7 QuickBooks Shortcuts to Save Time

Seven QuickBooks shortcuts that will save you time

For the past several weeks I’ve been working on two five year bookkeeping projects. Needless to say there are quite a few entries needed to get the books in order.

The following tweaks to QuickBooks can save you several seconds per transaction, equating to a significant amount of time when you have hundreds, if not thousands, of entries.

QuickBooks Shortcuts and Tweaks:

1. If you are certain of your data entry skills turn off the warning that indicates a transaction is more than 90 days in the past
   • How to Turn off QuickBooks Warning on 90 Days in Past: Edit>Preferences>Accounting>Company Preferences>Unselect the “Warning if 90 days in Past” option

   

2. You can also turn off the warning that you’ve changed a transaction
   • How to Turn off Edited Transaction Warning: Edit>Preferences>General>My Preferences>Unselect “Warn when editing a transaction” (red arrow in screenshot below)
3. Presumably you will be entering in data from the same time period in batches – change your date preference to use last date instead of the current date
   • How to Change Date Preference: Edit>Preferences>General>My Preferences>Change “Default Date to Use for New Transactions” (orange arrow in screenshot below)
4. Set your QuickBooks preferences to auto-fill information for vendors to what has been used in the past (this can be especially useful if you have long or hard to remember names)
   • How to Change Auto-Fill Preferences for Vendors: Edit>Preferences>General>My Preferences>Change “Automatically Recall Information” (blue arrow in screenshot below)

   

5. Using the same memo in individual Journal Entries? Have QB auto-recall the data so you don’t need to type it on each line
   • How to Auto-Fill Memo in Journal Entries: Edit>Preferences>Account>My Preferences>Select “Autofill Memo in Journal Entry”

   

6. Have industry terms or words that only your company uses? Add them to the spell check library or turn off that feature altogether
   • If your Spell Check Options are turned on – you will first have to enter the information in an invoice, etc. and then click “Add” for the word to be added to the “library”. (Additional spell check options can be found at: Edit>Preferences>Spelling>My Preferences)
7. If you frequently have multiple windows open – save time toggling between them by having the open windows list show on your left sidebar so you can quickly click the desired screen/report
   • How to Show List of Open Windows on Left Side of the Quickbooks screen: View>Select “Open Windows List”

And one that is purely preference of sanity (will save no time, just possibly gray hairs!) if the beep that you hear each time you save a transaction drives you slightly batty – you can turn it off by visiting: Edit>Preferences>General>My Preferences>Unselect “Beep When Recording a Transaction”.

These are just a few of the many shortcuts available for QuickBooks. Your turn – tell me what tweaks you’ve made and what options you’ve selected or unselected to save yourself data entry time when doing your QuickBooks bookkeeping.