December is a universal time of reflection, connection and celebration. During this busy season, thanks for setting aside some time to spend your holiday with us! We have a lot of new features in December, so grab a hot chocolate, sit back and immerse yourself in all things QuickBooks®.

New! QuickBooks Capital Small Business Loans Available in QuickBooks Online

Wouldn’t it be nice if a working capital loan were tucked into QuickBooks Online? What if there was a way for small businesses to get more money when they needed it to buy more inventory or hire more people? Well, have we got news for you! In November during QuickBooks Connect, Intuit® unveiled QuickBooks Capital, its innovative lending solution for small businesses. Using a breakthrough credit model, Intuit is able to help young, small businesses overcome the barriers they have traditionally faced in accessing small dollar loans. Intuit uses your QuickBooks data to understand historical and ongoing business performance, and rewards you for the successful stewardship of your business.

Read more from Intuit

 

The Canadian government pays a monthly payment, called the Old Age Security pension, to individuals who are 65 years or older. While most Canadians include the OAS as a foundational piece of their retirement plan, a certain amount of this payment can be taken back depending on individual income levels.

What Is the Old Age Security Clawback and How Does It Work?

In Canada, the government imposes a special tax on OAS payments for certain individuals. This “clawback” is officially known as the OAS recovery tax. If an individual’s income for the year exceeds a certain annual threshold, 15 cents is due on each dollar of income above the threshold. The clawback is typically based on the net income reported for the previous calendar year, but there is a provision in the Income Tax Act that allows the clawback to be based on the current year if current year income is drastically different than the previous year’s income.

Read more from Intuit Canada

 

Once your business has employees and pay payroll regularly, you have to prepare T4s for your employees and send them to CRA. T4 is a form that holds information of employee’s wages and taxes (income, CPP, and EI) withheld during the year.
T4 for the year is due end of February the following year. For example, T4 for the year of 2013 is due end of February 2014. Thus, you only process T4s once a year.
Before preparing T4s, make sure all employee information are complete and accurate – SIN, address, and birth date.

Here are the steps to prepare T4:

1.    Open Employee from Main Menu > Payroll Forms > Process T4:

 

After creating your invoice, you can email directly your invoice by populating Email field on the right of your customer name. QuickBooks Online makes it easy to add a second email on the fly: enter your first email address, followed by <comma><space> second email address. You can add multiple emails as you wish separated by <comma><space> between email addresses.
In the example below, we have two emails in the Email field. Press "Save and send" bar to save your invoice and send email.

 

In QuickBooks 2014, the icon bar or shortcuts automatically appear on the left hand side. You can change the view of the icon bar to the top or hide it by going to View > Top Icon Bar or Hide Icon Bar. Once you have used the program for a while, you may need to customize the icon bar according to your need. To customize the icon bar, from Main Menu > View > Customize Icon Bar to open Customize Icon Bar dialog box:

 

QB Customizing Icon Bar 1