QuickBooks Online: Recurring Transactions

What is a recurring transaction?

In layman’s terms, a recurring transaction is one that is bound to repeat itself at a predetermined interval — every month or every week, for instance. Examples include monthly rent, utility bills and subscriptions.

How can recurring transactions help?

Even for an experienced bookkeeper, a single entry can take three to five minutes. If you have ten similar entries every month — rent, telephone bill, subscriptions, magazines and so on — you spend roughly half an hour each month rekeying the same information. Setting up recurring transactions removes that work and the mental overhead that goes with it.

How to set up recurring transactions

To set up a recurring transaction, follow the navigation below.

• Go to Company name
• Under Lists, select Recurring Transactions
• A screen appears where you fill in the details as per your requirements

The following need to be defined while setting up a recurring transaction.

Type of template

There are three types of template:

1. Scheduled — for recurring entries at a fixed point in time
2. Reminder — for reminding you of recurring entries at different points in time
3. Unscheduled — for recurring entries at variable points in time

Transaction type

Here the type of transaction needs to be defined. It can belong to any of the following categories:

• Bill
• Non-posting charge
• Cheque
• Non-posting credit
• Credit card credit
• Credit note
• Estimate
• Deposit
• Journal entry
• Invoice
• Refund sales receipt
• Transfer
• Supplier credit
• Purchase order
• Expense

Scheduled template

To create a scheduled template you need to define the following fields:

• Payee — supplier, customer, employee and so on
• Account — the account the payment is made from
• Interval — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or a specific date
• Start date and end date
• Days in advance to create the entry
• Whether to alert when the range has ended
• Mailing address of the payee
• Payment method — cash, cheque, Mastercard, Visa and so on
• Reference number
• Whether amounts are inclusive of tax, exclusive of tax or out of scope of tax

A scheduled entry can cover two types of detail:

1. Account details, including expenses, income and liabilities
2. Items, including inventory

Reminder template

Creating a reminder template is similar to creating a scheduled template. The only difference is the fields to be predefined:

• Transaction type
• Sort by — date, name or amount
• Location

Unscheduled template

An unscheduled template is created in much the same way as the other two. The major difference is that you are not required to set a schedule.

You can enter the payee name and save the template. Whenever you wish to record an entry saved as an unscheduled template, click Use, then save and close.

In a nutshell

QuickBooks Online is straightforward to use, and recurring transactions are one of the simplest ways to save time in it. In case of any queries, feel free to contact us at cs@bkcprohub.com.