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Multi-Company Bill Disbursement Utility by Baystate Consulting
Bill Display Screen
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Multi-Company Bill Disbursement Utility by Baystate Consulting
Bills Disbursement Screen
A lot of QuickBooks ProAdvisors, Business Consultants, Accountants and Bookkeepers are aware of the Data Import and Export products that Baystate Consulting offers for both QuickBooks ‘desktop’ and ‘online’ products; however, I would venture to guess that very few of our readers are aware of another ‘great’ product Baystate offers, their “Multi-Company Bill Disbursement Utility”. I became aware of this utility a few years ago when a construction company client of mine decided that they were going to start forming one subsidiary after another, and soon had 5 or 6 QuickBooks Company files. They soon found that they needed to allocate a lot of their ‘overhead’ expenses between the various Company files. The answer for that client was Baystate’s Multi-Company Bill Disbursement Utility.
This Utility allows businesses, like my client, to quickly disburse Accounts Payable bills across multiple QuickBooks company files. It eliminates the need for users to manually enter both the A/R Invoice on the parent side and the A/P bill on the client side.
The process begins when you set-up your various companies within the utility and designate the intercompany accounts and items. You then retrieve bills by selecting the company file where the bills have been entered; this opens the Bill Display screen (Figure 1) which displays the various bills from the ‘master company’ that will be distributed to the various subsidiaries. You can easily filter or sort the data and then double-click on one of the payables to open the bill disbursement screen.
This Disburse Bill screen looks a lot like a QuickBooks check (in pre-2013 versions) and allows for Accounts, Items, Customers, and Classes to be disbursed to the various companies selected for disbursement. (Figure 2) Like a QuickBooks check, this screen includes various columns appearing on two tabs. The Expenses Tab contains the Company (to select the company to distribute towards), Account (the General Ledger Account to disburse towards), the Amount of the disbursement, optional memo for the disbursement, optional customer for the disbursement, optional class for the disbursement, and optional billable flag for the disbursement. The Items Tab also contains the Company (to select the company to distribute towards), Item (the item to disburse towards), the Description of the disbursement, Quantity for the disbursement, Cost for the disbursement, Amount of the disbursement, optional customer for the disbursement, optional class for the disbursement, and optional billable flag for the disbursement. As a result you can make your distributions using either accounts, items, or a combination of the two, just as you might do if you were posting these transactions manually in each Company file.
As my client continued to grow they found that they appreciated the ‘multi-user’ functionality of this utility. There are some other products that work similarly, but they don’t offer multi-user functionality, you have to purchase and run multiple copies of those products if more than one user needs to be allocating expenses.
All in all this utility was (is) pretty simple to learn and use. My client liked it from the very start, and still likes it today and uses it daily with their 12 or so Company files.
To find out more about this product see the Baystate website.