Recently, a client of mine with a lot of on-the-spot sales, wanted to know why certain transactions did not appear in the customers’ Transaction List in QuickBooks Online.
Why? They were entering sales incorrectly
Here’s the scenario: Monies received from these customers were entered as straight bank deposits without using a sales receipt or an invoice and received payment transactions. The client figured that it was not worth entering product/service items on sales transactions because they weren’t tracking inventory within QuickBooks Online.
So they took the “easy way out” and entered the sales as deposit transactions:
But when they did that, the deposit transaction did not appear in the Transaction List for this customer:
But we know the transaction was entered because we ran a one-day Profit and Loss, displaying columns by Customer, and the sale was there:
QuickBooks doesn’t like that
QuickBooks does not display deposit transactions in a customer’s Transaction List.
What to do instead
I instructed my client that, going forward, if he wants to see these sales on the Transaction List for a customer, all on-the-spot sales transactions should be entered as sales receipts.
And for those deposit transactions that were already entered? It was a little messy, but we found each deposit and created a sales receipt for a generic sales item for the same date, and deposited it into Undeposited Funds.
Note: I could have created or used other product/service items that were more granular, if required.
Then I opened up the original bank deposit, removed the original line from the Add funds to this deposit area, and added the amount from the sales receipt I just created - for the same amount so that the bank deposit total was unchanged.
The altered bank deposit now looks the way it should have in the first place:
And now, the customer’s Transaction List displays the correct sales transaction:
While my examples showed a bank deposit with one line for an individual customer, the same methodology could have been used for a bank deposit with multiple customers. All we would have to do is create separate sales receipts depositing to Undeposited Funds for all the customers whose monies were deposited on a given day.
Then, edit the original multi-row bank deposit to add the funds from the new sales receipts and delete the incorrect rows in the Add funds to this deposit area.
Esther Friedberg Karp is an internationally-renowned trainer, writer and speaker from Toronto, where she runs her QuickBooks consulting practice, EFK CompuBooks Inc. Consistently in Insightful Accountant's Top 100 ProAdvisors, she has been named to the Top 10 twice.
With the unique distinction of holding ProAdvisor certifications in the US, Canadian, UK, and International versions of QuickBooks, she has traveled the world with Intuit. She has spoken at conferences such as QuickBooks Connect, Scaling New Heights, and Future Forward, and has written countless articles for Intuit Global.
Esther has been named one of the “Top 50 Women in Accounting,” a “Top 10 Influencer” in the Canadian Bookkeeping World, and is a repeat nominee for the “RBC Canadian Women’s Entrepreneur Awards.” She counts among her clients many international companies, as well as accounting professionals seeking her out on behalf of their own clients for her expertise in multi-currency and various countries’ editions of QuickBooks Desktop and Online.
She can be reached at esther@e-compubooks.com or 416-410-0750.
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