QuickBooks 2014 Income Tracker
The
The Income Tracker provides you with a fast way to see the status of your unbilled and unpaid transactions, and provides you with features to improve billing/collections as well as perform a number of batch procedures.
This feature was first developed in QuickBooks Online, and this year Intuit has brought it into QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks for Mac 2014.
The Old Way
What did we use before?
Do you use the Collection Center? I always forget how to find this, as it isn’t in a menu (it is an icon at the top of your Customer Center). This feature was hard to use, didn’t provide you with any sorts of summaries, didn’t look at unbilled income.
Most users of QuickBooks that I talk to end up using a variety of reports. You have to look at multiple reports and spend a lot of time analyzing them – or possibly purchase an add-on collections
- Collections Report to see your overdue invoices.
- A/R Aging Summary to get your total outstanding invoices, current and past due.
- Perhaps the Open Invoices Report for another look at unpaid invoices.
- Estimates by Job or Job Progress Invoices vs. Estimates reports to look at unbilled costs (there are several Job related reports to help here).
- Pending Sales or Open Sales Order reports to look at unbilled sales activity.
There are other reports of this sort, but the point is that you have to cast about to find a variety of reports to gather all the information that you might need.
QuickBooks 2014 Income Tracker
Here’s the Income Tracker, which provides you with a way to manage your unbilled and unpaid transactions all from one easy-to-use location. You can access this from an icon in the Customer Center, from a tab in the left navigation bar, or from the Customers menu.
From here you can:
- See all of your unbilled and unpaid sales transactions.
- Select just one category by clicking on the colored bar.
- Double click on any transaction to open that transaction to see the detail.
- Print or send a copy of a transaction by email by selecting the action on the right.
- Sort the list by clicking on any column heading.
- Print a group of transactions in a batch.
That last bullet item is a very useful feature that has been requested often – the ability to easily re-print a batch of invoices or other transactions without having to go to each individual one and check the to be printed box. For example, in the next screen I clicked on the red overdue button to list the overdue invoices. I check the box at the very top right to select all that are listed. Then I select Batch Actions at the bottom of the screen and select Invoices, and I can print all of the selected overdue invoices in one batch. VERY NICE!
I also like being able to quickly see the total amount (and a detailed list) of the unbilled estimates and unbilled (open) sales orders.
With this feature you no longer need the old Collection Center, and you won’t see it in the Customer Center. However, if you are really used to that, the feature is still available by enabling it in your Preferences.
Not Quite Perfect
I do like this very much but there is always room for improvement. For example:
- If I do a batch print there isn’t any way that I’ve found to control the sorting order for the transactions, so you can’t print them grouped by customer. If that is important, you can set a filter for a customer and print just those for that customer in a batch, but that often isn’t practical.
- When you batch print, the transactions will print using the template that is associated with the transaction. In most cases that is good, but if you have different pre-printed forms for different types of transactions you’ll find this a bit more difficult to work with. That isn’t too common, though.
- There isn’t a built-in way to print to PDF. That is easy to get around, using a Windows PDF printer driver, but it would be nice to have that option here.
- There isn’t a way to do bulk emails of your invoices. That would be convenient also, but it is a complicated thing to manage.
These aren’t major issues, more of a wish list for the future, other than perhaps being able to have the batch print use the order in which the transactions are listed in the window (that would be SO easy to do!).
I like this feature very much!
Category: Product Reviews, QuickBooks Tips/Tricks, Software Updates