QuickBooks & Peachtree Shortcuts


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Hi, I’m Jayne Miller, the QuickBooks Gal. Welcome to another in our series of “Quicklets” –informational podcasts about QuickBooks and related bookkeeping topics.

Today, we are going to talk about using shortcuts in QuickBooks.

As much as I love to work in QuickBooks, I appreciate anything that speeds up my work and lets me get done faster. With that in mind, I created a QuickBooks and a Peachtree shortcut guide several years ago. Recently, though I’ve discovered a few more tips that I hadn’t been using that can really speed things up.

The first one, I absolutely love. For people like me who live in Nevada, it can be a real pain filling in the “state” portion of addresses in QuickBooks drop-downs, as well as those on various web forms. Typing “N” brings up NE for Nebraska, while typing “NV” gives you Nebraska, then Virginia. What I learned only recently is that I can type N several times to cycle through all of the states that start with N. The same is true for T states or A states, or any others where your state isn’t the first one with that letter. This is much easier than typing an N and then using the down arrow to get to Nevada.

The second tip, I knew but had forgotten. While working in QuickBooks, you can press control and tab to move from window to window. For example; if I’m working in the check register and open a report over the top of it and then want to return to the check register, I can use control and tab to go back without having to close the report. When I’m cross-referencing several reports, this can be very helpful as I don’t want to have to run them in tiny windows or have to close and re-open them again and again to navigate between them.

One final shortcut in this quicklet, one that I use all the time, is the “Add to Icon Bar” feature. With whatever report, task, or window you might want to make a shortcut for open, simply click on the “View” menu and select “add “. . . “to icon bar.”
This will let you name the thing you want a shortcut for, select an icon for it, and place it on your top icon bar where you can access it with one click in the future. You can return to View and select Customize the Icon Bar if you would like to rearrange the order in which the icons appear. Go to blog.quickbooksgal.com for itemized instructions on how to do this.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of how I use this:

• Regularly Used Reports - As a bookkeeper and business owner, I keep a close eye on my Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable. I like to use the Open Invoice report and the Unpaid Bills reports. Rather than going through the steps to open these reports via the menus or find them in the Memorized Reports file, I just open them, make any changes I want to the layout of the report, then add them to my Icon Bar….now they are just a single click away.

• One-time, Repeat Activities - The second example is pretty specific to my practice: Bank Reconciliations. Very often I have to reconcile a client’s bank account(s) for many months. Quite often, I have to reconcile many months and many accounts. Since this is a repetitious activity, I put the Bank Reconcile to my Icon Bar. Once I finish, I remove that icon.


Adding Icons to the Icon Bar
1. Open the window that contains the feature or report you want to add.
2. Go to the View menu and click Add Window to Icon Bar, where window is the title of the window you are adding.
If the menu item is dimmed, make sure that the icon bar is displayed. Go to the View menu and click Add Window to Icon Bar again.
3. In the Label field, enter the text that you want to appear below the icon.
Choose a label that will help you recognize the icon, but avoid long names that will cause the icon to become too wide.
1. Open the Customize Icon Bar window.
2. Select the name of the icon that should appear before your new icon.
If you don't select an icon, your new icon will appear at the end of the icon bar.
3. Click the Add button.
4. From the alphabetical feature list, select the feature or report that you want to add.
5. (Optional) From the scrolling list, select an icon for the feature.
QuickBooks preselects an icon, but you can select a different one.
6. In the Label field, enter the text that you want to appear below the icon.
Choose a label that will help you recognize the icon, but avoid long names that will cause the shortcut to become too wide.
7. (Optional) Modify the Description that appears when you pause your mouse above an icon.


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Next time: How to choose a QuickBooks Pro Advisor

Upcoming:
• What do you need to start a business? (Insurance, license, etc)
• Payroll – Ugh! I have a business with employees– now who wants a piece of me? (Social Security, Medicare, State Unemployment, FUTA, who else?)
• Using Credit Cards to pay bills, make purchases
• Converting Peachtree to QuickBooks
• Creating a new file in QuickBooks from an old one (Import lists vs. deleting transactions)
• Recording cash purchases and owner purchases/contributions
• QuickBooks Short Cut Keys
• QuickBooks Point of Sale – What’s new in 2007

Once a month, I will be dedicating a podcast to your questions.
Got a QuickBooks Mess? Got a QuickBooks question? Send it to me, The QuickBooks Gal, and I’ll try to include it in our monthly Q&A Quicklet!

Well, that’s it for now. I appreciate your time and hope you will join us again next time for another in our Quicklet© series. If there are topics you would like me to cover, send me an email at jayne@quickbooksgal.com. I welcome your ideas, questions, and comments.

Don’t forget to visit our website, www.quickbooksgal.com to learn more about me, the services we offer and our workshops. Look for an expanded workshop schedule in March.

I’m Jayne Miller, the QuickBooks Gal. Thanks for listening!

Jayne Miller is the owner of Custom Business Solutions, a consulting firm in Reno, NV that specializes in providing bookkeeping and software support.

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