New year, new you! We hope everyone had a great holiday season and a terrific New Year – and now it’s time to get back to work. 

One way Certum Solutions makes your life easier is to give you new features and improvements in QuickBooks Online. Maybe it’s learning something new about the software, a shortcut to speed your workflow or an announcement about what’s changing. Either way, Certum is committed to helping improve your efficiency. 

 Here’s what you need to know. 

Use QuickBooks Online Payroll to distribute your W-2s 

 Go paperless! Just in time for the Jan. 31 deadline: Send W-2s to your employees through QuickBooks Online Payroll. 

 Each of your employees can turn on paperless W-2s in QuickBooks Workforce. However, unless all your employees complete this step, the IRS will require you to supply a paper W-2 to those who haven’t. Still, you can simplify this by enabling Automated taxes and forms in your Payroll settings. Once this is enabled, Intuit will fulfill the IRS regulation requirement for you. 

Revenue Recognition, Where Art Thou? 

When we work with clients, one of the most popular questions we get revolves around revenue—specifically, when to account for it in QuickBooks. 

It’s getting into the weeds a bit, but for background’s sake, the Revenue Recognition standard, also known as ASC 606, is a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principle) about how and when revenue should be recognized. 

In QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can automatically recognize revenue when it’s earned. So, if you’re an accrual accounting business, you no longer need to rely on third-party apps or spreadsheets to track recurring revenue or manually move funds from a liability account to an asset account. You can get more of the revenue recognition functionality you need with new customizations, edits, and adjustments. 

How does this help with workflow? QuickBooks automatically calculates a revenue recognition schedule, but you can also edit a schedule after saving an invoice. Construction and manufacturing businesses with projects will benefit from this feature. 
 
You can now add products or delete product line items on an invoice or sales receipt, or void an invoice or sales receipt for any reason after the fact, and can adjust the price of a revenue recognition item. Before the schedule begins to post, you can also revise the service date of a line item. Certum can help you set up these items, quickly and easily.   

A Sunny “Forecast” 

Whether you have a large company or a small business, knowing what the future may hold is important. We call that “forecasting,” and a new feature in QuickBooks Online Advanced now enables you to create a Profit & Loss (P&L) forecast in QuickBooks. The forecast can span a short time to 3 years. 

How does this help? It saves you time you may be spending on manually exporting data from QuickBooks Online to spreadsheets or outside forecasting tools. You can build a P&L forecast from a prior year’s actuals or an average of the actuals from the most recent 3, 6, 9 or 12 months. After creating your forecast, you can convert it into your new budget. You can even create rules to forecast specific accounts by a percentage. 

Note: If you’re using Microsoft Excel to handles your bookkeeping, forecasting and numbers in general, stop! Contact us right away so we can show you how to automate your books.  

How to use this feature: Select Financial planning from the left menu, then Forecasts. 

Schedule a Free 30-minute Consultation: We Promise to Listen 

At Certum Solutions, we are great listeners—and no one solution is cookie cutter for us. We offer a free 30-minute consultation, so sign up today and let us know how we can help. We hope everyone has a terrific 2024! 

Images courtesy of QuickBooks