Resource · QuickBooks Online
Getting QuickBooks
to tell you the truth
QuickBooks Online will happily let you run a business on numbers that are wrong. Nothing errors, nothing warns you, and the reports look finished. Here is where the truth usually goes missing, and how to get it back.
Start with the
chart of accounts
Almost every reporting problem traces back here. QuickBooks ships with a default chart, most businesses add to it ad hoc for a few years, and the result reports on categories nobody chose.
The test is simple: does your profit-and-loss break costs down the way you actually think about the business? If you think in terms of jobs, materials, and labour but the report shows twenty indistinguishable expense lines, the chart is the thing to fix — not the report.
Fewer, more meaningful accounts beat many precise ones. Detail you never act on is just work.
The monthly routine
Four things, every month
- 01
Review the bank rules before the feed
Rules apply silently and permanently. Read what they are doing before you accept a month of transactions they have already categorised for you.
- 02
Clear undeposited funds
Payments recorded but never matched to a deposit accumulate here, inflating income and the balance sheet at the same time. It should not carry a growing balance.
- 03
Reconcile every account, not just the main one
Credit cards and loan accounts are the ones most often skipped, and they are where the largest surprises hide.
- 04
Read the profit-and-loss against last month
A single month tells you very little. Side by side, a miscategorisation usually announces itself as a line that moved for no reason you can name.
Housekeeping worth
doing once
Merge duplicate customers and vendors. The same business under three spellings makes ageing and spend reporting meaningless. This is tedious once and free forever after.
Close the books after each period.QuickBooks can lock closed periods behind a password. Without it, a stray edit can change last year’s filed numbers and nobody will notice.
Set proper user access. Everyone having full admin is convenient right up until it is not. Access should match what each person actually needs to do.
Reconcile from statements, not from the feed. The feed is a convenience; the statement is the authority. When they disagree, the statement wins.
When to hand it
over
All of the above is doable yourself, and plenty of owners do it well. The point to hand it over is usually when the routine keeps slipping — because a monthly close that happens most months is closer to no close than to a reliable one.
Bluebonnet is certified in QuickBooks Online and works in your existing file; nothing needs migrating. See QuickBooks bookkeeping for what that involves, or catch-up and clean-up if the file needs rescuing first.
Ready when you are
Or hand the file
to someone certified.
A free 30-minute consultation. Bring your QuickBooks file as it is — messy files are the normal case.