Okay, continuing on with our gear icon, we're going back to your company, account and settings
And now we want to go to the expensive settings. So now we're talking about your vendors
And this is the information that we want to be capturing or using on the vendor side of it
So here under the bills and expenses section, we need to decide whether we want to show
items table on expense and purchase form. And what this means is that we're going to capture some more detail when we're entering
a bill from a vendor, for example. So let's say we bought a whole bunch of electrical bits and bobs from our electrical supply company
or our electrician company. Do we want to be able to itemize all of that when we enter the bill
And if we are working with inventory, we're very likely going to want to do that
The next thing is do we want to show a tag field on expense and purchase form
And again, the tags part of it we're going to get into in a lot of detail, but usually
you're going to say yes to it because that tag piece of it is going to help us to categorize
things in a variety of different ways. So it's a really valuable tool that we'll get into how to use that later on
And then do we want to track expenses and items by customer
And this depends on the business. If you are purchasing things that are specifically for a job that you're doing for a customer
let's say you're building a house and you're buying lumber for that house, then yes, you're
very likely going to want to track expenses and items by customer
You want to be able to assign that to that particular house that you're building
Do we want to make expenses and items billable? Let's talk about, oh, I know, a lawyer
So a lawyer is going to bill for their time, but they're also going to bill for other expenses
So maybe they're going to bill you for mileage and they're going to bill you for phone charges
and they're going to bill you for travel, any of those other kinds of miscellaneous expenses
So the question here is, do you want to make those billable to your customer
And you may. If that's the kind of business that you're in where you're incurring expenses for a customer
then you're going to want to be able to bill those items to the customer. Now the next question is, do you want to mark up what you're billing to your customer
So if you are charging them for travel expenses, you're going to charge them $100 plus a markup
Now the next piece of it is tracking billable expenses and items as income
This is the part where having a little bit of need to know accounting would be good
There's two ways that this can be done. So let's talk about plain fare
Let's say it's $500 in plain fare. So you should have an expense account called plain fare and then you could put that $500
into that account and then when you bill the customer, you could take it back out of that
expense account. So you're at zero with your expenses. But you're also bringing in income
That customer is going to pay you. So rather than going against an expense, increase expense, decrease expense when the customer
pays you, you can set this up as an income account. And you could call it something like billable expenses, for example
So these are things that you are going to be charging to your customer and getting paid for
If you are in a business that has regularly something that you are, an expense that you're
incurring for your customer and the customer is paid, whether you mark it up or not, it's
best to have that as an income account so that you can keep track of that
The next piece of it is about sales tax. Are you going to charge sales tax on these items that you are charging to your customer
And then default payment terms is the next piece. If your vendors are generally net 30 accounts, you can set this up so that when you enter
a new bill, it automatically assumes that you are going to pay this in 30 days
You can always override this when you're entering a bill. You can change the terms to whatever the vendor is saying their terms are
And then the next piece of it is, are we going to use purchase orders? So are we going to create a purchase order, send that to the vendor, the vendor is going
to enter that into their system and then send us a bill when they ship the product or deliver
the service. And this again is a business decision. Are you going to use purchase orders
If you're going to use purchase orders, we're going to turn this on. If not, we can turn it off
And then just like with our sales form, we can take our purchase orders and we can change
the message that's going out to the vendor with the purchase order
So you know, sales decline, purchase order from Craig's Design or whatever it is you
want it to say, and please find our purchase order attached. If you have any questions, contact this person in the company, that sort of thing
So that is the expensive section of account and settings. And again, you get there by those gear icons