QuickBooks offers multiple ways to accomplish many tasks. Here’s a handy tool for processing and tracking payments.
Whether you’re a sole proprietor or a larger company who has one staff member dedicated to dealing with accounts receivable, there’s a lot of screen-switching and repetitive work involved.
If you haven’t taken a QuickBooks training course, you might not know what all of these are as they apply to receiving payments. You may automatically go to Customers | Receive Payments, which works fine. You can even run a handful of reports from a tab on that screen.
This is the screen you probably use most often when recording payments.
But what about your standard sales and A/R reports? Your critical reminders? What if you have to create a sales receipt or issue a refund? You’ll have to keep going back to the Customers menu or home page to launch those screens.
The QuickBooks Payment Snapshot presents a time-saving alternative. To get there, go to Company | Customer Snapshot and click the Payments tab. This customizable screen consists of several basic parts, arranged in three columns for easy viewing:
- QuickLinks. Jump to screens that let you receive a payment, create a sales receipt or issue credits and refunds.
- A graph displaying Invoice Payment Status and A/R by Aging Period for different financial periods
- A link to summary and detail views of several Receivables Reports
Two of the sections on the Payment Snapshot screen.
- Lists of Recent Transactions and Customers Who Owe Money, which you can “drill down” on to see the underlying records and transactions
- Reminders of Money to Deposit and Overdue Invoices
Like most other screens in QuickBooks, the Payment Snapshot is customizable. To modify its content, click the Add Content link in the upper left corner. Under Add content to your Payment Snapshot, you’ll see miniature models of each possible element on the Payment Snapshot page (scroll sideways using the green arrows to see all of them).
Click the + Add button next to each chart, list or set of links to display it on the Payment Snapshot page.
To see a larger version, click Show Preview. If a particular element is already showing on the page, the + Add button will be replaced by a checkmark with Added next to it. To remove one, just click the X in the upper right corner of that section. Click the down arrow to save or print, Restore Default to go back to the original screen, and Done when you’ve finished modifying.
You don’t have to take a QuickBooks class to master the use of this particular page, but it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with it to save time and unnecessary effort when you’re recording payments.
