Linda Ardisani shows how to clean up your QuickBooks Online file before year-end: deactivate old vendors, remove outdated expense categories, and lock prior fiscal periods to prevent accidental changes. S-corp owners need this done by early February for tax filing.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Ardisani, Ardisani Bookkeeping. So I wanted to do a few tutorials and I'll space them out through November to get— just to start working on getting your file ready. If you haven't been doing it all year, you've kind of been throwing it together and the accounting's kind of been by the wayside. I wanted to do some tutorials on how to help you to prepare your records so that when 2019 rolls in, And we all have to get our records. Usually, if you know you're an S corp or corporation, you need to get the file to the accountant by— usually my accountant likes mine by like February 10th so that he can get the file ready for processing for March 15th. And I try to get that ready for him early so that we can have discussion on how my business is doing. And really right now is a good time to have the discussion with your accountant and take a look at your records. And start to prepare for next year, maybe set some goals. But yeah, so we've got QuickBooks Connect coming up next week. So there'll be a post and it'll be kind of out of topic. But I am— I've already put it together. So it's ready to go when I'm not here. I've already packed. I'm a planner. So I like to get my stuff done. And it's funny, you see sometimes bookkeepers that don't even have their records are like the last thing to do, almost like when you're married to a mechanic and your car is the last one to be fixed. It kind of falls into that same realm. But I like to plan. I'm already packed for my trip. I'm going a little early so I can visit my grandchildren. But I am going to be preparing my records for, for 2019. So let's take a look here. I'm just going to take you through something that you have the ability to do in your file if you've just got a regular QuickBooks Online company file. But I want to show you one of the ways you can get in and just kind of clean things up now. So let me share my screen. And let's go into the file. So here's my, my file. And I like to go in here and just kind of clean things up. So, you know, 17hats, you can come right into your— you're going to come into expenses. And then I'm coming right over to the vendors, or you can come right into vendors from here, which is new. They've kind of added that. And you can come in and like 17hats, I can come into that page and just look and see, are these all the same, right? They're all the same. Great. Come to 7-Eleven. I don't use it very often, but looks like it was always gas. And be careful in here though, you want to make sure— now see how these are 2015? I don't want to change anything from prior periods. In 2017, I haven't really bought much gas because I state where I'm at. This is just an app. So I've got my little app, app section. And these are all for 2018. ACEs is old, and I'm probably not going to use this, this particular vendor again. So I'm just gonna go over here and edit it and just make it inactive, take it off my list. That will delete it. So Acuity, we just did Aloft, that's a hotel I ended up staying in when I got stuck. And I stayed there and had a meal, and I'll probably never go to that again. So I'm just going to make it inactive and trying to keep my lists under control. So this is a nice way to come in and start to do this. This is all office expenses. You can just see here's all office expenses. And, you know, you really want to be careful about the year here. And another way to make sure that the year is correct and you don't go and accidentally come through and like clean this up and go into it is you can come over to the gear. And come into your company settings. And then just come in here and start to lock the period out, right? So you can come in here and just lock out this particular period. Let's see, change this a little bit here. I want to— might be under Advanced— close the books. So I just want to come over here and make sure that I don't accidentally change any of the books. And my closing date, my tax return has been filed. So I want to just allow changes after a warning. Obviously, I'm not going to want to change anything. So make sure you do that step before you come into your vendor list. And you just come through like, you know, American Airlines, right? That's my usual conference expense. You know, a Mori restaurant, I probably never go back to a Mori restaurant. I don't even remember where that was. So I'm just going to come in here and make it inactive. And just come through and clean it up. So that's my little short tip for processing and getting your records in order. You can obviously do this even with your customer list and all your lists, kind of work through it, maybe even your chart of accounts. And just kind of start to clean things up. This is a good time of the year to do that. And I hope you follow us when we go to QuickBooks Connect. I hope you follow us and I hope you join our group Community Live and get into the contest that we're having. Free 90 minutes. Maybe you hire me to do this and if you win the contest, I'll come in and clean your lists up for you. Certainly can do that. I could send it when, you know, what I do with my clients, I send it out as an Excel spreadsheet and they just of highlight and color the ones they want to keep and then take away the ones they don't. So I hope you follow us. I hope you can, you know, it's an expensive conference to go to. So if you want to follow us virtually, just join our group Community Live. I'll put the notes in the blog and then follow us and watch us go through there and interview people and meet people and network and learn stuff. We'll share what we've learned because we are attending some of the sessions. So I hope you follow us and I hope you join us and stay with our group. And we've got more fun things coming in the future with our group and some webinars and some help sessions and just having 2 pro advisors together kind of work things out because we obviously work a little differently. We have different approaches to things because we have different life experiences. So I hope you join us and I hope you follow us and have a wonderful week. Bye now.
