Organizing your lists to save time and improve reliability

For those who are tired of scrolling though long drop down lists in creating sales orders, estimates, purchase orders, invoices, or entering bills. There is relief.

There is a simple way to organize your existing account or item lists that allows you to quickly select just the account or item you want, without having to scroll through long lists in alphanumeric order. Don’t get me wrong here; a list sorted in alphanumeric order is the most intuitive and logical way to find information in a long list. QuickBooks also makes it easy by refining the displayed list with each character of the list name you enter.

However, without the subaccounts or sub items your list can have radically different categories listed one after another and similar types of items being far apart. One example would be "liability insurance" and "workers compensation insurance". If you accidentally select a list item above or below you can get interesting results. Years ago, as controller of an oil company, I discovered a $30,000 entry to the "travel and entertainment" account. Even in the oil business, that seemed rather unlikely. It turned out the purchase was for a "tank battery", an oil storage facility.

Sub items and sub accounts provide a way to group information, making it easier to make selections from dropdown lists in all of the forms we use to enter information. These reorganize the lists in a more logical way and can save keystrokes locating the list item you are looking for.

For example, with just a little effort, I can create an account "Insurance" and make the "Liability Insurance" and "Workers Compensation Insurance" accounts subaccounts of "Insurance". All I have to do now in selecting "Workers Compensation" is to type "ins" to get the following display, and depress my "down" key twice and tab to move to the next field.

We can also use sub items to organize for quick and intuitive selection. In the example below I just entered one character, "E", to immediately see a list of "Entrees" on a sales order.

I both cases, I did not need to change any existing accounts or items. I merely need to create an account/item that would be my major category and makes the existing accounts/items subaccounts. Just a little thought about organizing your list can reap great returns in saving time and improving the reliability of your accounting.

Robert Guild is certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Austin, TX who conducts CPE courses for CPAs and individual training and group classes to QuickBooks users. His company, Accounting Insight, maintains a sixteen-station QuickBooks lab, providing hands-on training. You can contact him directly at rguild@accountinginsight.biz or follow him on twitter at QBPro