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How Do I Resort Lists?

Chief Mechanic · September 11, 2010 ·

Lists are one of the foundations of QuickBooks, and from time to time they can become out of order. That’s when they need to be resorted. Some common indicators that it’s time to resort your lists include:

the list itself is out of order
an element is missing
new entries in a list appear at the top of the list instead of in their sorted order
you can’t turn on the account number preference
selecting a Customer:Job, Vendor, or Employee in a Center fails to display existing transactions for that name
Names don’t properly auto-fill when entering a Name filter on the Advanced tab of the Edit->Find… function

Resorting any list will undo any special order you’ve applied to the list, and this activity can’t be done in multi-user mode. It’s always a good idea to backup your company file before undertaking an action that can’t be undone.

There are 8 lists that can be resorted. They are:

Customers:Jobs
Vendors
Employees
Other Names
Accounts
Items
Memorized Reports
Memorized Transactions

Since this technique is often used to address possible data corruption, we’ll outline the most efficient technique to resort multiple lists, but you can also choose to resort an individual list by opening up a Center and right clicking on a list element.

The first 4 lists are collectively referred to as Names or Entities, and there’s an easy way to resort these 4 lists:

Open the Write Checks window by clicking on Banking->Write Checks or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + W
In the Pay to the Order of field, click Ctrl + L
Opt to include inactive list entries by clicking the Include Inactive checkbox
Click the Name button and choose Re-sort List from the menu
Click Ok to resort the lists
Uncheck the Include Inactive checkbox

The screenshot below shows the combined Name list in Step 4:

QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 10 Resort Name List

Our related article explains how to provide easy access to this combined list of all Names.

Resorting the Chart of Accounts and Items lists follow similar procedures, except each of these lists will have to be resorted individually. To access the Chart of Accounts, click the Lists->Chart of Accounts menu selection or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + A. To access the Items list, click Lists->Items. Opt to include inactive list entries, resort the list from the button in the lower left of the window, and uncheck the Include Inactive checkbox before proceeding to the next list.

Resorting Memorized Reports and Memorized Transactions are similar to the above steps, except there’s no need to include inactive list entries since they’re not allowed on these lists. To access Memorized Reports, click the Reports->Memorized Reports->Memorized Report List menu selection; to access Memorized Transactions, click Lists->Memorized Transactions or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + T.

After resorting lists, close and reopen your company file (.qbw) to insure that all changes are successfully written to disk.

Resorting lists is discussed in this Intuit knowledge base article.

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How Can I Display a List of All Names?

Chief Mechanic · September 5, 2010 ·

In QuickBooks, Customers, Customer:Jobs, Vendors, and Employees are called Names. In transaction entry screens, the selection of a Name is filtered to include only the type of Names normally associated with that transaction type. For example, when entering a Vendor Bill, the selection of a Name is filtered to only include Vendors.

Sometimes, it’s helpful to be able to review a list of all Names in one place, especially when trying to follow a consistent pattern if an entity appears on more than 1 list.

To display a list of all Names, follow these simple steps:

Open the Write Checks window by clicking on the Banking->Write Checks menu selection or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + W
In the Pay to the Order of field (ie, the check payee), use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + L to display a list of all Names
Add the Name List window to the Icon Bar by clicking on the View->Add “Name List” to Icon Bar… menu selection
Assign a Label and Description to the new window
Optionally, change the default icon selection that will appear in the Icon Bar to represent the Name List
Click Ok

You now have a list of all Names in an easy-to-access window. The list provides a consolidated window of 4 pieces of information: Active Status, Name, Name Type, and Balance Total.

QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 10 Name List

Note that the Write Checks window was used to access all Names because a check can be written to all of the different Name types and by-passes the filtering set by QuickBooks on different transaction types.

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What Distinguishes a Reimbursable Expense From Other Expenses?

Chief Mechanic · September 1, 2010 ·

A reimbursable expense is an expense that you expect to invoice to a customer or client either at the actual cost or with a markup. QuickBooks includes features to distinguish reimbursable expenses from other types of expenses and to track which reimbursable expenses have in fact been invoiced to a customer.

For more information on handling reimbursable expenses, see our related articles on enabling automatically invoicing customers for reimbursable expenses, invoicing a customer for reimbursable expenses, removing expenses from the list of billable expenses to be invoiced to a customer, and finding out which reimbursable expenses haven’t been billed to a customer.

In QuickBooks, the 4 principal ways to record expenses for a business are:

Recording a vendor bill using the Vendor->Enter Bills menu selection
Writing a check using the Banking->Write Checks menu selection or Ctrl + W keyboard shortcut
Recording a credit card transaction using the Banking->Enter Credit Card Charges menu selection
Via a General Journal entry using the Company->Make General Journal Entries… menu selection

When you record an expense using 1 of these 4 methods, you can associate line items on the transaction with one or more Customer:Jobs. Doing so will enable you to analyze both the expenses as well as the revenues from a job.

When you add a Customer:Job to a line item on a check, vendor bill, credit card charge, or General Journal entry, QuickBooks will automatically put a check mark in the Billable? field. That check mark in the Billable? field indicates this is a reimbursable expense to be invoiced to a customer or client. If it’s not, simply remove the check mark by clicking on it.

Unfortunately, there’s presently no way to set the default for the Billable? field to being unchecked for those organizations who want to simply assign expenses to customers and not seek reimbursement. Leaving this field checked won’t interfere with associating expenses with customers; it’s an important detail if your organization does want to use it to track reimbursable expenses. In either case, with a Customer:Job associated with the line item for the expense, you’ll be able to use QuickBooks to perform job profitability analysis, more commonly known as job costing.

The screens for each of the 4 principal ways to record an expense are shown below. Here’s the Enter Bills window:

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Enter Bill Reimbursable Expense Tab

The Write Checks window:

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Write Checks Billable

The Enter Credit Card Charges window:

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Enter Credit Card Charge Billable

And the Make General Journal Entries window:

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Make General Journal Entries Billable

Note that the field where you enter the Customer:Job on the Make General Journal Entries window is actually called Name because General Journal entries can be recorded for an entity that isn’t a Customer:Job, such as a Vendor, Employee, or Other Name.

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Does QuickBooks Have Limits On the Number of List Items and Transactions That Can Be Entered?

Chief Mechanic · August 26, 2010 ·

Yes. There are 2 kinds of limits: physical and practical. Let’s consider each in turn.

QuickBooks faces these physical limits:

2 billion transactions
10,000 accounts in the GL chart of accounts
14,500 names (customers, vendors, employees, and other names – combined)
14,500 items (which include inventory items)
10,000 classes
100 price levels

The above list highlights the most important physical limits of QuickBooks; it’s not an all-inclusive list. The physical limits of Enterprise Solutions are considerably higher. For details on all of the physical limits of both QuickBooks and Enterprise Solutions, consult this Intuit knowledge base article.

To find out how your own company file stands relative to these limits, press F2 from within QuickBooks to display the Product Information window. On the right side, you’ll see the List Information. In this example, the company file has 134 (out of 10,000) GL accounts, 217 (out of 14,500) total names, and 106 (out of 14,500) Items.

QuickBooks Premier 2009 Product Information List Information

There are important practical considerations as well. According to Intuit, QuickBooks is designed for small businesses with fewer than 20 employees and $2 million in annual revenue. However, those are general guidelines. Bigger firms reliably use QuickBooks. What impacts whether you should use QuickBooks or its more powerful relative, Enterprise Solutions, is the size of your data file today and how that data is expected to grow over the time period for which you want to keep all transaction data in 1 file.

Intuit suggests estimating 2 Kb per transaction and projecting the size of your data file over several years. Keep in mind that a sale paid for with 1 check results in 3 transactions (invoice, payment, and deposit), and each AP transaction results in at least 2 (vendor bill and payment). This estimate does not include the data that list elements themselves (e. g., customers, vendors, or items) will add to overall file size.

In our experience, the performance of QuickBooks can degrade if overall company file size exceeds 100 Mb. Intuit suggests a practical limit of growth of 15 Mb per year (or about 7500 transactions).

As a company grows, QuickBooks includes a utility to remove fully paid and reconciled transactions in a process referred to as “cleaning up.” This process reduces the size of the QuickBooks company file. That’s why it’s important to consider the time period you’ll keep old transaction data in your company file. If you’ll clean up your company file every 18-24 months, the number of transactions you can store without hitting the practical limitations of QuickBooks will be considerably greater.

Some longtime QuickBooks users engage in a process of making a backup copy of a company file and then cleaning it up with a cutoff date. The backup copy preserves history transactions for those rare instances where they may be useful, but the company file for everyday use has been cleaned up and no longer includes stale, fully paid transactions. That results in improved performance.

The guidelines on practical limits we’ve discussed here aren’t unbreakable rules, and the limits are influenced by factors we didn’t mention, most notably the hardware performance of the computer on which you run QuickBooks.

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