Major Time-Saving Tips for Catching Up Your Quickbooks Online
It happens. Stuff comes up. Deadlines pop up. Life throws us curveballs. So, falling a little behind on bookkeeping? It happens.
Sometimes we gotta do a little catchup in Quickbooks Online (I admit, myself included). But with these tips, you can get caught up lickety-split (do people still say that?).
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Give yourself a target date
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably not the biggest fan of deadlines. There’s something about deadlines that can make a lot of us feel under pressure or under time-crunch. But! On the flip side, time-bounding a project or task can also be an excellent way to keep us on track. Because without a deadline, somewhere in the back of our mind, there’s a little voice that tells us “you’ve got all the time in the world”. Especially with projects that take extra motivation (like, I don’t know…bookkeeping?). And then we just keep pushing it off, or taking way longer than we really have to get get it done.
That’s why I recommend setting a target date. You want to make your target date so that you have breathing room, and you don’t feel smothered by the time-restraint. At the same time, it should be a target that will still keep you accountable.
Unless it’s urgent for you to get your Quickbooks catchup finished, a good rule of thumb is that for every month you have to catch up on, give yourself .5-1 week to get it done. For example, if you have 5 months to catchup, you might set your target date from 2 1/2 – 5 weeks from now.
I know what you’re thinking, what’s the difference between a target date and a deadline? And the answer is: absolutely nothing. Except! A target date is more positively framed, and sometimes just as simple as a positive mindset shift can make a world of difference in your motivation and how you approach your project. And that can have a major impact on the amount of time you can save performing it.
Plan and allocate time
Once you have a target date, you can start planning for how much time you’ll need to finish the cleanup project. Give yourself a reasonable amount time. Say it takes you an hour to do a month of bookkeeping. You have 5 months of bookkeeping to catchup on. That’s five hours you want to allot yourself.
Then decide how you want to allocate those hours into your schedule so you can finish by your target date. Now here’s the really important part. Actually go into your calendar and block that time off. There’s always going to be a reason for us not to do our bookkeeping. And let’s face it, a lot of times it takes us so long to finish bookkeeping, or even to start bookkeeping is because we never. So by time-blocking it on the schedule, we’re making a micro-commitment to the task at hand. You’re dedicating specific time to get it done, and that forces you to limit the amount of excuses you make for yourself. And with excuses out of the way, you can get your Quickbooks caught up that much quicker.
Start with the paperwork
A Quickbooks Online catchup project does not begin in Quickbooks. Before you even log into your file, what you want to make sure all of your documents are in order first. There is no point in trying to play catchup if the paperwork is all out of whack. You don’t want to be going back and forth between scrounging around through your records and trying to enter them in Quickbooks. It’s going to cause frustration, it’s going to break your stride, it’s going to make everything less efficient. All of which will drain your time. And your energy.
So start with scraping up all your receipts, statements, bills, and whatever other records you have beforehand. After your paperwork is all organized, then you can get to work in Quickbooks Online. Which segues quite nicely into the next tip.
Focus on catching up one transaction type at a time
The way I see a lot of people take on a Quickbooks Online cleanup is to complete a month of bookkeeping, then move on to the next month. But when it comes to saving time on a catchup, this is not my favorite strategy.
What I recommend is instead of catchup up month to month, focus on recording one single type of transaction at a time. For example, if you were starting with invoices (which I recommend), then you would record all outstanding invoices first. Then you would move on to the next type of transaction, say customer payments. And then you would of course save the reconciliations for last, when all the transactions have been recorded.
Here’s what I like about doing it this way: you’re not constantly having to change gears or constantly click in and out of different transaction windows. It allows you stay in one zone, which can help you not only save a ton of time, but also reduce errors.
Make it a game
Some tasks–like bookkeeping–naturally take longer to do simply because we just don’t like doing them. But you know what a lot of us do like? A good challenge. You can turn your bookkeeping catchup project into a game. Set micro-goals and give yourself an incentive to complete it.
For example, a goal could be to finish recording all your invoices for a certain time-block. And if you meet your goal, you’ll reward yourself with a facial, or a slice of cake…your treat of choice. Then it becomes less of a chore and more of a friendly challenge with yourself. And that makes you MUCH less likely to drag your feet on it. The result? A faster cleanup. And goodies!
Turn up the volume
So…this may not be the most conventional tip on this list. But listening to music might be just the thing you need to help speed up your Quickbooks Catchup project. Why? Because studies show that music can actually boost productivity. And when it comes to repetitive tasks (hello bookkeeping!), playing music in the background has been linked to performing those tasks more efficiently.
But fair warning…Music with lyrics can have the opposite effect, because it can shift our focus off of the task and onto the words. So for catching up in Quickbooks, or doing bookkeeping in general, it might be be a good idea to stick to the instrumentals.
Rule Quickbooks Online...with bank rules
No question that the suggestions feature in the bank feed is already a time saver. It’s usually really good at picking the right category or match for a transaction, so all we gotta do is click the mouse button. Et voila! On to the next transaction.
But as smart as it is, the suggestions feature has also been known to make a flop or two. And then we have to go into the transaction and correct the match or category before we accept it from the bank feed. Now, it doesn’t a whole mountain of time to do one transaction. But they can add up, and you put enough mole hills together…
So what if we can shave off even more catchup time by making the bank feed suggestions more accurate?
Enter bank rules.
By using bank rules, you provide criteria for how a transaction should be recorded. That makes the suggestions less “educated guesses” and more fine-tuned around your specifications. Let’s see how bank rules work.
Say you had a lot of transactions from Widgets Company. You notice the category suggestions for these transactions are a little wonky, even when you’ve already added a few of them from the bank feed. You also notice that the bank feed doesn’t record Widgets Company as the vendor. So instead of going into each transaction to fix the category and add the vendor name, you make a bank rule. Every transaction has a bank description that includes “widgetsco”. So you’re bank rule looks a little something like this:
Now you don’t have to worry making all those little changes to each transaction from that vendor. Did you hear that? That was time being saved.
What happens after cleanup?
Cleanup is over, and you can finally see the light shining down on you. But now here comes the really hard part: keeping it that way. Yes, sometimes are bookkeeping slips behind a little. But we don’t want to make it a habit. Develop a regular routine, and stick with it. And you can definitely use these same tips to keep your books in ship shape (wait…do people even still say THAT anymore?).
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