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One way to keep your company’s cash flow positive is by sending email reminders to overdue customers. QuickBooks Online can automate this.

Most small businesses struggle with cash flow. How do you get customers to pay by the due date, or at least not long after? We’ve written about some of the possible solutions. Accept credit/debit cards and direct bank payments. Send statements regularly. Offer a discount for early payment if it makes financial sense for you.

QuickBooks Online offers another tool for accelerating incoming payments: automated reminders. If you set these up, you won’t have to spend so much time keeping up with past-due remittances. It’s easy to do, and you can personalize your messages. You can even do this manually if you come across an individual customer who needs a nudge.

What about reminders for yourself? QuickBooks Online doesn’t come with a to-do list that you can use to enter tasks that must be done. But there are still ways to tie a digital string around your finger so you don’t fall behind on your own critical chores.

If you feel like you’re being too intrusive by sending out payment reminders, think about how you feel when you receive one yourself. Often, a financial obligation has simply slipped your attention. You want to maintain a good working relationship with your vendors, so you might even welcome such an email or letter.

Setting Up the Automation

To get started, click the gear icon in the upper right corner. Under Your Company, click on Account and Settings. Click the Sales tab and scroll down to Reminders. Click the pencil icon way over to the right to open the options here, then click the on/off button next to Automatic invoice reminders to activate them. Click the down arrow next to Default email message for invoice reminders to open the template.

If you’ve ever done a mail merge, this will look familiar to you. QuickBooks Online replaces the text in [brackets] with data from your company file. So it will prepare an email for every customer that is past due and replace the bracketed content with your own customer and company names and invoice numbers. Of course, you can choose not to personalize the emails, but it’s likely to be more effective if you do. Everything in the template can be edited, and you can check a box to have a copy sent to you.

Below this email template are three reminder-scheduling blocks. Click the button next to Reminder 1 to turn it on. You’ll see that you can set up a reminder to go out to customers either on the due date or a specified number of days (3, 7, 14, 30, or 90) before or after.

QuickBooks Online checks the due dates for your invoices and will automatically send the email reminder out to everyone who meets the criteria. If a customer record has an email address in it, a reminder will be dispatched even if you didn’t send the original invoice through email.

To set up additional, different reminders, you can do so in the Reminder 2 and Reminder 3 blocks. When you’ve finished, click Save. You can always go back in and edit these. To see who received reminders, click on Sales in the left vertical toolbar, then Invoices. The word Reminded should appear in the Status column.

If you’d rather dispatch reminder emails manually, you can do so in QuickBooks Online. With the same Sales | Invoices screen open, click on the down arrow next to Receive payment at the end of the row and select Send reminder. If you want to send reminders to multiple customers, click the box in front of each name to create a checkmark. Click the down arrow next to Batch actions right above the table and select Send reminder.

Reminding Yourself

We wish that QuickBooks Online had a reminder feature like QuickBooks Desktop does, that greets you every time you launch the software and displays tasks that need to be done. But there are still ways to remind yourself that invoice and bill payments are running late. You just have to make a habit of checking certain data screens regularly. For example, you should be visiting:

• The Business Overview element of the home page. There’s an Income graph that shows you how much money is tied up in overdue invoices (and open invoices).
• The Invoices and All Sales screens that you can see by clicking on Sales in the left vertical toolbar.
• Reports, like Accounts receivable aging detail, Open Invoices, Unbilled charges, and Unbilled time.

If you just started using QuickBooks Online this year and are struggling with it, we’re available to set up training sessions and answer questions. And, of course, we’re always here for longtime users, too. The COVID-19 pandemic is still affecting a lot of small businesses, and we understand you may be facing difficult issues. If we can help you better use QuickBooks Online to manage your finances, please contact us.

Your customers are your company’s lifeblood. Make sure their records are thorough and up-to-date.

When companies buy other companies, what’s often considered the most critical asset? The customer list. When a business is damaged and data possibly lost, which set of records do they most hope to recover? The customer list.

You probably spend most of your time in QuickBooks Online working with transactions and reports, but your customer records deserve equal time. If they’re incomplete or otherwise not maintained well, you lose time filling in the blanks when you’re trying to complete a task that requires complete customer profiles. Your searches and reports may not tell the whole picture. Your relationships can suffer, and you may miss out on sales opportunities.

QuickBooks Online provides excellent tools for creating and maintaining comprehensive customer and sub-customer records. Here’s a look at how it all works.

Moving Your Customer Data In

There are two ways to create customer records in QuickBooks Online. If you have an existing database in Outlook, Excel, Gmail, or Google Sheets, you can import it. This will save you an enormous amount of time, but it’s a challenging process. You select the file you want to import, and then you have to “map” it by matching the fields in your database to fields in QuickBooks Online. You’ll likely need our help with this.

To import a customer file into QuickBooks Online, you’ll have to “map” its fields. We can help you with this.

Your other option is to enter records manually. This is time-consuming, but the more information you can include about your customers from the start, the better. You can always edit your records to add, delete, or modify what you originally entered.

To get started, hover over Sales in the toolbar and click on Customers. Then click on New Customer in the upper right corner to open the Customer information window. The only field you’re required to complete is Display name as. You may want to do this if you have a new customer on the phone and you want to concentrate on the conversation. You can take notes about their contact information and fill in the record later, when you’re off the phone.

But wherever possible, as we’ve already said, complete as many fields as you can. You’ll enter name and billing and shipping address and phone number(s) on the opening screen. You can also supply contact details like fax number and website.

Creating Sub-customers

You’ll notice a checkbox that says Is sub-customer. QuickBooks Online lets you “nest” related records under the “parent” record. This can be an actual customer, but many people use it to document jobs they’re doing for the customer. So if you’re a contractor, for example, you might have sub-customers like Sun deck and Spa.

If you want to set up such a record, enter the job name and click in the box next to Is sub-customer. Two fields will open below that allow you to select the parent customer and to indicate the sub-customer’s billing status. The remainder of the fields will automatically fill in with the parent customer’s contact information.

You can set up jobs as sub-customers in QuickBooks Online.

Supplying Details

When you’re setting up individual customers, you should add as much detail as you possibly can to each record, beyond basic contact information. QuickBooks Online’s record templates display a number of tabs running horizontally across the window. The most important of these are:

• Tax info. Are the customers taxable or exempt? If taxable, what is his or her Default tax code? (If you haven’t set up sales taxes yet and need to, please let us help. It’s complicated.)
• Payment and billing. Do they have preferred payment and/or delivery methods? Will you be assigning default payment terms, like Net 30 or Due on receipt? What is their Opening balance? If they’re brand-new customers who have never ordered from you, this will be $0.00. If they’re existing, active customers, enter any outstanding balance they have with you as of the date that you enter. This must be correct, to avoid any problems with the customers’ ongoing balances. Questions? Ask us.

Other tabs here are self-explanatory. When you’ve entered everything you can, click Save. The new record will now appear in the Customers list and will be available to select from the drop-down list in transactions.

There will be times when you have to refer back to these forms to answer questions. By maintaining detailed, accurate customer records, you’ll be ready to respond. If you have questions about any of the information requested, or about other elements of QuickBooks Online that are puzzling you, please contact us so we can set up a consultation.