Quickbooks, Bookkeeping and Accounting Blog

We recently added a number of QuickBooks tutorials related to managing customers and customers jobs in QuickBooks. Each QuickBooks tutorial includes detailed instructions and some commentary on things to think about. A list of recently added QuickBooks tutorials follows:

• Adding Customers in QuickBooks
• Using Customer Jobs in QuickBooks
• Editing Customers in QuickBooks
• Adding Customer Jobs in QuickBooks

Check out Samarak’s QuickBooks Tutorials page to find QuickBooks Tutorials on other topics.

A list of upcoming dates and actions for accountants, bookkeepers and small business owners to be aware of follows:

• 5/2/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 26th and April 29th.
• 5/7/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 30th and May 2nd.
• 5/9/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between May 3rd and May 6th.
• 5/12/2008 - Employees who earned more than $20 in tips in April must report the total to their employers.
  5/14/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between May 7th and May 9th.
• 5/15/2008 - If you are subject to the monthly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for April by May 15th.
• 5/16/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between May 10th and May 13th.
• 5/21/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between May 14th and May 16th.
• 5/23/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between May 17th and May 20th.
• 5/29/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between May 21st and May 23rd.
• 5/30/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between May 24th and May 27th.

Another blog showing dates and actions that accountants and bookkeepers should be aware of in June will be published at the end of May.

If you do project-based work for your customers, then you will probably want to use customer jobs. Using job tracking allows you to analyze your financial performance by job and job type. You can easily figure out both how much money you made on a specific job and how much money you make on certain types of jobs.

Customer jobs in QuickBooks are connected to customers. Therefore, you have to have a customer before you can have a customer job. However, you can have as many jobs as you want for each customer. Here are some reasons to have jobs:

• Customer has multiple offices or branches for which you perform services
  When you have a customer with multiple locations and billing centers, then you can use customer jobs in QuickBooks to separately record the information for each location. While you could simply create multiple customers, using customer jobs enables you to easily analyze your profitability on work done for the parent company as a whole as well as for each job.
• You perform multiple services for one customer
  When you perform multiple services for one customer, you can use customer jobs to analyze your profitability on each service. For example, a contractor could analyze his or her profitability on replacing a roof and redesigning a kitchen for the same customer by creating two jobs, roof and kitchen, under one customer, and then assigning the revenue and expenses associated with each actual job to the customer job in QuickBooks.
• You perform different types of work and want to know how profitable you are for each one
  You can use Job Types to break your business down into different categories and then analyze your profitability by category.
• Using Customer Jobs enables you to track additional information about the individual projects you do for customers
  You can record the Start Date, Projected End Date, and actual End Date for each job on the Job Info tab. You can set Price Levels on the Additional Info tab and can even add fields (click on Define Fields in the Additional Info tab) to track additional information about each job.

While not for every business, customer jobs are very useful for companies that do multiple jobs for the same customer and for customers that want to track their profitability for different categories of work.

Being able to get ahold of your accountant as you have questions is incredibly helpful. Unfortunately, many of my customers complain that they can’t get ahold of their accountant when they need them. Therefore, I recommend that if you are looking for an accountant, you specifically ask how soon you can expect to hear back from your accountant when you have questions. In addition, I recommend that when you interview some of your potential accountant’s current customers (a very important part of selecting an accountant), you ask them if they ever have trouble getting ahold of their accountant. If they say they do or even hesitate before saying they don’t, then interview some more accountants.

As a point of reference, my accountant often answers his own phone. When he doesn’t, he normally calls back within the hour. He serves as the accountant for many of my clients as well, so I often talk to him a couple of times a week, and in 10+ years he has never failed to return one of my calls. While this level of responsiveness is not required, it sure is great to have and is certainly worth looking for.

For tips on hiring an accountant, see my blog titled, appropriately, Hiring an Accountant.

We posted five new QuickBooks tutorials this week, four of which have to do with managing the QuickBooks chart of accounts. Every QuickBooks tutorial includes a discussion of things to think about, detailed instructions and pictures illustrating exactly what we are talking about.

Following is a list of the QuickBooks tutorials we posted this week:

• Setting Up QuickBooks Users
• Managing Your Chart of Accounts - Adding Accounts
• Making QuickBooks Accounts Inactive
• Deleting Accounts from the QuickBooks Chart of Accounts
• Editing Accounts in the QuickBooks Chart of Accounts

Samarak has many more QuickBooks tutorials available on our site. Check out our QuickBooks tutorials page.

Now that your 2007 tax return is final, it is time to take a look at what you are paying in for 2008 and make sure you are paying in enough to avoid penalties when you file your 2008 tax return. There are two ways to avoid penalties:

• You can avoid paying penalties by paying in 90% of what you will owe in 2008.
• If your AGI in 2007 was less than $150,000, you can avoid penalties by paying in 100% of your 2007 tax liability. If you 2007 AGI was greater than $150k, then you must pay in 110% of your 2007 tax liability to be sure of avoiding penalties.                 

Obviously, the two ways to pay money in are via withholdings and estimated tax payments. It is important to be aware that withholdings and estimated tax payments are not treated equally by the IRS. Estimates tax payments are applied only to the quarter they are paid in for. Total withholdings paid during the year are divided by four and then applied to each quarter in equal parts.

This is important to consider as penalties are determined on a quarterly basis, meaning that even if you have enough in at year end, you will owe penalties if you are behind on a quarterly basis (example: if $20k is the minimum amount of federal withholdings you need to pay in for 2008, your first quarter estimated tax payment + 25% of your total 2008 federal withholdings must equal at least $5k).

Samarak has offered a directory of local bookkeepers since 2006. In 2007 we added a directory of accountants and a directory of QuickBooks experts. We also added city pages to all of the directories. The purpose of these pages is to make it easier to find local accountants, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants in each directory.

Easy to use, inexpensive directories are a key part of our goal of helping financial professionals, including accountants, bookkeepers, QuickBooks consultants, and part-time CFOs and controllers, obtain business over the web. If you haven’t looked at our directories before, take a look and, if you are a financial professional, consider listing your company.

We posted 4 new QuickBooks tutorials this week, all of which include detailed instructions for a specific topic, pictures showing exactly what we are talking about and explanations of things to think about. A list of the QuickBooks tutorials posted this week follows:

• Converting Data from Peachtree to QuickBooks
• Show the QuickBooks Home Page When Starting QuickBooks
• Using The QuickBooks Home Page
• Customizing the QuickBooks Home Page

For a list of all QuickBooks tutorials available on Samarak’s website, see our QuickBooks Tutorials page.

Some users of QuickBooks 2008 are experiencing problems opening their QuickBooks software today. The QuickBooks loading screen appears and then quickly disappears. 

This problem does not actually have anything to do with QuickBooks itself. Instead, it occurs after installing a Windows Update from Microsoft and is caused by a damaged component of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. To correct the problem, users must remove and then reinstall Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

Detailed instructions for resolving this issue are available on Intuit’s website.

The maximum amount of wages subject to social security taxes increased from $97,500 in 2007 to $102,000 in 2008, and is expected to increase to $106,500 in 2009. Here is a look at the maximum wages subject to social security taxes over the last 10 years:

• 1999: $72,600
• 2000: $76,200
• 2001: $80,400
• 2002: $84,900
• 2003: $87,000
• 2004: $87,900
• 2005: $90,000
• 2006: $94,200
• 2007: $97,500
• 2008: $102,000
• 2009 (projected): $106,500

The tax rates are 6.2% for FICA and 1.45% for Medicare, and there is no limit on the amount of wages which are subject to the Medicare tax.

Unincorporated businesses jointly owned by married couples are normally classified as partnerships for Federal tax purposes. However, per the Small Business and Work Opportunity Tax Act of 2007 (Public Law 110-28) a “qualified joint venture,” whose only members are a married couple filing a joint return, can elect not to be treated as a partnership for Federal tax purposes in calendar year 2007 and subsequent tax years.

For more information, see Election for Husband and Wife Unincorporated Businesses on the IRS’s website.

I added 5 QuickBooks tutorials recently, all of which deal with QuickBooks backups and portable company files. Each tutorial covers a specific topic and includes pictures and a brief discussion of things to think about. Links to these QuickBooks tutorials follow:

• Backing Up Your QuickBooks Company File When Closing QuickBooks
• Schedule Automatic Backups of Your QuickBooks Data
• Restoring Your QuickBooks Backup File
• Creating QuickBooks Portable Company Files
• Restoring Your QuickBooks Portable Company File

Check back often as QuickBooks tutorials will be added on a regular basis.

The recommended method for giving your accountant access to your QuickBooks company file is via an Accountant’s Copy, which allows you to continue to work in QuickBooks while your accountant makes changes to your QuickBooks file.  You can then import the changes your accountant made into your company file. For information on using the Accountant’s Copy, see Exchanging QuickBooks Files With Your Accountant. In this blog, however, I am going to talk about QuickBooks Portable Company files.

A QuickBooks Portable Company File is a compact version of your QuickBooks company file. Depending on the quantity of data in your file, it may even be small enough to be sent by e-mail. Because of this, the easiest way to send your company data to another person (such as your accountant) or to move your company data to another location is by first saving your company file as a portable company file.

When your accountant receives the portable company file, he or she can open it to view your data or to make changes. Be aware, however, that you cannot merge the copy of your QuickBooks file that your accountant is working in with your own copy of your QuickBooks file. Therefore, if your accountant is making changes to your data, you should not make any until you have received your file back from your accountant. If your accountant only needs to make a few changes, you might ask them to note what they are so that you can make them yourself.

Finally, be aware that your accountant will need your administrator password to save your file as a portable company file so that they can send it back to you.

For specific instructions on creating and restoring QuickBooks portable company files, see Creating QuickBooks Portable Company Files and Restoring Your QuickBooks Portable Company File.

The IRS has a list of common errors people make when preparing their tax returns on their website. Check it out at http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc303.html.

 Some of the most common errors people make are:

• Missing or incorrect social security numbers.
• Entering the wrong tax from the tables.
• Computation errors in calculating the earned income credit or the child and dependent care credit. Also, incorrect  or missing identification numbers for child care providers.
• Entering withholding and estimated tax payments on the wrong line.
• Math Errors. Check your addition and your subtraction.

Mistakes can significantly delay the processing of you tax return, so take the time to review your work!

A list of upcoming dates and actions that accountants, bookkeepers and small business owners should be aware of follows:

• 4/2/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between March 26th and March 28th.
• 4/4/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between March 29th and April 1st.
• 4/9/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 2nd and April 4th.
• 4/10/2008 - Employees who earned more than $20 in tips in March must report the total to their employers.
• 4/11/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 5th and April 8th.
• 4/15/2008 - Household employers who paid $1,500 or more to a household employee must file Schedule G.
• 4/17/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 9th and April 11th.
• 4/21/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 12th and April 15th.
• 4/23/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 16th and April 18th.
• 4/25/2008 - If you are subject to the semiweekly deposit rule, then deposit payroll taxes for payments made between April 19th and April 22nd.
• 4/30/2008 - Deposit accumulated FUTA owed through March if it is more than $500.

A new list will be published at the end of April showing dates and actions that accountants and bookkeepers should be aware of in May.