Quickbooks How To Guide for Collection Letters

Dec. 8, 2012 - PRLog -- Managing collections and your accounts receivable in Quickbooks is incredibly important.  After all the reason you are in business is to make money, but what good is having sales, if you are struggling to get paid.  Fortunately, Intuit Quickbooks makes it incredibly easy to keep track of what customers owe you money, and has a process in place to help automate your accounts receivables and collections.  In this post we will discuss some tips and how-to’s to handle your collection and Accounts Receivables process.

First, from the Snapshots window (located on the toolbar typically next to calendars and customer) there should be a tab that shows “Customers who owe money”.  This feature can be sorted by both date and amount, and in the newer versions of Quickbooks, you can even receive payments from here.  If this is not located on your toolbar, we will discuss how to customize your toolbar and screens in tomorrows post.

The next location you can keep track of customers who owe money is from the Customer Center.  This can be found by click on the customers tab from the drop down selections or the customer center on your toolbar.  Along the left hand side under customers and jobs, you can filter the Balance Total to show which customers owe you money.  From here you can run an open balance report that will allow you to drill down to the specific invoice which will provide more information about the amounts owed.  Additional reports will provide more detail which can be found under the report center under the option, “Customers and Receivables”.  There are numerous A/R reports that provide snapshots as well as in depth information about customers who owe money.

Once you have your A/R reports, you can begin your focus on the collection process that you have in place.  Quickbooks has multiple tools available to help with this process.  The first is found under the Customer Center, under “Collections Center”.  From here you will see your customers broken out into two categories.  “Almost Due” and “Overdue”.  Quickooks allows you to e-mail friendly reminders to the customers who are both past due, and almost due.  One of the benefits is that if you do not like the template Quickbooks has included with their software, you can customize these templates under the “Preferences” option by selecting “Send Forms”.  You can choose the form and alter the wording that is included in your e-mails to the customers.

An additional way to automate the collections and past due accounts is to choose “Customer Center” and select the “Word” icon and choose the option, “Prepare Collection Letters”.  Under this option you will be able to filter the specific customers that you would like to prepare letters for.  Quickbooks gives multiple time frames, and filters to select specific customers that fit your criteria.  Once you have filtered out your customers, you can choose from Quickbooks pre-loaded templates, or edit the templates to your liking.  (Help with this option can be found from yesterdays post)  http://inventivepm.com/blog/2012/12/mail-merging-letters-...

Once you have run your letters, you can choose to print and mail the items yourself, or outsource this option as we had mentioned in yesterdays post.

http://www.inventivepm.com/blog