Recently, I received this question:

The situation:

I bought inventory and pre-paid the invoice with a credit card. When I received the inventory, they said they had misquoted me and refunded me $50.00 on the order. The refund was made back to the credit card that was used to pay for the order.

The question (in two parts):

1. This is a refund on the the whole order, not just a handful of the inventory items  (i.e. I am not returning anything, I’m just getting some money back on the job overall). Do I handle that by using Bill–>Misc and entering negative $50  as the bill, which generates a return credit to me? AND
2. If I do that, I am then being asked to to apply that $50 to one of my accounts, but which one?

The answer:

Because you need to change the cost of your merchandise inventory, the best approach is to go to the original bill for the items and adjust the purchase amount to what you’re actually paying for each item.  Since this has already been paid, it will show a negative amount owing.  Then go to Purchases -> Settle Returns and Debits, select that debit and “deposit” it to your credit card.

I’ve been supporting the accounting needs of mac users for quite some time. Until last week, I was using my mac mini to help those clients. I foolishly bought a mac mini because I already had a pc laptop and, like it or not, most accounting is done on the pc platform.  And I didn’t want to spend the money fully transition.

Last week, a windows update corrupted my computer. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. It has numerous issues and I’ll have to reinstall the operating system (man, I hate Vista). To get up and running quickly, I transitioned to the mac mini.

I LOVED it (except being chained to my desk and only having one monitor). I said “to heck with the budget, I NEED a MacBook”. Seriously. I know, I’m an accountant. I reason that I’m much more efficient on one machine rather than two. Plus cut and paste between the virtual machine and the mac is awesome!

I’m all set up on the new machine and loving it. I’m running 3 computers on one machine to solve all of my clients’ needs. Here’s the run down:

• MacBook: QuickBooks for Mac 2007, 2009, MYOB AccountEdge 2008, 2009
• Virtual Machine (Parellels/Windows XP): QuickBooks Premier Accountant 2009 (with numerous other years available, if the need arises)
• Real Time Data: Hosted Windows QuickBooks desktop, currently running QuickBooks 2008 & 2009  (this works better on my mac, than it did on my PC)
• Of course, QuickBooks online too.

Yes, I’m still working in Windoze a lot.  I can’t get around that, but at least I’m working on my Mac as much as possible.

~Kelly