No status

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. As we continue in this month of cleaning up our client files, whether they're an old client or a new client, I wanted to share a pretty cool filter that you may or may not have noticed in your QuickBooks Online file. It's called a no status filter. This is one of the quick and easy ways to see the items that have not cleared in the bank. Like your deposits and your check items. This is a cool filter that in the past I had used, uh, the reconciliation screen and snapshotted what was left over. But now you really want to start to use this filter. It gives you a really good report. So why do we need to even see these? Well, it's that time of the year that we want to clean up our past records, and now is the best time to populate these lists for our clients When we complete the work, the year-end work in our file, especially when you work with attorneys and law firms like we do, it's really critical to address any hanging items in the bank account, the IOLTA or the trust account. Did you know that if a client retainer is refunded, that if it's not cash, there's a lot of steps the law firm has to do to try to get that money to the client? And then sometimes it could end up even in the hands of the state because you need to have that money. It's not their money. You need to address that. This is the problem that we're really addressing by creating this list. So maybe in the operating account there are some duplicate entries from the client doing their own record keeping. We've all seen that. This is a fast and easy way to filter that checking account, to search for those items, as well as produce that list. So let me share my screen and I'm going to show you exactly what I'm talking about, as well as walking you through a few other items that maybe you don't know what really what they mean if you're new to QuickBooks. So basically I'm coming in here to my Banking tab. So the Banking tab on the left, I'm coming into the account. Like I mentioned, the IOLTA is a pretty important one, as well as all the accounts, even the credit cards you want to check on this. So I'm going to go to the bank register here. Everybody has a different way to get there, but this is how I get there. And this filter is pretty cool. You have a lot of ways I could look for specific items by just clicking on this filter and just using this find. I use that a lot, but I also use the advanced find button that's under the spyglass. which is over here on the top right-hand side. It's one of my favorite tools for looking for a specific item or an amount, a specific type of transaction. But you can do it right here. This is just going to search in this, this box here for this check register. And I can do a search here. Let's see, I'll just do $145.32. So I'm just going to search for all items at that amount, and it's going to bring up that one check. So that was my filter. I just have to cross that filter out. To get to No Status, you're going to come over here and just some reconciliation status. That's what we're talking about in this video. We're talking about this column right here, which has got your reconciliation status. But I want to use this to really record what has not cleared. It has no status whatsoever. And then I can export this list right here by coming over here and just exporting it to Excel. And it's going to bring up this beautiful Excel spreadsheet that I'm going to be able to give to my client And a lot of times what I'll do here, and I see if I can make this a little bit bigger for you to see on the screen, um, we can really just kind of do this and I can take and make a column here for the client and just ask them like, what are, what is this, what are these items that I have hanging? And you know, here's the payees. You might want to take and clean this up a little bit, take off things that really aren't specific to your client that he, he or she may not really care about. Like, why did this check to McKernan Motors— this is actually a deposit that didn't clear— why didn't the deposit clear? That should have cleared the bank by now. It's June. And maybe it's a matter of the client never reconciled. So those are the things you want to look into if you've got a brand new client. First place you really want to look and go to, you know, AAA. Why did that check not clear the bank? You just want to look and see if that's a payment. These payments never cleared. How come this payment didn't clear the bank? Why did they send the refund back but it never happened? So those are the items you want to look at. Now, as we go through, and you want to send that to your client, say send that to the client in a nice formatted listing. Here's what's in the IOLTA, here's what didn't clear the bank, why. But before you send it to the client, you really want to try to investigate and figure out what happened in the file and why it didn't clear. Maybe I want to go into the client's account by going into the accounting tab and going to the chart of accounts And looking specifically at McKernan Motors and find out what actually happened, what transpired. Maybe there's a duplicate item. That's the item that's hanging. We'll want to remove it. Maybe you go into the client file and see that it's negative, that, that particular trust client submatter is negative, and that's a problem and you want to address that. You can also do a few other things I just wanted to show you. So obviously, if you've never really— let's get rid of no status. If you've never really played around in the reconciliation screen, if you're not aware, you can sort by date. One of the features I really use a lot if I'm searching for a particular maybe deposit or a specific amount and I want to see— maybe I know there's multiple of the same and I want to see where they are— I'll want to search here and kind of look in this check register to see by sorting by the amount. You can sort either way. I can do largest to smallest or vice versa. The other search icon that's really helpful when you're trying to clean up a client file and you're looking for a specific amount— and this tool used to be really robust, but I've had some problems with it in the recent time since they kind of captured down a 2-year filter timing to it. But you can change and search for so many things here. Like, you can search right down to, like, reference number on check is one I use. If I'm looking for a journal entry, a lot of times I'll do all transaction lines and I'll be looking for a specific amount. That's going to find the amount no matter where it is in the file. That's just a few things that we like to use as we're using as guidance to try to figure out when we're trying to reconcile or figure out what's going on in the client records, especially when you're looking for duplicates. Looking at it in that check register view, doing that search under the filter there is going to show you that if you see the 2 and they're right next to each other, one's reconciled, one's not, you want to go and look at it. Maybe the client downloaded the bank feed but didn't realize you had already entered the transaction as a transaction through the outside legal software. Those are things we see. So I hope this little short video is helpful. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out. Hit that subscribe button, that A, and keep following me if you want to watch more videos. And if you are happy and you learned something, send me a thumbs up or write me a little message. I'd love to hear from you if you have any questions or anything you'd like me to address. Also, I'd love to have some ideas thrown my way as we dive into 2022. Thanks for watching. Bye now.