..issues about the types of computer users in Windows Vista and 7 and user permissions within the QuickBooks program itself, can arise… This error occurs because Larry said that ONLY the QuickBooks Admin could run the program

This is a special type of liability account that lets you enter individual charges for each transaction.

I try to publish my “main” new blog post every Wednesday at about 9am Pacific time.

One important financial goal of most businesses and individuals is to increase net worth. But how is that accomplished?

..many businesses rely on resource intensive paper-based processes. The process of printing, shipping, faxing and filing, is time consuming, expensive and slow.

It is more and more common nowadays for businesses to take deposits from customers which means it is more important to know how to record these transactions in QuickBooks

I will not promote a product or service just because someone else does.

Ask questions by posting your comments here and I will pass the questions along to him.

The other day I was in a social media lunch and a guy asked, “I have competitors following me on Twitter, what do I do?”

The total equity in your business represents the net worth of your business, or the “book value”.

Twitter is a 24/7 online networking group but it is a very big sea so you have to learn how to segment it and find your community.

Gist is amazing! It will go through your contacts and start finding their profiles on any/all sites..

I loved how easy MS Outlook made it to organize and integrate all of these critically important areas of my life, but I was not happy having to organize things twice. This was highly inefficient.

Here are 3 good reasons why the business owner has to look at the Sales By Customer Detail Report in QuickBooks..

The important thing to remember when you are setting up your inventory in QuickBooks is that there are certain pieces of information that are required to be filled out

You also may have found yourself as I did scratching your head and wondering..

If you follow along with me and what I am up to (and I can barely even do that) then you might know that I have more than a few projects going on. How do I do it? Read on to find out!

I walked out of Pace University with a degree in Accounting and a specialization in “Public Accounting” with no clue about how the Statement of Cash Flows worked. I hoped I never would have to see this statement again, and I didn’t for a long time.

Here is a short video I recorded demonstrating what my system is for how to avoid conflicting copies in Drop Box

The very simple and direct way to deal with this is through a journal entry, but you will run into a problem with this.

In retrospect all anyone had to do was explain the following

What is the REAL problem we are all trying to solve for people here?

Don’t rack your brain trying to figure out the accounting treatment for your Groupon promotion in QuickBooks! I’ve got your answer right here.

There are 3 ways to dispose of or liquidate an asset on your books…

Are you struggling to find a good way to track your investment activity?

The first thing I needed to figure out was how to get MS Excel to calculate the difference from one time to another, but it doesn’t end there.

At this point you simply go to Scenario 4 and change the Gross Profit Margin % to one set number.

..but with MS Excel it is not difficult to break your data up in to two or more columns to make it easier to analyze.

The main point behind this is to spend the time analyzing your product lines, and this is how some of my clients who are doing in excess of $5MM in annual sales are dong it.

The best way to understand how to book contributed capital in the form of services is to think in terms of breaking up the transaction into smaller components. Let’s say we’re contributing web design services..

The “Twitter” effect – Twitter has taught me by forcing me down to 140 characters to cut out all of the fat.

Focus on one simple concept and go deep. I am in talks with Lynda.com now about doing a course for them and this was one of the first things that was stressed to me.

I also learned to pay attention to what someone is saying beneath the surface of what they were saying.

There is one thing though more than anything else that inspires me about another business.

For me it is about recognizing what I can and can’t control. I can only control me, I have no control over other people, what they do and how they behave. As soon as I acknowledge that, then I can make things happen by letting go and letting them happen.

Going paperless not only saves trees, but it also makes for a very convenient digital environment. It will always be 10 x (or more) faster to find things that are stored digitally compared with the time it takes to find something in a shoebox or even a paper file, not to mention that pile of papers sitting to your right on your desk that you are scared to go through and find out what you overlooked

Considering that I spend about an hour of my time trying to figure out what was wrong because there was no indication from Netflix I am sorry but the slightly less than 24 cents doesn’t really excite me, and now I spent more time which I can never get back by reading the e-mail and clicking through to get the credit.

The first thing you will need to do in order to customize your facebook page is to add the Static FBML App. Once you add this app, you have to go to the app, name it, and paste your code in.

QuickBooks Online Banking has been around for a while now so most people know how to use it.

If you have a page on Facebook who’s type was formerly known as a “Fan Page” then you are presently talking about a “Like” page, or as it no seems to be commonly referred to, a “Business Page”.

Facebook allows you to change your privacy settings presumably so that you can determine what others can or cannot see about you based on their relationship to you.

There are some things you can do in Facebook which are not so obvious in terms of how to do them. Today’s tip, the first in a series of 3 is based on how to change your Facebook settings with respect to what and whom you see.

I was just telling someone the other day that I would not want to blog with an iPad because it would seem impractical to type on a device like that, yet here I am tapping out this post on my Droid phone as I sit in a coffee shop.

There are many things you can do with the information once in has been exported to MS Excel. This screen cast focuses on filtering the data by category and formatting the cells to make the information easy to read.

There are many businesses out there where the owner is removed, in some cases almost completely from the bookkeeping. The bigger the business generally the further removed.

The first thing I need to do is define what a discounted note is. Normally when we borrow money we borrow a set some of money and repay it with interest.

Many times in business we will find that the time has come to take on a loan in order to catalyze our ideas and turn them into a reality.

The thing is that with my receipts in a shoebox it could take hours potentially to find a particular receipt if and when I am asked to provide it as proof of my purchase.

Let me free you up to focus on what you do best.

Previously we saw how you can set up your inventory items in QuickBooks to handle the accounting for inventory where you are buying (eg) a used car, fixing it up with repairs and then selling it.

Usually inventory is simply bought, assembled if needed (manufacturing) and then sold for hopefully more than what is cost to produce. But what happens if I have inventory that needs some fixing up?

In part one you saw How To Set Up Sales Reps in QuickBooks. Once you have that in place you have 90% of the battle won. There are only a few steps left in the process now.

There are several things that need to be done here in order to make this work. QuickBooks is a database with many related data tables.

When you run or create a report in QuickBooks, play around with the “Total By” drop down. Try different options and see if you find the results to be meaningful.

Memorize anything you create that you like by clicking Memorize reports:

To learn how to post transactions, set up a blank company file and run a Balance Sheet and P&L for all dates so that you have two completely blank reports. Then post your transactions and see what the impact is on the financial statements. Make sure you refresh your reports. Ask yourself if the results make sense.

When it comes to posting customer deposits in QuickBooks or any transaction for that matter I can almost guarantee you that there are several ways to accomplish the task. So which is the right way? So which is the right way? The answer is likely all of them.

When it comes to figuring out how to book any transaction in QuickBooks the idea is to think of the books as a mirror image of what really happened. Since this transaction doesn’t impact the banking at all then nothing should happen in the banking part of QuickBooks.

So now we are looking at what happens when our Lemonade business (we’ll call it “Lemonerd”) takes off and now we have stands at every major block around town.

How to take notes with Evernote 4.0. The tool is here – it’s up to you to learn this simple yet powerful tool that will enable you to boost your…

Once your inventory is updated and adjusted properly such that you have accurate balances in your inventory accounts…

You may not even be aware of it but your CPA very possibly makes an adjustments to your QuickBooks file without even bothering to explain them to you.

When I hired a marketing consultant last year one of the first things he asked me was “what is a customer worth to you?” I didn’t know. And I was surprised that I didn’t know.

As someone who has been involved with bookkeepers and bookkeeping services for a long time now I have seen many bookkeepers come and go.

The second thing you should know when you are using QuickBooks for Inventory is that there are 4 components to the sale when selling inventory..