When making journal entries in QuickBooks there are a few steps you can take to make the process more efficient and accurate.
My two biggest suggestions are matching the layout of your sales reporting system to the QuickBooks journal entry layout and creating "dummy" journal entries.
The first step is matching your sales summary layout to the general journal entry layout in QuickBooks. To see the journal entry layout in QuickBooks go to Company/Make General Journal entries.
I would like to call QuickBooks layout a "vertical" layout as you progressively move down the page when entering the journal entry. My point here is to make sure your sales reporting system has a vertical layout as well.
If you are exporting your sales report to excel or manually entering it in excel just make sure you set it up with a vertical layout.
The second step is creating a "dummy" journal entry in QuickBooks. What I mean by this is create a fake journal entry that has a line for every possible sales and payment category. Enter the appropriate accounts and memos.
Now memorize the "dummy" journal entry by selecting Edit/Memorize General Journal. This way you can run your sales report and enter the information into QuickBooks in a very efficient way. Put QuickBooks and your sales report side by side (dual monitors helps) and crank out some data entry.
You will no longer have to remember where to put each line from your sales report as you have matched your sales report to your memorized journal entry within QuickBooks.
If you have a $0.00 in any particular field on your sales report you can delete that particular line from the QuickBooks journal entry by highlighting the line and clicking Edit/Delete Line or Ctrl+Del.
I talked a lot about sales journals but memorized journal entries work great for payroll journal entries and any other journal entries you have to make on a recurring basis.
If you need help setting up your memorized journal entries please feel free to email us.
