Save 10 Million Hours with QuickBooks Online Rules
Save 10 Million Hours with QuickBooks Online Rules
You obviously cannot personally save 10 million hours with QuickBooks Online rules.
You can, however, quickly and easily use QuickBooks Online rules. This will save hundreds to thousands of hours.
You can use these bank and credit card rules to save this time for you, your staff and clients, producing far more accurate records, far faster. It will be far less frustrating. You also can easily help 3.2 million QBO users save far more than 10 million hours this way.
To save time, very quickly and easily automate QuickBooks Online work. It will make records far more accurate far faster, without knowing how to create rules.
You will soon be able to do this by visiting a new LinkedIn group, QuickBooks Online Rules. I will start posting some of my more than 150 QBO rules there. I used many for 6 years. You will be able to instantly download and install them in your QBO file. Then you will be able to change and edit them, besides uploading your own rules. This should soon result in a national set of rules, for all QBO users.
There are many reasons why you should use these rules, not simply accumulate QBO Machine Learning corrections from correcting accounts.
Each QBO correction only corrects each exact mistake, such as separately changing the account for Sal’s Pizza. However, my generic compound rules correct Sal’s Pizza, Domino’s Pizza and all other pizza entries. This includes pizza places we never heard about. Generic rules are essential to how many rules someone must check for errors. Generic compound rules also run faster. They are far less likely to have errors than vast numbers of special-purpose rules.
QBO rules are far more powerful than the best QuickBooks teachers often make them seem.
The Contains condition is rarely taught when it is key to generic rules covering hundreds of conditions. I also recently stumped some very good Intuit employees when I asked if you could have multiple conditions in a rule. You can. Without generic rules, you and 3.2 million QBO users will correct many of the same and similar errors repeatedly, in millions of QuickBooks files.
Few also teach, or even reference, what I feel is the most important part of QBO rule creation: EXCEL!
You can instantly copy QBO rules to Excel, for one or many clients. There is nothing like an Excel review, with sorting on different fields. It lets you spot rule errors and quickly and easily. You also very accurately fix and add to them. Then you instantly import them back into the same or other QBO files. Make sure that a few rules, which must come before other rules, do so in imports.
One simple QBO rule can save hundreds of hours of coding and corrections, in many clients.
One rule can assign entries containing a bar, barbeque, barbq, bistro, grill, lobster, pizza, restaurant, sandwich, seafood, shrimp, take out OR wings to entertainment. The key is to set the condition to ANY, not AND (meaning ALL). A second rule can assign all entries containing (CONTAINS) Amoco, BP, Circle K, Citgo, Exxon, Gas, Getty, Gulf, Hess, Love’s Marathon, Mobil, Oil, Petroleum RaceTrac, Raceway, Shell, Sunoco OR Texaco to auto expenses. These entries are very powerful because using Any (not all) and contain (contained in) lets you ignore many store numbers associated with companies.
Hector Garcia is a terrific QuickBooks expert, teacher, innovator, and friend.
Despite this, I recently found it very painful to watch (or even listen to) a very popular video he did in February 2015. It shows him EXPERTLY cleaning up Excel entries, for importing into a QuickBooks DESKTOP file> That means QuickBooks Pro, Premier or Enterprise. He did so for QuickBooks to properly classify imported entries, without any changes. What made it so painful was I remember doing this repeatedly, for many years, knowing that every time I did it I would probably do it again next month.
You and other QBO users can now do far better things with QBO and a few rules.
The best thing about these generic compound QBO rules is they work every day, 24/365, without further attention. This often means automatic account assignments for 98% of QBO entries.
You can add to my rules or create your own rules based on mine.
Having a body of expertly debugged, generic compound rules makes adding new rules far easier. The fact that QuickBooks Desktop still does not have rules is very sad. Unless it soon gets them, QBO will have an increasingly unbeatable advantage for most users.
So, help save 10 Million Hours with QuickBooks Online Rules by joining the new LinkedIn group, QuickBooks Online Rules. You also can contact me at Mike Block CPA, on LinkedIn or Slack.
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