Simplify Your Repetitive Transactions

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA

Some users consider entering repetitive transactions —such as monthly dues, service agreement invoices, as well as rent and utility bills — to be the accounting equivalent of watching paint dry. Fortunately, Office Accounting Professional 2008 can release your clients from much of the drudgery of these monotonous, yet necessary, transactions. In this article I’ll discuss the new ways that your clients can manage — and automate — routine periodic transactions.

Professional Required: Office Accounting Express users will need to upgrade to Office Accounting Professional in order to use the recurring transaction features discussed in this article.

Recurring Transactions

Recurring transactions have undergone a makeover in Office Accounting 2008 — this feature was previously referred to as “memorized” documents. Users could recur — or schedule —memorized documents, but it was easy for users to overlook this capability. You’ll notice these changes in Office Accounting Professional 2008:

• The ability to recur transactions is more clearly identified. As shown in Figure 1, the Memorize button on the toolbar of document windows is now labeled Recurring. Recurring documents can either be saved as templates for future use, or scheduled to recur one or more times.

Figure 1: The Memorize button has been replaced with a Recurring button in document windows that permit recurring transactions.

• As shown in Figure 2, a new Documents to Process list serves a central location from which your clients can identify and manage recurring documents as they become due.

Figure 2: The new Documents to Process window simplifies the process of managing recurring documents.

• As shown in Figure 3, the former Memorized Transaction list has been replaced with a new Recurring Transaction list.

Figure 3: The former Memorized Transaction List is now known as the Recurring Transaction List.

Your clients can save any of these transaction types as recurring documents. I’ll provide some background on why they might use each:

• Quotes – Your clients might choose to save a quote form for frequently sold items or groups of items. Typically your clients won’t schedule a quote to recur automatically; most users will want to use a saved quote as a jump start on new transactions.
• Sales orders – Although your clients might use sales orders in a similar fashion to quotes, they can also schedule sales orders to fulfill ongoing orders from customers. For instance, customers may have standing orders for agreed upon products or services, so scheduled sales orders can help ensure that customers needs don’t fall through the cracks when a key employee is away on vacation.
• Customer invoices – Some of your clients will get a lot of mileage out of recurring customer invoices. For instance, any organization that charges for monthly dues or service agreements can set up a recurring invoice for each customer. Your clients can then post these transactions en masse each month.
• Cash sales – Recurring cash sales can be a big time saver for any of your clients that receive ongoing revenue from automatic ACH or credit card transactions. For instance, let’s say some of your clients automatically draft customers’ bank accounts or charge a credit card on file. Scheduled cash sales eliminate the need to generate an invoice just to post the automatic payment against it.
• Customer credit memos – Most of your clients probably won’t schedule recurring credit memos; it may be helpful to save a boilerplate document, perhaps prefilled with terms and conditions.
• Item receipts – As with customer credit memos, your clients might not schedule item receipts very often, except in the case of automatic inventory shipments. However, saving an item receipt for frequent item shipments can save loading dock personnel a few steps. In this case, your clients might prefill most of the fields on the item receipt document, and perhaps leave the quantity, date, and reference fields blank.
• Purchase orders – Any of your clients that use purchase orders may opt to save templates in the same fashion as customer quotes. A few might opt to schedule purchase orders for certain ongoing necessities.
• Vendor bills – Just about every business has recurring bills of some sort, such as rent, utilities, taxes, and insurance. Encourage your clients to establish recurring vendor bills for infrequent expenses, such as taxes and insurance, to serve as a tickler for items that are easy to overlook. Whenever the respective due dates roll around, the bills will appear on the Documents to Process window, reducing the chances that an important payment will be skipped.
• Vendor credit memos – As with customer credit memos, most users won’t have a need to save or schedule ongoing credit memos, but the feature is available should any of your clients have a special circumstance where this capability would be helpful.
• Cash purchase – Your clients should schedule cash purchases to record any transaction that is automatically withdrawn from their bank account, such as monthly bank service charges or life insurance premiums.
• Checks – Recurring checks can work in the same fashion as recurring vendor bills, particularly for those clients that opt to enter transactions in Office Accounting on the due date, rather than in advance.
• Journal entries – Although your clients might not take advantage of recurring journal entries, it’s a great way for you to put their monthly depreciation and amortization journal entries on autopilot.

Create Recurring Transactions

Recurring transactions are easy to create, and the procedure is the same for all of the aforementioned transaction types. Let’s schedule a recurring power bill to see how the procedure works:

1. Choose Vendors, and then Enter Bills.
2. In this case, fill in all fields except the amount.
3. Click the Recurring button on the toolbar, as shown in Figure 1.
4. Assign a name to the transaction, as shown in Figure 4, and then choose a scheduling option:

• No reminder
• Only Once
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Every three months
• Yearly
• Every other week
• Twice a month
• Every four weeks
• Every other month
• Twice a year
• Every other year

Figure 4: The Save as Recurring Document window allows you to name and optionally schedule reminders for recurring transactions.

5. If necessary, set the date for the first time that a reminder should appear for this transaction.

Important: Setting a schedule for a recurring document doesn’t mean that the document will automatically post to your clients’ books. Instead a transaction reminder will appear in the Documents to Process list. Your clients can then edit and post the transactions from there.

6. Click OK to save the changes.
7. At this point, Office Accounting has saved a copy of the current transaction to the Recurring Documents list. Your clients can either close the current window, or use this as an opportunity to post the current month’s transaction.

Use the Documents to Process list

The Documents to Process list is accessible in several ways:

• Choose Documents to Process from the Find section of the navigation pane that appears in the various home pages, such as Company Home, Customer Home, etc.
• Choose Documents to Process from the Find section.
• Choose Documents to Process from the various list menus. For instance, your clients might choose Vendors, Vendor Lists, and then Documents to Process.
• Press Ctrl-Shift-K from anywhere in Office Accounting.

Recurring Documents List: The Recurring Documents list can be found in the same locations as the Documents to Process list, or press Ctrl-Shift-Z.

A reminder for pending documents will also appear in the Reminders section of the Company Home page, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: The Company Home page will remind your clients of pending documents to process.

If your client needs to edit a transaction, such as to fill in the amount of the power bill, then instruct them to double-click on the transaction, make any changes, and then click Save and Close. Or your clients might choose one or more transactions, and then right-click and choose Process Document and Delete Reminder. Doing so will post all of the transactions at once to their books. Similarly, they can delete misposted or unneeded transactions — simply right-click on the transaction and then choose Delete Reminder. In such cases they may also need to delete the transaction from the Recurring Documents list, so that it doesn’t reappear in future months.

Memorized transactions: Despite the name change from memorized to recurring, your clients can use any document in the Recurring Documents list as a template. Simply access the Recurring Document list, and then double-click on the desired transaction.

Edit Recurring Transactions: If your clients need to update a recurring transaction, such as to change the amount, they’ll first double-click on the document in the Recurring Documents List. After they make any changes, they’ll click Recurring and choose Replace when the prompt shown in Figure 6 appears.

Figure 6: Existing recurring documents can be replaced with updated versions.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Microsoft.