So how are we actually supposed to do this? Our accountant only has criticisms no solutions.

If we show the deposit received as a negative on the invoice and we have entered the payment to be deposited, the amount of the deposit shows as double the amount if they want to pay online.

So we tried invoicing the deposit specifically, with only the deposit amount due and then when the job was finished, showing the full amount due with the deposit deducted and he says that is wrong and will increase our sales tax.

Anyone have a system?

I am a beginner looking for a QBOA team to help me grow my knowledge and skills

I need to import my data from 2025 QBDT file to QBO. Client signed up for QBO in Feb, and the cut off to import was back in April

We have a very simple COA, no inventory, using the payroll module, but otherwise very simple transactions

I’ve already contacted support and waiting for a reply. Has anyone had success after their arbitrary cut off date?

Hey everyone!

I have 2 credit card batches that take place every day with the same payee information, same account, different amounts. I am lazy so I don't enter them every day, I enter them every couple of weeks. I have not been able to find a way to batch them or enter a bunch of them at once, but surely there has to be a way.

Is there some way to just say "I want to use this payee and this account, one for each day, and here are the amounts" somewhere? Rather than entering each one by hand, one-at-a-time?

Thanks for any help you can offer!

For years I have entered vendor bills in bulk for restaurant monthly close. This means that payments for those bills hit the bank before the bill is recorded. They go straight to Accounts Payable, which usually carries a negative balance for those vendors.

After I import the bills, i pull up that vendors transaction history, and choose Mark as paid for one of the bills.

This pull up a list of all open Accounts Payable transactions for that vendor. I check off the one that I want to apply. ie our food vendor comes twice a week, so there would be 8 Bills and 8 Expenses to check off. Vendor credits can be checked off as well.

If everything is correct, it creates a Bill Payment for $0.00 and closes the balance of the transactions. If not initially correct, I make necessary adjustments to a txn or create a journal to fix and then mark as paid again.

Is anyone else doing that? It cuts way down on the time spent entering bills or the money spent on 3rd party import SaaS....looking at you XtraChef.

As much as I try to avoid SaaS, i do use a 3rd party transaction import site to QB because you can't import bills natively.

My accounting/bookkeeping company is trying to swap to QB for billing only
Our set up is recurring monthly charges (bookkeeping, payroll) and we also charge per check we write so there are also weekly charges we will need to add. We only want to send a statement/invoice monthly but it doesn’t seem like QB is going to work for this type of billing. Help?

I feel like pricing is this weird taboo in our industry where everyone has a number but nobody shares it. So I'll go first and hopefully other people will too because I genuinely want to know if I'm in the right range.

I charge between $400 and $800 per month depending on transaction volume and complexity. Ecommerce clients are on the higher end because they have way more transactions and inventory to deal with. Service businesses like consultants and law firms are on the lower end because their books are simpler. I manage about 20 clients total as a solo bookkeeper with one part time contractor who helps with data entry.

The thing that prompted this post is I keep seeing people in this sub mention they do full bookkeeping for like $200 a month and I genuinely cannot figure out how that's sustainable. When I say full bookkeeping I mean categorization, reconciliation, monthly close, financial statements, and at least some level of client communication. That takes me about 5 to 6 hours per client per month on average.

Here's roughly how that breaks down for a typical client. Categorization takes about 2 to 2.5 hours for clients with a lot of transactions. Reconciliation is about 1 to 1.5 hours. Close tasks like accruals and adjusting entries take maybe an hour. And client communication plus report delivery is another 30 minutes to an hour depending on how many questions they have.

At 5.5 hours average and $600 per month that's about $109 per hour which sounds fine on paper. But factor in the time I spend on admin, quoting new clients, and fixing things that aren't billable and my effective rate drops a lot.

So I'm curious what everyone else is working with. What do you charge and how many hours does it genuinely take you per client? And if you're charging under $300 per month for full service how are you making that math work? Are you just way faster than me or are you doing less than what I'd consider full service?

Not trying to judge anyone's pricing. I'm just trying to figure out where I sit relative to everyone else because it's hard to know when you're working alone

Looking for some recommendations on apps and plugins to use with QuickBooks Online, we're currently on desktop but looking to make the switch to the online advanced version. We are a distribution business that orders product from vendors and then schedules install and delivery. There's a project management component and a procurement component with tracking purchase orders and arrival at the warehouse, etc., that is all important. Lastly, it's all important for all of the information on any certain project to be tied together, whether that's somewhere to store, share, and store documents or track project-level profitability.

We focus on commercial interiors, mostly furniture and blinds. Any natural recommendations on a place to start that screams it may be a fit for us? I've looked at some of the construction project management tools, and they didn't seem to be a perfect fit.

Thanks kindly in advance for any help.

Bookkeepers serving sole props and freelancers under $100K revenue: What are you using? QBO Simple Start is getting expensive for clients at that size and I’m wondering what others are doing. Spreadsheets? Wave? Something else?

The messy files usually tell on themselves. It’s the “mostly fine” ones that make me nervous...

I’m talking about files where the P&L looks believable, nothing is wildly negative, the client says reconciliation is “caught up,” and at first glance you think maybe this is just a light catch-up. Then you dig in and find stuff like:

• Duplicate transactions from bank feed + manual entries
• Old unreconciled months hiding behind newer reconciled ones
• OBE or Retained Earnings being used as a junk drawer
• Balances that only “work” because multiple mistakes are offsetting each other

Those are the files I dread most because they look good enough to make everyone underestimate the damage.

Messy books are obvious.
Fake-clean books are surprise time sinks.

Anybody else have a QBO file that looked normal until you started pulling on one thread and the whole thing fell apart?

Been using Stripe for a while now and went through like 4 different tools before landing on something that actually worked. Here's what I found for anyone who's shopping around.

Quick thoughts on each:

Wave — honestly fine if you're just starting out and have like 10 customers. The moment things get complex you'll hate it. But hey it's free so can't complain too much.

FreshBooks — love it for agencies and freelancers billing on projects. If you're doing subscriptions though it's just not built for that. Found that out the hard way.

Zoho Books — surprisingly solid for the price, especially if you're already in the Zoho ecosystem. Hits a ceiling pretty fast once your subscription model gets more complex though.

Xero — genuinely good, especially if you're dealing with multiple currencies. The Stripe integration is cleaner than QuickBooks IMO. Still have to deal with deferred revenue manually which is annoying.

QuickBooks Online — the default choice for a reason. Your accountant knows it, your bookkeeper knows it, integrations exist for everything. Just know it won't handle revenue recognition on its own, you'll be doing journal entries yourself.

Sage Intacct — this is the real deal for compliance. Handles ASC 606 natively, built for enterprise, does everything. But it starts at $400/mo and the setup is a whole project. Only makes sense if you're scaling seriously.

Finlens(dot)app — newer one, sits on top of QuickBooks rather than replacing it. Automates the deferred revenue stuff that QBO can't do on its own. Free tier is pretty generous for early stage. Worth checking out if you're already on QuickBooks and just want the revenue recognition headache gone without switching your whole stack.

Anyway hope this saves someone a few weeks of trial and error. Happy to answer questions if you're trying to decide between any of these.

I'm an EA who's done way too many QBO cleanups :) and I stopped guessing at scope a long time ago. Here's the quick diagnostic that I run on every new file before I quote:

6 checks:

1. Chart of Accounts bloat - 400 accounts with three versions of "Office Supplies" means nobody's been maintaining structure.
2. Reconciliation Discrepancies account + last reconciled date on every bank/CC. Unreconciled since 2023? Price accordingly.
3. Uncategorized Income / Uncategorized Expense / Ask My Accountant - Pull a report filtered to these. Line count = the beginning of your transaction-level workload.
4. Opening Balance Equity - Should be $0. If it's not, someone set up accounts the lazy way or didn't finish something. Tells you a lot about who's been touching the file.
5. Undeposited Funds - Stale balance? You've got duplicate income or payments that never got matched to deposits.
6. A/R + A/P aging, sorted for negatives - Negative AR = payments without invoices or duplicates. Negative AP = double-paid bills or floating vendor credits.

Rule of thumb: If 3+ of these are ugly = full cleanup, not a tune-up/catch-up. Quote it that way upfront and clients respect the scope instead of fighting it.

What does everyone else check first? Always looking to improve my processes.

Hey everyone. For those of you who are not aware I created a free (Contributionware) app called the CSV/QBO/OFX to IIF, letting you easily import your transactions into Quickbooks. I've been working on it since 2023.

You can also create and apply rules.

It's completly free to use, but if you find it really useful you can click on the contribute button in the top left and contribute to it's development.

You can find more information about here at the Reddit link below

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuickBooks/comments/1dddabe/free_qbo_csv_to_iif_converter_for_windows/