Vicki McCay

Vicki McCay
In this lesson, I focus on how to customize your P&L report and show a bit about how to do that. Also, we talk about singling out a stream like Amazon. You can play around with that and see what types of reports you can create. One of my most asked questions is “how do I pull a P&L for tax season?” Well, you know my standard reply will start with – I am not a CPA….My reply is not intended to be construed as advice. I will share with you what I do and you can take it or leave it. :) For the P&L at tax time, as a Cash business, I choose Cash Basis when I customize my report. I choose Last Fiscal Year for my Dates and use the Previous Year Comparable feature. Since I use Turbo Tax Self-Employed online to do my own taxes, I just follow the interview and fill-in the information straight from my P&L. It’s really simple to do and makes tax season a lot easier to stand. Cost of sales is figured by Turbo Tax after all income and expenses are entered. Then I compare it to my reports to see if there is any difference or if I entered information accurately. Once I complete the entering of info, I pay for the product and am able to pull copies of the Preview Return. I check the pdf against my report a second time. I will check and re-check until I am happy I’ve taken all my deductions. If I owe, I file in April. If I am getting money back, I file in February! :) No need for extensions. No extra fees or interest. While I am on the subject, if you are using your vehicle for business and claiming mileage, please be sure to track it. A simple mindless way to track is MileIQ. This little app goes on your phone; your phone goes with you everywhere anyway, right? Make it work for you! You’ll need your beginning mileage and ending for your taxes. Plus you need your actual business miles. MileIQ keeps track of all that and can track multiple vehicles. Be sure to check out the home office deduction on Turbo Tax too. You will need your office space dimensions and home total sq footage. That’s the simple way to get the deduction. Of course, you can use all those expenses you’ve been tracking to decide on how you want to claim your deduction.
Private Label order, deposit, final payment, receive inventory. Private Label Scenario – Adding Inventory With Proportional Payment In Module 2 – Adding Sample Inventory Item, I gave you a head’s up about the Defined Fields. The gist of that note was to give you options in case you do RA and OA plus PL. That’s lots of options to take care of, right? The great thing about QB is it gives you so many ways to customize your accounting. The hard thing about teaching it is there are so many options! I hope this is not too confusing. I’m going to try to simplify the process of ordering PL with a deposit. Then waiting for production and paying the balance. Then waiting some more for delivery and inspection before shipping to FBA, possibly even storing it in your own warehouse until shipment to AMZ. So here’s the basic information I’ll start with and you can tweak it as you see fit. Order – receive Deposit billing Transfer Funds for Deposit Wait for Production Product Completed – Final billing Shipment Received and Inspected – Verify Count Prep or Store – Ship to AMZ for FBA or do MF Anyway you sell it, the first thing is to pay the deposit. How do we do that? Well, we need a new account. Inventory is an Asset Account. So we will be adding a new account we can call Prepaid PL and make it a sub-account of Inventory Asset. We will post a transaction in the checking or credit card register, depending on which account we use. ACH will be a transfer or wire from a checking account. The amount that is paid for the deposit will be posted on the Expenses tab of the transaction with Inventory Asset:Prepaid PL as the account. This accounts for the money spent, but does not increase or record the actual parts/inventory purchased. It is kind of holding a place for the inventory that is coming. Once the order is completed, the final billing will be paid the same way, increasing the Inventory Asset:Prepaid PL. After the final payment is received by the vendor, the order should be released to us. A final zero transaction will be needed to move the Inventory Items into Inventory Asset:Amazon:FBA and out of Inventory Asset:Prepaid PL. This will add the Inventory Items to Quantity On-hand and add to Inventory Asset account, while reducing or eliminating the Prepaid PL amount that was setup in the first two transactions. Any other fees that are accrued can be added to the Cost or expense them as Selling Fees. We can setup sub-accounts as needed for those fees. If you decide to add shipping to the Cost, do not add it in the Defined Fields (Item List) as this will return incorrect figures in the ROI worksheet, since the amounts will be included twice. I would suggest not adding the shipping to the cost and expense it like any other business expense. Doing this will let the numbers fall onto the ROI worksheet and you will have a better picture of each item’s ROI. So you want to see that in a video? I thought you might! :)
Memorizing transactions cuts your work in half or more. No need to address recurring transactions. It is quick and easy.
Credit Memos are addressed in the Payment Statement Module. If the individual sales invoice process seems cumbersome, I’d encourage you to try the Mass Sales Invoice method in Module. I can’t show you the process at this point because it requires payment statements to complete. We aren’t there yet. I started using the Individual sales invoice method at the beginning of my business, but as sales increased I started using the Mass Sales Invoice. There are pros and cons to each method. One pro is the elimination of Credit Memos, for the most part. I do not like dealing with Credit Memos. :) I think you need to know both methods to get a well-rounded education on the matter and make your own decision which way you’d like to do it in your business. You have options. Another pro for learning the individual sales method is that you can use it for other platforms. **If you decide you do not want to post ANY SALES INVOICES, I have another option. You still use your QuickBooks for bank downloads for inventory purchases and miscellaneous business expenses, but utilizing ShopKeeper you avoid a lot of the manual bookkeeping. We will talk more about this option in the final module of this course.
I love when students ask questions or share comments.  Andy shared a comment below about the auto-fill function when dragging cells and I made a quick video to show the work-around.  Since I do not have the account numbers turned on in my QB file, this was not an issue in the first video.  However, for those of you using account numbering, this will be something you want to address prior to importing the Excel file back into QB.  Don't worry.  It is a quick fix! :)
Adding variations to inventory may be necessary and so is the colon.
If you are QuickBooks savvy and just want a Chart of Accounts to upload, you can use this one. https://southernmomflair.com/product/chart-of-accounts-for-amazon-sellers/ You can upload it directly into QB using the Excel worksheet. I want students to know how to add the accounts themselves as they need them, but some of you have asked for a short-cut so I am giving you a quick tutorial. Keep in mind this is not for the beginner. You will also need mapping of worksheets knowledge. This is something we go over in detail in the Inventory modules. It is the same process, so if you are adventurous, go for it! :) Note: The COA used in the following example is not the one we use in this course. Therefore the notation of 29 accounts, as mentioned, does not go along with this course.
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