QuickBooks Online and Receivables
To start, let’s look at a sample QuickBooks Online company. Note that ZenCash will also work with QuickBooks for PC (Pro, Premier and Enterprise).
Looking at my customer center, I can see that I do have a number of customers with an outstanding balance. I’ve sorted this list by “balance”. My sales must be doing pretty well to have that amount of Receivables.
Looking further, my A/R Aging Summary shows a more dismal picture. I have far too many customers who are quite a bit overdue!
Digging further in, I can get my Collections Report, which shows the contact person, phone number, and the details of the invoices for past due accounts. This helps, it filters for the overdue customers. This is a very helpful report if I’m going to be making phone calls about these overdue accounts.
These are typical reports that you can get from just about any
Looking At This With ZenCash
I won’t go into the details of the services that ZenCash can provide for you – Stacy’s article covers that in more detail. In summary, their service can automatically send thank you notes to clients when they pay, reminders when invoices are overdue, make phone calls for you when the invoices get even more overdue, and even refer items to collections. If you have a Receivables problem but you don’t have the time to manage overdue accounts, this can be a great help to your business.
Here’s an example of the actions timeline, where you decide on what kinds of actions you want ZenCash to take care of for you, and in what timeframe.
However, even if you are letting ZenCash manage all of this for you, it is still important for you to keep an eye on what your Receivables look like, and how that might be impacting your business. This is where the ZenCash dashboard comes in. This is a new feature added at the end of January this year.
When you log in to your ZenCash account you see the new dashboard, which has a number of “widgets” that give you a good picture of where things stand.
Currently Outstanding
This hits you over the head if you have a Receivable problem. Wow, 186.7 “average days to pay”. I had better get ZenCash working on this, I haven’t been doing a good job of managing Receivables by myself! Actually, this isn’t my real company, my own receivables aren’t like this at all, thank goodness.
If you look at the far right you see that there are three colored bars – green is “current”, yellow is “past due”, red is “in default”. The “#” column tells me how many invoices in each category, the “avg size” value is the average size of the invoices.
Receivables Over Time
This next widget has multiple tabs. The Weekly Receivables History is an interesting way to show how your Receivables have grown and aged over the past 6 months. If you hover your cursor over a bar you get a popup that shows more detail. The colors are consistent with what we saw above. This is a helpful graph, and the popup gives you the details for the given date.
One thing that is VERY important to me is data accuracy. I don’t like programs that make estimates or approximations – I want accurate, precise data. If we flip back into QuickBooks Online and look at the Income List, we see a different view of our Receivables – but the numbers for open and overdue invoices DO match what I see in ZenCash, which is good. While I like the Income List very much, it isn’t giving me much detail.
I also like the outstanding invoices by due date tab in the ZenCash widget. You get a nice graphical representation of the amounts spread out over time, looking forward as well as at overdue accounts. Click on any of the bars to see a popup with more details.
Upcoming Actions
Earlier I gave you a screen shot of the actions timeline, where you specify the type of action (letter, phone call, etc.) that is taken at various stages. The Upcoming Actions widget in the dashboard gives you a view of the actions that are going to take place soon. The columns show if it is going to be a letter or a phone call, when that will take place, and what invoice it applies to. There are icons on the right that highlight different things that you need to address – such as a missing phone number for “Jemley Bradser” in the sample below.
From this widget you can click on the customer name and you’ll see a more detailed description of the status of this customer.
Gallery of Debtors
This may be one of my favorite widgets in the dashboard. This lists the most important customers based either on the amount outstanding or the average days to pay. The graph/% value at the bottom represents what portion of your total outstanding Receivables this customer represents. If you want to see more detail, just click on the customer and you’ll be taken to their detail page.
A Worthwhile Addition
I do like this improvement in ZenCash – the dashboard brings together a number of features that were scattered about in different places, and the graphic representation makes this very easy to digest. There are more sophisticated “dashboard” products on the market, but the value here is that this is working in conjunction with the ZenCash Receivables
There is room for improvement, which isn’t surprising since this is a new feature. I would like to have the ability to move the widgets about in the dashboard, perhaps even to hide some of them. Also, ZenCash synchronizes periodically with QuickBooks Online, and sometimes you have to wait for the information to show up in ZenCash. I would be happier if there was a “refresh now” button in the product so that I can make my payments in QuickBooks and then be able to see the impact on ZenCash immediately.
If you have a Receivables problem that you need help in managing, so that you can focus on other aspects of your business, ZenCash is an excellent product, and the new dashboard makes it easy to see how things stand.
