Time to Start Cleaning up… How to “Merge Accounts” in QuickBooks

As we approach the end of the year many of us are beginning to get a nasty feeling that keeps nagging: “…dang! It’s already September?!?! I should probably start getting my records cleaned up before tax season hits in few months…”

Being a “Procrastinators Club” Alumni, I understand that typically the things we most often put off, are tasks that seem overwhelming… so we don’t even want to start them.

I thought I would take this occasion to give a few tips on how you can very quickly & very easily do some clean up work on your QuickBooks file.

Chart of accounts

Those of you who have attended my QuickBooks classes already know that I really stress the importance of keeping your chart of accounts SIMPLE & well organized.

Sadly, we get busy & many times during a stint of “mass-data-entry catch-up”, inevitably we will come across a strange item that we need to record. At this point we think “now where did I record this kind of thing last time?”… We usually don’t remember so, what do we do? We simply create a new account for it.

BAD JUJU!

After enough of these little sessions we soon find ourselves with a 10-page chart of accounts, full of all kinds of redundancy & duplication! 🙂

As you can imagine, this makes your tax preparation quite a fun (& expensive) adventure for your accountant.

Here’s an easy way to fix that:

Merge Accounts

QuickBooks has a wonderful feature that allows you to take to accounts that are redundant & merge them into one account. Beats the heck out of sitting there all day, having to re-code every transaction.

For this example we will pretend that a duplicate account has been created for coding utility bills:

• – Utilities
• – Building Utility Expenses

Here’s what you do:

• 1. Open your “Chart of Accounts”
• 2. Select the account you wish to eliminate
• 3. right click with your mouse & select “Edit” from the menu (Ctl+N shortcut)
• 4. When the “Edit” screen pops up, simply re-name the account EXACTLY as the account you wish to keep appears
• 5. Click “Save & Close”
• 6. QuickBooks will pop up an alert saying “an account with this name already exists, do you want to MERGE them?”
• 7. Click “yes”
• 8. You’re all done!

So there you have it!

Next time, we’ll talk about an awesome, easy way to organize all of those really strange transactions that you have no idea how to code.

… No more using the “ask my accountant” (that nobody remembers to look at), no more guessing & no more duplicate account creation.

STAY TUNED…

Just a reminder, QuickBooks classes are held here at our firm EVERY MONTH!

They are FREE to our clients & are just $50/person for everyone else.

For those of you who would like to get an Accountant’s opinion as to what sort of shape your books are really in, another service our firm provides is a “FREE QuickBooks checkup”.

Contact me if you have any questions or would like to attend the next class.

~ ian

Ian Bullis
775-882-4459