In this brief tutorial, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping demonstrates a lesser‑known QuickBooks Online feature that lets users filter outstanding invoices by date to quickly apply a single payment covering multiple invoices. She walks through a sample client file, showing how to receive a payment, enter check details, and use the date‑range filter (e.g., 4/1/18 to present) to narrow a potentially massive list of open invoices down to the relevant ones. This streamlined workflow is especially useful for businesses with high‑volume clients who may have dozens or hundreds of open invoices. Artesani also mentions her role on the Intuit Advisory Council, underscoring her expertise and the relevance of the tip for both bookkeepers and small‑business owners. The video concludes with an invitation to watch future QuickBooks tips.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I'm just going to do a brief tutorial on QuickBooks Online. I have to say, as you know, my favorite program ever, and it amazes me how I see things that have probably been there the whole time and just never noticed it. So I'm going to take you to one feature. This isn't going to be a really long tutorial, but just something that maybe you never recognized or saw in the program that can be helpful, especially if you have a lot of invoices and you, you bill out with a lot of invoices to one particular client and you know, you get a check for several invoices and you have to really narrow it down as you're trying to apply them. So I do have some good news to share. I was appointed to the Intuit Advisory Council. So I leave Tuesday to go to Intuit's headquarters and be on an amazing panel of people that are all like-minded and share our thoughts and hopefully maybe present Intuit with some ideas on how the program can work better for a business like mine that does bookkeeping, or even businesses like yours that maybe you struggle with something. I just think QuickBooks Online is the most amazing program ever, but I'm sure that we'll talk about Desktop too. That being said, let's take you to the sample file so I can take you through the program. What I found, and this is an accountant's file, but what I found is we're going to just take a look at one customer here. I'm going to go to Customers. Her name is Summer, so I'm going to bring you to Mary Summer. So we have a lot of open invoices with her. Now I'm going to pretend that we received a check, and this check was from Mary Summers, her business, and she was paying all of the May and one April invoice. So we'll just pretend this is a gigantic list. So you're going to come over to the plus sign, you're going to receive the payment, and I'm going to type in Mary Summers. Mary Summer and come in here and, you know, I'm going to enter the check, the check number. And now I know this, we're just going to assume this list is gigantic and maybe it goes on, maybe you've got like 50 pages of invoices, maybe you invoice her a lot for a lot of different things. So we're going to narrow it down to one specific payment that she paid me for just April and May invoices. So You can find the invoice by typing in the invoice number if you're looking for a particular one, especially if you've got a giant massive list of invoices that you're trying to find one specific one. And maybe this is your, like, your biggest client and you invoice her quite a bit and she's got maybe, I don't know, 100 invoices a month and you're trying to go through the weeds to find that one invoice. But another way is, and in this particular way it's going to work for me, is I'm going to filter down this list. So I'm going to do from, I'll say, 4/1/18. So she's paying me for invoices for one remaining one from April and also all the ones from May. So I'm going to hit Apply, and now that screen is now filtered down. So if you're dealing with a massive amount of invoices, I've now filtered it down to only those, and she paid me $23,500, and voilà, I can enter this payment fairly quickly by just filtering down the invoices. Now if you've got a massive list, you probably want to maybe open up a second screen, or you If you've got the check in front of you, you can come through and just kind of check off each one. But if you do it this way fairly quickly and you've got a check, and maybe you got a check for $23,500 and she's clearing off all the April and May invoices, or maybe she pays you once a month and it just pays off all the May invoices, you'll be able to find them fairly quickly by using that filter. And I find sometimes with these invoices, especially if you don't enter them in a numerical order, it sometimes can be hard because they won't list here. So when you're dealing with a massive amount of invoices that unpaid, they don't always list in numerical order depending on how you enter them and what was happening. I've seen that with client files. I'm like, oh, I just wish I could just click description and sort by it or sort by the date, and it doesn't let you. You can't make these filters, they don't click. So this is the way I find that will help me. I received a check, $23,500, and now I've done that, I'm done with that transaction really quickly. So that's my short tip today. I know it's not a long tip, but it's like one of those things that maybe was hidden, you just couldn't see in the file. And I've done other ones on hidden features in QuickBooks Online, but I thought that was kind of interesting because I never really noticed that. But I just had a client that has 450 open invoices for one particular customer, and the customer does pay her monthly, and I just happened to notice that in the file. So it's kind of cool, another reason why I love QuickBooks Online. So thank you for watching. I will definitely Um, be back next week with another video, but I just wanted to share that with you. Thank you for watching. Bye now.
