QuickBooks 2021 Features That Will Improve Your Productivity

Built by Intuit in 1983, QuickBooks is one of the most efficient accounting software in the market. With its best-in-class functionalities, it has added value to the lives of CPAs and has become a popular accounting tool in the USA.

With the QuickBooks Desktop 2020 version, Intuit introduced some exciting features like Automated Payment Reminders, Alternate Vendor, and Express Pick-Pack. This year, with the 2021 version of QuickBooks Desktop, they have added a bunch of features that are sure to improve your work productivity.

Let’s have a look at some of them.

1. Automated Statements

Email is one of the primary sources of communication these days. But, sending emails to all your clients can be a time-consuming task. Therefore, this process is made easier by the Automated Statements feature available in QuickBooks 2021. When a transaction is done, the detailed statement is sent automatically to the customers via email.

It is also an efficient way of reminding your customers about the payments that are still pending. With different templates for different purposes, the automation helps you send the required data to the target customers with minimal effort.

Follow these steps to find the feature.

1. In the Payment Reminders menu, select the Schedule Payment Reminders option.
2. Create a new schedule according to the given instructions.
3. Add name, description, and then review the customers you want to add to the group.

2. Receipt Management

It is cumbersome for accountants to keep receipts of all the expenses and store their hard copies. It consumes a lot of time that could have been used for other productive tasks. For this, QuickBooks 2021 has introduced Receipt Management.

It makes the expense receipt process faster and more efficient. You can create and categorize the expense transactions automatically. It is just a matter of capturing the receipts on camera, importing the document to QuickBooks 2021, and reviewing it. It also helps in handling multiple receipt transactions at once.

How to upload and edit receipts?

1. Select Receipt Management in the Vendor menu
2. Choose an Intuit Account to access the files.
3. Upload the necessary receipts.
4. On selecting the Review option, you can attach or remove the receipt based on the transaction.

3. Customer Groups

Interacting with hundreds of customers personally can be a bit exhausting. Therefore, to make this process efficient, Creating Customer Groups is introduced in the 2021 version of the QuickBooks software application.

It groups your customers based on a particular property, such as location, payments, sales rep, etc. By creating a customer group, all the customers in the same group can be contacted at once, saving time and increasing productivity.

How to create a customer group?

1. In the Lists menu, choose the Manage Groups option.
2. Select Create customer group and enter all the necessary details.

4. Improved Bank Feeds

Though traditional banking systems are still in use, online transactions are preferred by everyone these days. Reviewing your bank accounts online or adding new ones is made easier by using the ‘Improved bank feeds’ option. With enhanced rules and improved matching, bank transactions are made more flexible. The efficiency of this process is increased by categorizing and defining the criteria.

Steps to find the feature:

1. Select the Edit option in the menu bar and go to Preferences.
2. Go to Checking and then select Bank Feeds.
3. Click on Bank Feeds Center.

5. PDF Invoice

The traditional way of reviewing an invoice is to open it separately and confirm the accuracy of the details. But this can be a bit hectic when there is a large customer base. Therefore, QuickBooks came up with this fantastic feature that allows you to preview the invoice by introducing the ‘Send Invoice View’ option automatically.

How to access this?

1. In the Invoice, select Email.
2. Click Invoice and Attached Files.
3. Now, there is no need to open every invoice outside of QuickBooks manually.

6. QuickBooks Tool Hub

QuickBooks tool hub was first developed and launched in the market in 2020. But, this is the first year that a link is being included in the desktop application as one of the new features within version 2021.

QuickBooks Tool Hub is a single place where you find solutions for all of your problems. With easy-to-use troubleshooting techniques, most of the errors can be fixed within a short period, hence avoiding extra time to search for them on different search engines. Even if you face any issue while solving the bugs, a faster access support system is available to fix that problem.

How to access this feature?

In the QuickBooks toolbar, select the Help option, and you will find QuickBooks Tool Hub.

1. On clicking that, it directs you to a webpage from where you can download the Tool Hub.

7. Batch Delete Sales Order

One of the most efficient ways of work is to delete the sales orders that are processed. This avoids confusion and makes it convenient for you to manage the client files. But, deleting multiple files manually one by one is tiresome. Therefore, QuickBooks launched the Batch Delete Sales Order feature. The feature makes it possible for us to delete multiple transactions at a time.

How to access it?

In the Accountant menu, go to Delete Transactions.

1. From there, you can select one or more transactions that you want to delete.
2. Then select the Review and void option to delete the content.
3. If you want to have a backup of the data, then choose the Backup and void option.

Conclusion

Intuit has introduced some major game-changing features with QuickBooks 2021 to improve work productivity. These features will help CPAs and accountants get their work done faster and focus more on revenue-generating tasks.

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