How much time do you spend on repetitive tasks, clicking on little buttons, and scrolling around looking for the data you need? I’ve never tried timing myself, but I would wager that you spend at least an hour every day scrolling through date pickers, and waiting for screens to load.
But not me! I love any cool tricks that shave seconds off every task, giving me enough time to take a walk around the block at lunch. Here are a few of my favorite timesaving tricks!
Join Alicia in her webinar with Divvy, "QBO Efficiency Tips and Tricks," on November 4, 2020 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. You can find the archive HERE.
Banking Feed Tricks
The Banking Feed is either your best friend (when you use it right) or your worst nightmare (when you use it wrong). I’ve tamed it to do my bidding, allowing me to enter vast amounts of data in a minimal amount of time.
Grid Options
The Grid Gear (most people call it the “baby gear”) just above the Banking Feed’s grid on the right received an overhaul a few months ago. Check out all the cool things it now can do!
- Turn on extra columns.
- Group transactions by month
- Show Spent and Received as one column of positive and negative numbers
- Allow you to edit the Date field.
- Add the Bank Detail to the memo field
- Stop QBO from suggesting rules
- Stop QBO from trying to learn from your history
- Show the bank detail in the grid instead of the artificial intelligence interpretation
- Show up to 300 transactions on one screen.
Sorting the Bank Feed
When you’re just working the Banking Feed for today’s transactions, the above features will do the trick. But if you’re working on a project where you have hundreds of transactions spanning many months, processing your utility payment 12 times gets old fast, even with the artificial intelligence predicting your payee and category.
When I’m doing bulk data entry, I click on the Description column to group them by what they are, instead of when they happened. That way I can use the Batch Update to assign Payees, Categories, and Classes to dozens of transactions at once, or create a Rule for future use.
Built-in calculators
Don’t reach for your 10-key and then retype the answer in QBO. Each Quantity and Amount field is a calculator. Type in your numbers with + - * /, and press Tab to get the answer! Even parentheses work on complex formulas.
The Date Picker & Date Shortcuts
Personally, I’m not a fan of the ubiquitous calendar date pickers on web forms. I think it takes longer to scroll back to April 20 than it does to type in the date. In QBO, you don’t need leading 0s or the current year! Typing 4/20, Tab resolves to 04/20/2020.
Here’s the best part. Click in any Date field and tap these letters to jump to a key date without typing:
shortcuts qbo
Keyboard Commands
Old-school pros don’t reach for a mouse when a keyboard shortcut is right at their fingertips. Migrating from QuickBooks Desktop doesn’t have to kill your productivity.
Hold down the Ctrl and Alt (or Option on a Mac) and tap the ?/ key on your keyboard. A window will open up with your Company ID as well as a master list of keyboard shortcuts. Hold down Ctrl+Alt and press letters in the list below to open those windows.
Chrome Tricks
Chrome is the favored browser for using QuickBooks Online. In fact, I only use Chrome for QBO, and use Safari for my personal surfing. Because it’s my work environment, I’ve tricked it out, turning it into a power-interface to manage my QBO workload.
Multiple tabs
When I hear accountants complain about QBO because they can’t have multiple windows open, I know it’s just a training issue. You can have as many simultaneous screens as you want. I myself can’t work in less than 4: The Banking Feed, an Advanced Search window, a Reports tab, and then one or two more centers that I randomly switch between.
For example, if I’m clearing the Banking Feed but I need to cross-reference the QB Payments deposits, I right click on Sales > Deposits to open it in a second tab, then switch between them as I verify income.
A second way of adding a tab is to simply drag the Center to the tabs area, and it will create a new tab. I frequently drag “Reports” from the left navigation up to the tabs area to create an additional Reports tab whenever I need it.
Bookmarks
The URLs for the Centers are the same no matter what client you’re looking at, so you can use the same set of bookmarks across files.
Drag the lock icon from the URL bar in the top center of the window down to the bookmarks bar (you may have to “show” it using the three dots in the upper right corner). Do this for all your frequently-used screens: the Banking window, Customers, Deposits, Invoices, Checks, as many as you want! Now you have one-click quick links!
Pro tip: if the bookmark’s url starts with c14. or a similar code, edit the bookmark and erase this code so that the url just starts with qbo.intuit.com/….. Sometimes that server code stops the link from working properly.
This also gives you another way of creating multiple tabs - click the + to open a new tab, then click your bookmark!
Ctrl-F (PC) and Cmd-F (Mac)
When I’m faced with hundreds of rows of dates and numbers, instead of scanning and scrolling up and down in vain, I use this shortcut to open up the browser’s Find feature. I type in the dollar amount, date, or text I’m looking for. Because it’s a browser tool and not a QBO feature, it only searches this screen, not all of QuickBooks, so I can jump right to my target.
Incognito windows
I’m sure you already know this, but in case you don’t, click on the three little dots in the upper right corner of Chrome’s Toolbar and select Incognito. That opens a special Chrome window that doesn’t accept cookies and doesn’t store your history.
I use my QBOA (Accountant Interface) in an Incognito window. That way I can keep it open to use the Work Center while I update client files in regular windows.
In addition, Incognito windows are great for troubleshooting. If a feature isn’t working, see if you can replicate the behavior in Incognito. If you can, the issue is with QBO. If it works in Incognito, the issue is with your browser, so you should clear your cookies and cache.
Chrome People
My clients all have different banks and reference sources I need to do their books. Click on the Account circle on the right of Chrome’s toolbar (just to the left of the 3 dots). You can create “People” for each of your clients, complete with their own sets of tabs and bookmarks like we created above.
Chrome will remember the tabs you have open, so you can create a complete interface for each Client/Person. Go straight to their bank login screens without having to look up the websites! Because every second counts….
Conclusion
As you can see, being efficient with your navigation will save you a lot of time in getting work done. What will you do with your newfound time? Take on another client? Go deeper into advisory? Hug your kids? Time is money, so get down to it!
These are just a few of the tricks that I’ll be demonstrating in my November 4 webinar. Join us to see me demonstrating these techniques, and a host of additional tips. This event has ended. You can find it and our other events in the archive HERE.