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The QuickBooks Online Plus plan enables you to take your business to the next level. The additional reporting options available by using the class and location features gives you the ability to see the results of your small business using parameters that are applicable to you.
If you track and sell inventory you need the QuickBooks Online Plus Plan. You are able to correctly account for the cost of the items sold, issue purchase orders to your suppliers and track the quantity of inventory on hand.
Budgeting and Project features help you to stay on track, and further manage your cash flow and business profitability.
The QuickBooks Online Plus plan allows you to have all the information you need to make great business decisions in real time.
The QuickBooks Online Plus Plan costs:
The QuickBooks Online Plus Plan allows access for up to 5 users.
The QuickBooks monthly fee and the current QuickBooks Online offers along with a free 30-day trial are here:
To compare the features available in the different QuickBooks Online plans, the following are the additional options available if you upgrade to a Plus Plan. You can also read about what’s also available in only the Essentials Plan, and the Simple Start and Easy Start Plans.
This is one of my favourite features in QuickBooks Online.
By tagging each line of a transaction with a class you are able to run a myriad of reports by class. You can create reports for a segment of your business, a different department, sales divisions – the sky really is the limit!
You turn on classes under Accounts and Settings:
You then have the option to receive a warning if a transaction is not assigned a class – you would turn this on if you want to ensure that every transaction is included in a class, be it a division or a segment of your business. If you don’t select this – don’t worry – you can still locate any items missed when you record them, by running a class report and looking at unspecified items – more on that below!
The other option is to apply a class to each row in a transaction or one class for the entire transaction. I would suggest you select the first option – when we look at locations next, you will see that option is available only to entire transactions, and then you can split a bill across multiple classes. For example if you receive a bill for many items that relate to different divisions – perhaps an expense claim from a travelling salesperson, or a large stationery order.
Here is a simple example:
Let’s have a look at the reporting:
The bill we separated above is split across the different classes, as is some of the income. The items without classes show as “Not Specified”.
If all items were assigned a class you would be able to easily see the profitability of each division. You may also want to have a class called “Admin” for all of your administrative costs.
Another great option is to run a separate report for each class. In this way you can provide a profitability report to the manager of each division.
To see this feature and the reporting in QBO you can watch this video:
See why this is a favourite feature of mine! You can obtain even more information about your business to help you make smarter decisions!
As mentioned above, location tracking allows you to add another element to your transactions and reporting to provide more information and reporting options.
You can also select what you would like to name the field:
For this exercise, let’s select Territory.
The way that location tracking differs to class tracking is that it can only be applied to an entire transaction.
As you can see the “location” field named Territory appears at the top of the invoice. All items on this invoice will be categorized in that Territory. This also applies to any bills you record.
You can run reports by “Territory” to show the results of the areas you have allocated your transactions to:
If you would like to walk through the steps, here is a video:
As you cannot split the items within a transaction as you can when you use the class field, think about this when you are choosing whether or not to select the class or location feature to be sure you can track your business results in all the permutations you want!
The inventory function in QuickBooks Online works very well for your basic inventory needs.
You can set up and categorize the items you would like to sell to your customers:
There is the option to enter the sales price and cost, and QuickBooks will keep track of the quantity on hand.
When you set up your products you can also specify where you would like the sales income to be categorized:
Here is a video to walk you through the setup of inventory items, and how to sell them, and run reports to show more information about inventory items:
If you have a manufacturing organization, or are running your sales through an ecommerce platform, the Inventory function in QuickBooks Online may not meet your needs. Fortunately, there are many options that also integrate with QuickBooks Online.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like assistance determining what application would best meet your business needs.
If you would like to issue purchase orders to your suppliers you need to turn on the feature in Account and Settings under the Expenses tab:
When preparing the order the items you select will prefill with the cost you set up when you created the inventory items. You have the option to apply the costs to any classes or locations you have set up in your business, and you can assign a customer if the purchase relates directly to a particular job.
You can also enter any message you would like to include to the vendor in the purchase order before sending it.
After you have received the goods you can use the purchase order to copy the items directly to a bill.
Or open a bill, and have the option to add the purchase order to that transaction:
If you would like to see how to enter and record purchase orders this video walks through the steps:
There are so many different ways to work with QuickBooks Online, that one should work well for your business! I love the reminders that pop up on the side – I rely on them constantly!
Being able to “tag” an expense or item billable when you record an expense is a great feature that is available only in the QuickBooks Online Plus plan.
By marking an expense or item billable at the time you incur the expense, you are more likely to recover all the expenses that relate to your customers.
By turning on the feature to “make expenses and items billable” in Account and Settings you will then have an additional field on your bills:
By marking these expenses as billable, they will appear when we invoice our customer:
The invoice with the billable expense for the rock fountain above added:
You are much less likely to miss adding costs to your invoices if you have tagged them and have this wonderful reminder when you prepare an invoice for your customer. You can also change the amount you charge manually before you send the invoice.
There is an additional setting to create a default markup percentage:
When you enter a bill after activating the markup feature the default markup rate and amount appear on the bill. You can easily change this percentage if you would like to charge your customer more or less than the default.
If you would like to walk through these steps in more detail you can watch this video:
QuickBooks Online has a very basic budgeting feature that is also very manual.
If you have a simple budget that you would like to track your results against you can enter it in to the budget feature:
You have the option to split your budget across months or quarters, or enter annual numbers. You can also split your budget by customer, class or location, allowing you to create separate budgets for your divisions or departments.
Budget reports are available to allow you to track your progress against actual numbers.
To see how to set up a basic budget you can watch this video:
If you turn on the projects feature in the QuickBooks Online Plus Plan you are able to manage the costs, and immediately see the profitability of any projects you are working on.
To create a project you enter the name of the project, the customer it relates to and any other information relevant to your job with lots of space for notes!
When entering your transactions – as we have explored above – all different types of transactions! You now have the option to tag them to the project they relate to:
All of the transactions that relate to a project will be collated under the projects tab.
You can see at a glance what projects you are currently working on, what you have invoiced, and what costs you have allocated.
This could be particularly helpful in tracking when you should be invoicing to recoup costs for your cashflow, or to ensure that you complete the job on time and on budget.
It is also a great tool if you have many jobs for one customer. You can separate the projects and manage them separately, and invoice the customer specifying the project that the invoice and costs relate to.
Here is a short video walking through the steps to set up a project and enter the transactions:
This feature is useful if you have inventory in your business.
When you are purchasing items (products) you can enter those items in the transactions you record. For example expenses and bills. This will enable you to keep your inventory updated and accurate.
If you purchase using the “items” section, not the “category” section the costs will be added to inventory on your balance sheet. These items will remain in inventory until you sell them, then they will be added to your cost of goods sold, and sales numbers. To see how this works you can watch this video. It walks through the steps of using the forms, and also shows you how these transactions impact your financial statements:
You also have the option to allocate any items you are purchasing to a particular customer. There is an example above that walks through that feature.
Once again, the QuickBooks Online Plus plan enables you to take your business to the next level.
Check out the best deal for the QuickBooks monthly fee here:
If you would like assistance to select or set up your QuickBooks Online file you can book a session here.
If you have QuickBooks, and have connected the bank, check out my bank feed training course before you get started.
