Hidden Features in QuickBooks Desktop

QuickBooks Hidden Features

Learn about the hidden features in QuickBooks Desktop such as audit trail, profit and loss by job and batch transactions. Increase your productivity with these new features.

QuickBooks Desktop has some great features. Some of these features have been in Desktop since its inception. Some of these features are very new actually. In fact, we’re going to go over one of them in a couple of minutes.

The first one is really undeposited funds. So QuickBooks uses undeposited funds really to group deposits together to match the bank deposit. So, if we click record deposits, it’s going to show us a list of deposits or I should say customer payments that were recently received. So let’s just assume that these three went to the bank together for a total of 33,445, that’s one deposit.

Now, I could put this in, make sure my date’s correct. I could do another one. Again, hit okay. It’s another deposit for 28,000, save and close. So those two are now in my check register. And when I do the bank reconciliation, they will match the bank statement.

The next thing I’d like to talk about is the audit trail. Under reports, accountant and taxes, we have the audit trail. Now this runs in the background and records every single transaction and who made the transaction, the date and time. And if there were changes to the transaction.

So let’s scroll down his check 500, which is put in and then you see prior and latest. That means there was a change under the latest. So if we open up where it is bold, and italicized, that’s where the change happened. So in this case, a check was put into permits and licenses and it was changed to subcontractors, by the admin user. So this is great when you’re trying to hunt down and figure out what may have changed and who made the changes so, that’s the audit trail.

The third thing that’s great with QuickBooks, one of the features, is job costing. Under company and financial, we have the profit and loss by job. This is really the standard profit and loss, but instead it is grouped by job or customer job. So, every customer has a column and the allocated expenses and revenue associated with it.

If I collapse this real quick, I can get a very bird’s eye view of which jobs are making money or losing. And if I expand it, I see the detail. And if I wanted to see how these got allocated, I could drill into one of these.

There were four bills associated with this job. And if I go into one of these bills, right here in the middle, it says customer job. So every transaction in QuickBooks allows you to put a customer job in. So if you do put those in, then that report we just saw, the customer job report, will appear with expenses and revenue in the appropriate job, very powerful.The last feature is relatively new. So under the accountant menu, we have batch enter transactions. What’s cool about this, if you need to put in a bunch of checks or deposits, credit card charges, bills and bill credits, invoices and credit memos that were done outside of QuickBooks, for whatever reason. Maybe you’re doing writeup work, or maybe there were manual checks written, you could just populate this and it’ll actually put them in. So you don’t have to do it one-by-one.

So, I have a quick example. We have a spreadsheet that has three checks, checks one, two, and three. So I can grab this, I can copy it. I could jump back here and paste it. Control C, control V. So in red, it doesn’t recognize this. So, that’s water, if I just start typing water, because maybe I didn’t have the right one when I had it on my spreadsheet and office, there we go. And in this case it did not like the dollar sign.

So, if I get rid of the dollar sign, it’ll work. Next time I would not put the dollar sign in and I could put a memo in, again, customer job, if we want job costing, here we go. Save and it’s telling me it’s saving it to the checking account. We can make a change if we need to. Hit yes and those are now in my checking account.

So, those are the great features. Check them out, let us know what you think and good luck with some of these new other features of QuickBooks.