October 2010:

• Pick out your Halloween costume
• AND all of your 2010 accounting should be input, reconciled (through September 30th 2010) so that  you can take this information to your tax preparer for strategic planning the following month.

November 2010:

• Eat lots of turkey
• AND get prepared for the holiday season because you won’t get much work done until after Christmas
• Meet with your tax preparer and review draft 2010 financials
• Make important tax strategizing decisions for end of year

December 2010:

• If you have payroll, begin the audits of W2′s to be mailed to employees by December 31, 2010
• Go to some holiday parties, buy some gifts AND……
• Prepare 1099 vendor records and accounting mapping to issue 1099′s the next month
• Make sure you have a W9 form completed for all subcontractors
• December 31, 2010 – mail W2′s to employees
• Print draft financials to begin stategizing for tax return deadlines coming up

January 2011:

• Do December bank reconciliations as soon as the statements arrive, finalize financials for reviews
• January 31, 2010 mail 1099′s to recipients (but hold the copies for the IRS until their deadline February 28th)

February 2011:

• Mail 1099 copies to the IRS by February 28th 2011 (the IRS deadline is a month after the vendor deadline – this gives you an opportunity to correct 1099′s with questions from vendors before the final copy goes to the IRS on February 28th).
• Begin final financial reviews to hand off to tax preparer – they need time to prepare the return

March 2011:

• March 15th: tax filing deadline for SCorp and Calendar year C Corp (final deadline September 15th)

April 2011:

• April 15th: tax filing deadline for individual and Partnership filings (final deadline for individual is October 15th and partnership final is September 15th)
• Don’t think you have until the deadline dates to start working on your accounting
• Beginning the prior October (and having all of 2010 already input and reconciled)  will result in this month sailing into Spring

May 2011:

• Spring is here and flowers abound
• Each month in accounting there is an end of month dealine
• If these steps are done all the other deadlines will fall nicely into place

Note: If you are using Intuit Merchant Credit Services, the install of R7 will require that you change your password every 90 days.

More information from Intuit:

We recently released a new update for QuickBooks Pro, Premier, Simple Start 2010 and Enterprise 10.0 and wanted to let you know it’s now available. And as always it’s free of charge.

This latest QuickBooks Update includes password security compliance requirements for users of QuickBooks Merchant Services. More information on this topic can be found at http://security.intuit.com/pci-dss.html.

Additionally this update fixes a bug which in some circumstances caused QuickBooks to close (or crash) when users attempted to print, delete or edit paychecks. In some instances users would receive an error message with either a c=74 or c=331 error code.

If you’ve enabled the QuickBooks Automatic Updates feature, QuickBooks will prompt you to install this new update as it normally does. Or if you prefer to manually download these updates you can find them at www.quickbooks.com/productupdates.

• Setup a new company file and design a perfect chart of accounts
• Setup bank accounts and credit cards and reconcile
• Invoice your customers and receive payments
• Manage accounts payable tasks
• And much much more!

Registration Details:

Date:  Friday, July 9, 2010

Time:  9am – 4pm, with a one hour break for lunch.

Location: Queen’s Academy – 2320 Marinship Way, Ste 205, Sausalito

The cost for the one day workshop is $295. Register by June 30 and receive a $50 discount!

Download the Registration Form

Refund Policy: Cancellations before June 30 will be refunded minus a 20% processing fee. Due to the limited enrollment allowed for this workshop, we will not be able to offer any refunds for cancellations after June 30, 2010

Queen’s Academy is located at:

2320 Marinship Way, Suite 205

Sausalito, CA 94965

• Setup a new company file and design a perfect chart of accounts
• Setup bank accounts and credit cards and reconcile
• Invoice your customers and receive payments
• Manage accounts payable tasks
• And much much more!

And best of all, you will be able to apply your new skills immediately, and will leave this workshop with your own customized, fully functioning, ready to go QuickBooks company file.

Day One: Essential QuickBooks Skills – new company setup, chart of accounts, features and lists, setup bank accounts and credit cards and how to reconcile, invoicing your customers, receiving payments, accounts payable tasks and backup.

Day Two: Setup your Own Company File – setup your bank accounts and beginning balances; populate your customer list; set up existing invoices and bills due. You will leave with a working QuickBooks company file that will be ready to use for your own company. You may bring your laptop to this session.

Registration Details:

Date:  September 16 and 17, 2010

Time:  9am – 4pm, with a one hour break for lunch

Location: Queen’s Academy – 2320 Marinship Way, Ste 205, Sausalito

The cost for the two day workshop is $495. Register by August 15 and receive a $100 discount!

Download the Registration Form

2320 Marinship Way, Suite 205

Sausalito, CA 94965

Registration Details:

Date:  July 29 and July 30, 2010

Time:  9am – 4pm, with a one hour break for lunch.

Location: Queen’s Academy – 2320 Marinship Way, Ste 205, Sausalito

The cost for the two day workshop is $495. Register by July 9 and receive a $100 discount!

Download the Registration Form

Queen’s Academy is located at:

2320 Marinship Way, Suite 205

Sausalito, CA 94965

Day One:  Learn how to setup your Chart of Accounts correctly; set up customers and vendors, including jobs and items list,  to accurately track income and expenses; learn how to track time on the job and use this information to invoice customers.

Day Two:  Learn how to setup payroll correctly to accurately give you labor costs on your jobs; setup your bills in Accounts Payable to effectively track job expenses; run financial reports and job costing reports to help you make strategic business decisions.

Registration Details:

Date:  August 10, 2010 and August 11, 2010

Time:  9am – 4pm, with a one hour break for lunch.

Location: Queen’s Academy – 2320 Marinship Way, Ste 205, Sausalito

The cost for the two day workshop is $495. Register by July 15 and receive a $100 discount!

Download the Registration Form

Queen’s Academy is located at:

2320 Marinship Way, Suite 205

Sausalito, CA 94965

 The first one is from the south from Davis at Cyclecenter.com:  “Highness, is there any way to remove clean-up genrnl’s from QB Premier?  The books are closed for prior years, so the genrnl’s are nuisances.”

 Yes, they are a nuisance aren’t they?  If adjusting journal entries are made in accounts receivable, accounts payable, sales tax, or payroll in QuickBooks – they will remain as entries but will do nothing to make adjustments in these “serious” areas of QuickBooks.  If you make an adjusting journal entry in QB, and credit a cash account and debit an expense account, it will work precisely.  If you make an adjusting journal entry that affects account receivable, for example, it will make the entry for the dollars but it will not “relieve” the accounts receivable outstanding invoice properly from the adjustment and the adjusting journal entry will remain on your Accounts Receivable aging forever.  To resolve the issue, one must “unravel” the thread of the knot, trace back to the original entry, correct it and then reconcile.  And Davis, if you tell me where you are seeing these renegade journal entries, we can go to the next step to correct it.

The other question came from the east coast from Jim C. who is working on a project with a legal case in which the company file in QuickBooks is legal evidence in a court case.  He wants to know if one can tell if a QuickBooks file has been altered. 

As part of the software, QuickBooks contains an “audit trail” function which tracks every transaction by user in the company file.  This report of the audit trail can be used to audit what each user does in a certain time period.  It would be possible from this report to see who (by each user) did what on a particular date in the file.  If the company file was handed off and then changes made to it after the handoff, it will be reflected in the audit trail.  Earlier versions of QuickBooks enabled users to “turn off” the audit trail.  If you are using QuickBooks 2008 forward (all versions: Pro, Premier or Enterprise), then the audit trail cannot be turned off. 

This is a good reason to create users in your company file.  Even if you are the only person using the company file, my recommendation is to setup a password for the Admin account, setup a user for Bookkeeper or the person’s name, and only use the Admin log on when doing specific required by QB Admin tasks.  In this way, you will be able to properly track all changes by each user.  This is a good feature to use when training a new accounts payable person, for instance.  They can work away on their tasks, and then at the end of the day, you can review what they worked on and make sure they are doing it correctly.

QuickBooks is a bunch of lists and they all talk to each other. There is a customer list, a vendor list, an employee list, and other lists. The Chart of Accounts is even more essential than the other lists. You have to have a Chart of Accounts in your company file. You do not have to have a customer list (although then you may wonder why you are doing any of this).

The Chart of Accounts is the spine of your accounting system. The job of the spine is to take task information from the brain, run it down the spine to your extremities, and then your arms and legs can work. You know how painful life can be if your spine is in pain, blocked, diseased or dysfunctional. It is financially painful and crippling to have a Chart of Accounts that is not set up correctly. And it is financially draining to have one that is not working – you will waste more time trying to get information out of a bad chart of accounts than you can imagine. Use that time to setup your chart of accounts perfectly!

Okay, we all know there is no such thing as perfect. But over the many years I have been teaching QuickBooks and setting up company files for clients, I have developed a template that will be probably the best beginning point for new users.

Many lists in QuickBooks can be exported out of one company file and imported to another company file. The list files that import and export are tagged as follows: xxx.iif. These are extensions you see many times throughout your computer use. Word documents use a “.doc” extension; Excel files are saved with a “.xls” extension; QuickBooks uses “.qbw” for a working company file and “.qbb” for backup files.

You can easily create your new QuickBooks company file, and choose None for the template chart of accounts that they suggest. You will then have a new company file with no Chart of Accounts and you can import the perfect one into your new company. From there you can add or delete appropriate accounts to fit your business model.

And of course, the Queen does have a perfect chart of accounts template for you. If you would like to have a copy of the Queen’s Perfect Chart of Accounts template in a .iif file format for importing into your own new QuickBooks company file, please enter your name and email address below and we will send you a copy.

The Queen of QuickBooks offers a specially trained bookkeeping SWAT team, available to help you. Here’s what she can do for you:

• Source qualified bookkeepers.
• Vet them based on your needs.
• Train them on the specifics of your business.
• Manage them.
• Provide backup and continuity of service.
• Act as an expert resource when complex questions arise.

This solution is ideal for many of the Queen’s clients: it’s professional, efficient, and cost-effective.

Meet some of the Queen’s Bookkeepers:

Carrie has a degree in Business Administration and many years experience in operations and management. Carrie had her “aha” moment in 2004 when she was working for a company with the Queen as a consultant and they identified that $100,000 was not being recovered in AR. Within six months, Carrie had tracked down the pieces of the problem and recovered the $100,000 for the company. She decided then she wanted to be a Queen’s Bookkeeper, and she takes pride in her bookkeeping and in finding “missing” money.

Ginger is a graduate of the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, and has experience in a wide variety of business environments. She has been working with the Queen for 10 years, and enjoys customizing bookkeeping systems to meet the needs of each individual client.

If you need bookkeeping services, call the Queen of QuickBooks at (415) 925-1830. She will be happy to explain in more detail how this service works, and to help you determine whether it is appropriate for your business.