To answer your questions...
Q: We need guidance on how the finance charges work in QuickBooks. Can you help us with this? A: Yes, here are some basic guidelines: It is in Edit/Preferences for Finance Charges that you establish your rules. The important ones are: - Annual percentage rate - be sure to multiply your monthly rate by 12.
- Set whether you want to use the invoice date or the date due to determine the age of the invoice. If using the date due, you can establish in the Customer Profile/Terms List the number of days or a specific date of the month such as the 28th.
- Grace period - this is the number of days (age) before the invoice is considered overdue.
- Account - choose or establish a general ledger account to record the finance charges.
- It is in the Create Statements screen that you can request to assess the finance charges.
- QuickBooks first determines whether each invoice is overdue. Then if it is, it applies the annual rate to the specific number of days the invoice is overdue.
Note that in the Create Statements screen, you can request to Assess Finance Charges to test your settings but then Unmark All to cancel if not correct. You can also create a specific invoice to charge a customer finance or late charges. It is recommended that you include text on your invoices to make clear your terms to charge finance or late charges. Q: Thanks to your tech support, we have discovered that we can automatically create a shipping label for each invoice. Are there other features to do things automatically? A: Yes, there are many of these, designed to give you accuracy and save time. You can review the sections in the Options menu to see the choices. If you want to choose an automatic, simply check the option on. Other choices that have proven very successful are automatic scheduling of cases and the assignment of price levels for automatic special pricing when invoicing. Also check out the Automatic Backup Protocol in the topic below.
Q: What is the best way to handle group practices that request one monthly statement for all doctors in the group? A: QuickBooks has had an ideal way for this. You can set up a customer record for the main or central billing address. Then under this, you can set up a job for each doctor in the group. If appropriate, each doctor have their own shipping address. Then in DQB for Options/Synchronization, you specify that both customers and jobs are to be synchronized. Each customer and job is given its own customer record in DQB, which means you can also treat each one as a separate entity for preferences, case plans, communications and alerts. If you have committed to special pricing for the group, you can create a price level, name it appropriately, and assign it to all the doctors in the group. For production and sales reporting, you can in Basic Lists, create a customer group to provide both detailed and summary analysis.
Then back to QuickBooks, you can create a statement for the billing customer and specify that the transactions for each job or individual doctor will be listed one by one with a clear identity in the statement.
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