There is no need to waste your valuable time on posting regular, recurring transactions such as monthly bills. QuickBooks will do it for you! My phone bills all hit my credit card for the same amount each month. When I finished entering the first bill this month, I saved it, then I clicked on the little cloud icon with a star in it – the magical “Memorize” button! (See image below.) A series of options popped up for me, and I can select how often to automatically enter this same transaction (monthly, weekly, etc.), how many days in advance I would like it to post, and how many occurrences are remaining. The number of occurrences remaining can be handy with loan payments when you know the final payment date. (Of course, you can set this to never because the phone bills never end…) You have the ability to make QuickBooks remind you when these transactions come up, so you can decide whether or not to post it at that time. This is a great feature if you do not want the entry to automatically post.
What happens if the phone company decides to raise my rate in a few months? You know they will eventually! All of your memorized transactions are found under the pull-down menu “Lists > Memorized Transaction List.” Here you can edit transaction details such as the amount or due date, add new recurring entries to your list, or delete them if they are no longer applicable. You can set up groups of memorized transactions for related entries, for example, each one of your phone bills.
Prepaid rent is easy to account for when you utilize the memorized transactions method. Ask your accountant how to correctly set up the accounts for this. Once you have the initial outlay of cash recorded properly, you can set up memorized transactions to post the rent expense monthly or as needed. The less data entry you need to do the better!
Writing checks can be memorized and automated as well. Say you pay a particular vendor the same amount each week and you’d like the check to show up in your print checks window automatically. You can do this by setting the check as “to be printed” and have QuickBooks memorize it that way.
One of our QuickBooks experts here at ADKF would love to go over this with you in more detail and show you ways to make your software work harder for you. Give us a call for remote or onsite training so we can make your life easier!
