In the previous blog titled Item and Item Types, we discussed Inventory Part item.
You create Inventory Part item type when you are tracking the products you make/buy, place it in your stock, and then resell it to customers. You have to activate the “Inventory and Purchase order are active” in Edit > Preferences > items & Inventory > Company Preferences by checking its checkbox.
Once it is active, then you can create an Inventory Part Item by opening List > Item List > click Item bar in bottom left > New > select Inventory Part in the Type line and you will have the following window:
What is Undeposited Funds account in QuickBooks? It is an Other Current Asset type of account that is set up automatically, and used to temporarily holding customer payments until you literally go to the bank and deposit them to your bank account(s).
Customer can pay you in cash, cheques, debit, or credit cards in your sales transactions and most of us do not deposit each and every customer payments individually to our bank account. We usually pool payments according to type of payments and then deposit them to bank account at the end of the day or a few times a week. This means that payment recorded in QuickBooks are different than appeared in the bank statement.
For example, you receive 3(three) cheques payments $100, $200, and $300, and deposit them to your checking account as 1(one) deposit of $600,-. You have 3 payments in QuickBooks, but your bank statement only shows 1 deposit, all with different amounts. It will be difficult for you to track and reconcile when you have a lot of similar transactions, right? This is when the Undeposited Funds account helps by holding your payments in it when you do Receive Payments and pull them out as 1(one) amount when you Make Deposit to your bank account.
Therefore, Undeposited Funds account matches your customer payments with your bank statement which makes bank reconciliation easier.
Let’s take a look at the Customer Payment screenshot below:
In QuickBooks, items simply are what you buy and sell. You enter in in customer and purchase forms, like Invoices, Purchase Orders, Bills, etc. When you set up an item, you also define how this item will be posted in your Charts of Accounts. Thus, an item is actually a quick way of entering transaction, while QuickBooks is handling its accounting.
The screen-shot of adding New Item looks like below:
When your business is dealing with more than one currency, QuickBooks allows you to enable the multi-currency option in Edit > Preferences > Multiple Currencies, before you can assign a currency to customers, vendors, price levels, bank accounts, credit card accounts, and accounts receivable/accounts payable accounts.
When you have a lot of customers and you give them many different percentages of discounts/ markups, it’s a daunting task trying to remember which discounts/markups for which customers. It’s even worse when you risk losing customers, because you give wrong percentages and your customers are not happy.
QuickBooks makes your task easier by having Price Levels. Once the Price Levels are defined and applied to your customers, QuickBooks will remember it each time you have transactions with that customers. You can also assign a Price Level individually on transactions you have with customers - estimates, sales receipts, or invoices.
This is how to create a Price Level:
- Activate the Price Levels preference if you have not done so.
Go to Edit > Preferences > Sales & Customers > Company Preference, and check the Use Price Levels checkbox.
- Go to Lists menu > Price Level list, a Price Level window will appear. Click the Price Level button at left hand corner and choose New.
- A New Price Level window will open like below. In this example, the name of the Price Level is “Discount 10” which allows a Fixed % discount by 10%. Choose “Decrease” in the The Price Level Will field since this is a discount. You have many different rounding options in the Round Up to the Nearest field drop-down arrow, from pennies to a dollar. This example uses “no rounding”.