If you’ve heard of QuickBooks Workpapers and are wondering what they are, you’ve come to the right place. Basically, this tool lets you review your accounts from a single dashboard in QuickBooks Online (QBO), much like a trial balance. Workpapers let you manage, review, and organize your financial records, and are especially helpful when it comes to year-end reviews or tax filings.
In this blog, we’ll take you through everything you need to know about Workpapers, to help you streamline your day-to-day accounting in QBO.
What Are QuickBooks Workpapers?
Workpapers were designed to help you streamline your year-end processes, by saving you time and lowering the number of resources you need for document gathering. The dashboard offers you a side-by-side display of all your financial reports. This can help with quick and easy comparisons with previous years, so that your finance team can analyze patterns, trends, and areas of concern.
One of the key features of QuickBooks Workpapers is that it groups reconciliation tools. This helps with accuracy in your bookkeeping, as it means that you can make adjustments to journal entries or review accounts. In fact, you can add attachments and notes to workflows to simplify transaction tracking, and to ensure your reports are transparent and compliant.
This tool also integrates with other workflows, so that you can map accounts directly to tax forms. Moreover, Workpapers let you automate tax line mapping and export data directly to tax preparation software, or to your tax professional.
Features overview
There are three main ways in which QuickBooks Workpapers can help your finance team.
Document storage and management
With Workpapers, you can upload, categorize, and manage your financial documents in a single location, through the Document Manager. As such, your team will no longer need to use external storage tools. At the same time, it offers enhanced data security through automatic backups.
Reconciliation tools
Because it links your accounts, QuickBooks Workpapers significantly streamlines the reconciliation process. It also comes with automated tools to help you pinpoint discrepancies, in order to resolve issues quickly.
Reviews and sign-offs
Since Workpapers allows for sophisticated approval and tracking, it notifies you about any updates to your books. This lets you review and approve any changes or updates as soon as they are made. Moreover, you can generate detailed transaction reports for potential audits or reviews.
What are the benefits?
When you work in finance, two things are of paramount importance: efficiency, and accuracy. And Workpapers helps your team achieve both.
Because it eliminates the need to use external software (or manual effort) for document transfers, you save time and increase efficiency with streamlined reconciliation processes. At the same time, this means better accuracy, as the tool’s automation capabilities and variety of templates can help your team avoid errors.
With better accuracy, and all your information in a single location, your finance team will also improve their organization. Workpapers makes tracking, annotating and adjusting information easy, including for multiple users. As a result, it also helps with collaboration, without compromising control or accuracy, as all changes can be tracked and reviewed.
Thanks to these benefits, QuickBooks Workpapers are a great help during month-end or year-end closure. It’s also the ideal tool to help with internal governance and audit preparation. Finally, it serves as a bride between your financial reports and your tax preparation, taking some of the stress out of tax season!
Setting Up QuickBooks Workpapers
If you’re using QBO, setting up Workpapers is really straightforward. All you need to do is log in to your QuickBooks account, and choose the account you want to work in from the dashboard. Then navigate to the ‘Workpapers’ section under ‘Accounting Review’ or ‘Bookkeeping’.
You’re now ready to set up Workpapers.
To start with, you’ll need to import and organize files. You can do this through the ‘Add Documents’ feature, and upload directly from your computer, or through cloud storage devices. Once you have the paperwork you need, you can organize it in a structure that suits your needs. For instance, you could set up several folders for different account activities, like income, expenses, or assets.
Next, it’s time to customize your templates. QuickBooks Worpapers features a number of standard templates for common workflows, which can then be edited for your needs, and saved so that you can resume them later.
You can then use the ‘Tax Mapping’ feature to ensure that your financial data is allocated to the corresponding tax form lines, ensuring compliance and accuracy when it comes to your tax planning.
Finally, you can review and adjust your financial reports using the trial balance timeline. This is especially important if your company conducts internal audits, as you can review and adjust any potential issues before finalizing your reports.
Tips for a smooth setup
Even though Workpapers helps your team save time and improve organization, you can make using this tool even easier and more rewarding with the below tips:
- Consistency is key: Use the same conventions when naming documents or folders, to ensure they’re easy to find, and that there are no inconsistencies like missing entries or duplications. Similarly, it’s a good idea to group related documents together for quick access – for instance, you can keep all your tax preparation information in a single folder.
- Embrace integrations: If you don’t have an in-house tax pro, and aren’t outsourcing this task to make your life easier, you can integrate Workpapers with tax software to simplify filing. It’s also possible to integrate your bank feeds with Workpapers to automatically update your transaction data, and reduce errors that could crop up during manual data entry.
- Update regularly: Just like with your main QuickBooks software, Intuit releases periodic updates to fix any issues, improve user experience, or for compliance. It’s also good to review your settings and templates on a regular basis, to make sure that your dashboard meets your needs, no matter what changes in your operations.
Troubleshooting and Best Practices
Even the most user-friendly software can occasionally present you with a few challenges. But with a few tips and tricks to resolve the most common issues that crop up, you can ensure smooth sailing with QuickBooks Workpapers.
Errors importing data
Data imports can lead to a few potential issues, especially when you’re dealing with large datasets. These include incorrect formatting, unsupported file types, or even broken connections. To prevent these problems, make sure all file formats align with QuickBooks requirements and check that any integrations are set up correctly.
Reconciliation challenges
Mismatched opening balances, duplicate transactions, or missing entries can easily crop up when you’re reconciling accounts. Such errors can be caused by mistakes when entering data – especially if this is done manually – or when you have incomplete syncing with your bank accounts. But these issues can be resolved easily by checking that your software is up to date, along with any integrations.
If you run into additional problems, you can also make use of QuickBooks customer support, or a trusted QuickBooks partner, to resolve any issues.
If you have questions about QuickBooks, or need help with your accounting, schedule a Discovery Call with one of our experts today!
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