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Recent developments for small business owners is the ability to do some recurring transactions within your accounting software. A transaction that happens with regularity will not be considered recurring unless it occurs at a set time every day, weekly, monthly or yearly!
By using an app like quickbooks online you can add a task to repeat every week, month or year and have it sync across all of your devices automatically.
This article will go more into detail about how this feature works as well as some examples.
Let’s look at some examples of how to create a monthly credit card bill that is set up as a recurring transaction in Intuit’s QuickBooks Online.
First, you will need to add your bank account into the app so it can access money from the bank. Then, you can use the Settings section to choose whether to have this be an authorized or un-authorized transaction. If you pick authorization, then users are allowed to see the transaction but they cannot edit or stop it until it is done.
If you want it to go through without anyone seeing what you're doing, then make it un-approved which means only you can view the transaction. Either way, after it has been run once, you can delete it and start over.
An easy way to manage your spending is to create a recurring transaction! You can choose between Transaction, Item, or Category as the action for this transaction. Once you have it set up, you can add additional items or take away ones that you don’t need.
You can also change the amount if needed, but remember to update the relationship first! For example, say you want to reduce your monthly movie budget by $100. You could remove one movie from the list every month for a total savings of $200 per year.
Removing an item is simple, just go into the settings for the transaction and search for “unmark”. Then, you can press delete to permanently get rid of the entry.
Changing the amount is slightly more complicated, but not too bad. Go back into the main settings for the transaction and find the name under Settings > Relationships. Press Edit next to the name and then you will see the drop down box with all the possible values. Simply pick another value and press Add to insert the new setting.
Then, press Update to save these changes.
The next step is to determine if you want to keep or remove this particular type of transaction. To do so, click on “More Settings” under the transactions list. Here, you can choose to either retain the transaction as usual, or permanently cancel it.
You will then need to confirm your choice by clicking outside of the box immediately after.
There is a per transaction cost to creating a recurring payment or invoice. This price is not set by quickbook, but rather by your bank or credit card company. The amount of this fee varies from person to person and depends on how many times you create invoices or payments during a given time period.
The online version of QuickBooks does include free trials, which allow you to test out whether or not it’s for you before paying any fees. It is important to know that there is no way to “pause” a trial subscription, so make sure you’re ready to pay for all of the services quickly!
There is also a one month free trial for some of their paid service plans, which can be found here.
The most significant limitation is that you can’t modify or remove the transaction once it has been created. You can, however, change how frequently it occurs or what amount it spends each time it happens!
There is also no way to combine multiple one-time transactions into one larger transaction, which may be necessary if you make purchases at several stores during a single shopping trip.
You can either create a new transaction for such items or add them onto an existing recurring transaction, but not both at the same time.
The second way to create a repeating transaction is by editing or adding an entry into the Transaction Settings section of your account. Here, you can choose whether it will occur monthly, weekly, daily, or every x days.
The other option is to add the item as an exception under the Repeat rule. For example, if you want to make a monthly payment to your mortgage each month, then Create a new repeatable transaction called “Mortgage” and set it up to happen once a month.
Then, go back into the main settings area and find the Debt category. Click Add debt and pick Mortgage from the drop down menu.
One of the trickier situations to deal with is when you have to edit or remove a recurring payment from an account.
If this happens, then there’s no easy way to do it. You will need to go into each individual line item and either cancel or change the amount/frequency of that transaction.
This can be tricky because not only does every row link back to the parent invoice, but there may also be other linked transactions within that parent invoce!
It’s best to save a copy of the original transaction first before making any changes. Then, go through and make sure everything is correct and export again so you don’t lose anything.
Another option would be to merge all of these transactions together into one large transaction, but just remember to include any additional settings such as refund amounts or notes.
When you want to delete a recurring transaction, you will first need to find it!
It is important to note that even if you can’t find the entry when you log into quickbooxs online, you can still access all of your past transactions via the My Transactions page. There you can click “Show All Transaction Types” under the Batch Operations section to view all transactions made throughout the year.
You may also be able to search through your old notes or messages to see if anyone else has this information.
