I recently wrote about staying on top of your company’s books and the tremendous information gains that result. I’m now in the process of analyzing my company’s 2006 year and learning a great deal about how the actual performance matches my expectations. One of my areas of needed improvement is bookkeeping - I am looking to reduce time spent bookkeeping, reduce the time it takes to get accurate statements of past performance, and to increase the amount of information that I can obtain from my books. To accomplish this goal I have been working on improving the ways I do my books, and have been learning some neat tricks in the process.

After a trip to the accountant’s last month I was introduced to a terrific QuickBooks feature for dealing with a nuisance of mine - entering repeat transactions. I have a number of clients on a monthly billing cycle for recurring services, and until now I have been entering each such transaction into QuickBooks manually. I’ve become quite good at it, but I can’t emphasis how much of a timewaster it has been each month.

Memorizing a Transaction

The simple trick here is to have QuickBooks do most of the work for you. Let’s say you have a client that is billed $150 per month for some sort of recurring service, and that you invoice this client monthly. If this is a new client, enter the first invoice manually as you would always do. If this is a past client simply bring up the last invoice. With the invoice open, you will find a Memorize Invoice option hiding in the Edit menu. This will allow you to have QuickBooks either enter the transaction automatically every “xx” amount of time, or set it as a task in reminders (this is your only option if you work with foreign currency, however the invoice is still automatically filled in for you). The same applies for other QuickBooks transactions too, most notably bills.

Now when I need to make my regular invoices or pay regular bills I simply click the transaction reminder for that bill and QuickBooks does the rest. The speed difference is incredible, and it’s always comforting to reduce the chances for human error through automation.

Compatibility Note: I write this from the perspective of the QuickBooks 2006 Canadian Pro edition, but I suspect that other QuickBooks versions and competing accounting packages have similiar functionality.