WSW - Podcast Merging Lists in QuickBooks Online
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[00:00:00]
Workshop Welcome
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Dan DeLong: Oh, welcome to another workshop Wednesday. Casual conversations for serious workflows brought to you by school of bookkeeping.com where you can keep learning QuickBooks. Your wife, how are you, Rachel? It's good to see you.
Rachel Dauchy: I'm good. How are you?
Dan DeLong: Very good. You come storming in [00:01:00] here and, you're a busy woman, so I appreciate
Rachel Dauchy: it.
Rachel Business Update
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Rachel Dauchy: Yeah, today's been a really busy day and I'm not sure if you noticed, but I updated my, profile underneath my name with both net deposited and core financial.
Dan DeLong: Because one business wasn't enough for you, you had
Rachel Dauchy: Nope. Net deposited really focuses more on inventory and e-commerce and core financial is service-based folks.
So that
Dan DeLong: core, the core financial,
Rachel Dauchy: yep.
Dan DeLong: So when you get into the branching out into, inventory, that's when you. Cross the,
Rachel Dauchy: that's a whole other level of crazy,
Dan DeLong: right? We're gonna be talking about merging, right? So maybe at, some point you may merge these two businesses under one umbrella.
But we're gonna be talking about [00:02:00] merging lists inside of QuickBooks today. Before we get into that that topic, we want to talk about something that Rachel and I discovered. I think it was yesterday or the day before where
Rachel Dauchy: it was yesterday. Yeah.
Dan DeLong: Is the, time is, is, it's hard to keep track of when you're not paying attention and sometimes you look up, look around and there's, oh, a month has passed
Rachel Dauchy: and it's also April 8th, yeah. It's crazy. And at Core Financial, we're also doing tech, so it's really crazy.
Dan DeLong: Wow.
Books Close Surprise
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Dan DeLong: So you were discovering and we've been talking in a couple months ago about Intuit Accountant Suite and the features of Intuit Accountant Suite. We have a blog on school bookkeeping, a comparison between the books review and the books close [00:03:00] feature.
And Rachel being, always open to trying something new was like, Hey, I wanna, I want to close my own books. Right?
Rachel Dauchy: Yep. And I was looking for it yesterday in QuickBooks accountant, the new accountant suite.
Dan DeLong: Yeah.
Rachel Dauchy: And I, yeah, I was gonna get caught up and I was gonna go in and, do all my transactions without payee and all of the things that you would typically do with a month end close, and.
What happened?
Dan DeLong: Let me share my screen here. So show what people are what, we're talking about, right? So we had talked, pretty, extensively about the Books Close feature, which is now when you have opted into the Intuit Accountant Suite Core or Accelerate, you have the ability to add on this feature called Books Close, which allows you to really see a bird's eye view of all of your clients.[00:04:00]
That you are closing the books for. And so Rachel you came to me and you were like, okay, I want to close my own books as a net deposited or Core Financial, one of the, one of the two. And so of course she went to onboard her herself, and you go in this case, my, my firm name is Dan with QBOA.
If I start to type in Dan. I don't see that as a, as an option on the books close, yep.
Firm Books Blocked
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Dan DeLong: Fail number, one. Number one is you cannot add your own books to the books close feature.
Rachel Dauchy: No, and it's really annoying because I historically when it was. QBOA, QuickBooks Online Accountant, you could use those functions for your firm.
And [00:05:00] that was really important because it was really for me, the way that I would test out how to use all these things and I did use them. And so now that we've switched over to into an accountant suite, my assumption was that I could use those things. Yeah.
Dan DeLong: Sorry to tell you. No. We discovered yesterday that
Rachel Dauchy: nope,
Dan DeLong: you cannot add the firm books as your own books close.
Books Review Missing
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Dan DeLong: So my initial thought was, oh, there's, why not just use the books review option, which is under. The all apps under accounting, right? Oh my goodness. There's no,
Rachel Dauchy: yeah,
Dan DeLong: you, yeah, that's what you said. You
Rachel Dauchy: couldn't go there and just do that. And I looked and then you looked and No, it's not there.
Dan DeLong: Yeah.
So I'm gonna go into a client just so that we have so we can show what we're, talking about here. Right [00:06:00] When you go into a client, under all apps accounting, under a client, there's an option for Books review, right? Which essentially gives you the, a lot of the closed books tasks.
In, the client that you're looking at Books Review, we've we've talked about the difference between books closed and books review, but you do have the ability to go into that company and see this books review. Tab, which under normal circumstances, would be an alternative plan B to be able to do some of those tasks in your own books.
As a firm, right? So as a, with the firm books and your books and The, The QuickBooks online subscription that accountants get as a firm, which you would [00:07:00] say, okay same, exact navigation all apps accounting. I don't have that option here. Yeah.
Rachel Dauchy: And Dan, did they announce that at all or did we just discover it?
Dan DeLong: I think that's a discovery, on this case. So yeah, we wanna make sure that people are aware. As an accounting firm, you can't close your own books.
Rachel Dauchy: Yeah. And that, by the way, that's really frustrating because for me, I usually do my bank feeds every day, but I don't always. Reconcile timely. And furthermore, a lot of times I'm doing it really fast and sometimes I'll skip a payee thinking and I'll just add 'em in bulk later.
And 'cause I always wanna put it in payee. FYI, like you always wanna do that. And but with the, books review tool, I thought oh, that's okay. I can put 'em in after the fact using this cleanup tool, which is really great. Now guess what? My only [00:08:00] option is import it into double or something like that for me to do a books close for my own firm.
And it's really frustrating because now I'm forced to pay for something else and o otherwise, how am I supposed to do it?
Dan DeLong: You, can't at that point because now you gotta look at something else. Now this may be something that they may. Take care of, it is in beta, right? Yeah.
They may have this as a, as an option and as a reminder, the beta has been extended to July 1st. If you're concerned about the May 1st start date of getting billed for some of these things, that has now shifted to July 1st. So we got a couple extra months.
URL Bookmark Workaround
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Dan DeLong: Now when we were talking yesterday, I thought, okay, let's just.
Let's just make our own bookmark, right? Because, this web address, and I'll, try to make this a little bigger so we can
Rachel Dauchy: Yeah. You have a trick [00:09:00] of copying and
Dan DeLong: pasting
Rachel Dauchy: a URL
Dan DeLong: to
Rachel Dauchy: do it.
Dan DeLong: So here we are in the book's review of, a client. You can grab the URL here. I, if I actually don't. Use, if I use the keystroke, that's supposed to be the key if you're in a client,
Rachel Dauchy: not your own books, right?
Dan DeLong: Yeah. I'm in, a client. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna just to give you an idea, I'm gonna pop over to another client and just paste that URL to so that you can see that, hey, that, that's where it should go, right? So here's the url. It's qbo.intuit.com/app/verify books. Is is the URL when I go there in the secondary client.
Now I'm in that secondary client in the books review. So that was my thought.
Rachel Dauchy: You all knows that's where you wanna go. And if as long as you're toggling back and forth between different clients, then I'll let you do [00:10:00] that.
Dan DeLong: And you can do that. You can save your own bookmarks with, Right tool.
Yeah. And those types of things. Alright, let's go back into the firm and just now that I'm in the firm, I can just use. This is the, thought process. I'll just use that URL in the firm and find my way into the book's review and oh, we're sorry. Page, you found the page we found. We can't find the page that you requested.
So this URL of the back door way to get. Into, the book's review. They've, cut that off yeah this is this is, truly what we were talking about, is that you don't have a way. To do any of these tools in the accounting.
Rachel Dauchy: The accounting version.
Yeah.
Beta Changes and Billing
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Rachel Dauchy: And and we dunno, this could be a [00:11:00] temporary thing. Remember when I discovered that I couldn't change the mapping on, a cost of good sold item or something like that. I can't remember. And you said, and other people had said, you're just imagining it. No, I swear I saw it. I swear that was the case.
And then it switched back. So they, I think they're in there. Yeah, modifying things frequently, and this may be a temporary thing and, we don't really know, especially because like you said, they extended the deadline for having to pay, and so I think what's going on over there is they're making a whole bunch of Yeah.
Changes and decisions and figuring out what they wanna include in Accountant Suite and what they don't. Flipping switches and that's fine. I'll say if we don't have that capability anymore, I'll be disappointed.
Dan DeLong: Yes. [00:12:00] Yeah. And that certainly could be something that is either an oversight today on the roadmap for tomorrow.
Or something that is gonna be brought to their attention even after they go live after the beta period is over and realize, oh we. They didn't think of that, or, whatever the case may be. But the fact that the URL is blocking, yeah, you can't get to it makes me think that this is something intentional, right?
Like they, this is what they were meant to do. Maybe they, didn't get the books closed and, and I'm pretty sure. That when, when you're dealing with billing of things that span across your books, your firm and potentially your clients, right? Because you, in this case, if you add yourself as [00:13:00] your own books, close client and you are a client, you've got billing, so to speak for.
Your, books and the client's books and should be charged for the books close on the firm books. That's a complication, right?
You've got
Rachel Dauchy: I think we should get it complimentary, but I get how on their side it could be complicated and that's fine. Yeah. It's probably I'm just gonna add this to my list of things for Intuit to take a look at.
I'm sure they're watching this right now and they're like, Rachel wants this back.
Dan DeLong: Send up, a a bat signal. So that Rachel is happy.
Rachel Dauchy: Tell Ted Callahan, but I saw today he's leaving,
Dan DeLong: right? Yeah. Ted Callahan is leaving Intuit for other pastors. He has not divulged where he's going or what he's doing.[00:14:00]
I guess that is, we have to wait until May.
Rachel Dauchy: Yeah. We love Ted and I'm very sad that he's leaving, but I'm excited for him.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. Yeah. He's a, really good guy now.
Merging Lists Intro
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Dan DeLong: So now let's get to our topic of the day, which is all about merging, right?
Rachel Dauchy: I love merging. It's very satisfying. I'm telling you it's the greatest.
Dan DeLong: Now this this occurs or this, is something that that needs to be addressed. When you have essentially duplicates. Now, what have you found in your. Breadth of experience.
Why Duplicates Happen
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Dan DeLong: What causes duplications and, we're talking about like chart of accounts, customers, vendors, products and services.
What have you found have been the, the, common hit list of where these duplicates come from?
Rachel Dauchy: We [00:15:00] usually see duplicates a lot in vendors, and that's oftentimes coming in through the bank feed. Maybe if they don't see a vendor, they'll create a new vendor, with customers. That definitely will happen and, that'll happen actually with me sometimes.
Sometimes I'll create a customer and then I'm there's a connection to my. What's the word? Proposal? Pro Platform. And then it'll create a duplicate customer. And so then I have to duplicate that. Sometimes there'll be duplicate product, service items. And then the one thing that I'll say is, especially when we're using QuickBooks online and we're using a lot of external apps.
Dan and I will use a lot of external apps for all kinds of things. Billing, inventory, et cetera. When you are syncing things over, the duplication is a big issue and you'll get a lot of erroring. And so where [00:16:00] this I used to think, oh, this really isn't a big deal several years ago now it's actually a very big deal and you can cause a lot of.
Things to jam. Yeah, if you have duplicated vendors, customers, accounts, items. Now, oh, what I was gonna say though is for the GL accounts, the duplication is well. Anno me because it'll create like a cluttered p and l, which I don't like. So a lot of times we'll merge accounts because we have unnecessary things, but the error issues come into play when it comes to vendors and customers and items.
Dan DeLong: Yeah.
Duplicate Customer Problems
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Dan DeLong: And what's the what's the big deal? Like why what's the problem with having, let's just take, customers for example. Yeah. What if, what's, the problem with having multiple John Dotes on your,
Rachel Dauchy: well, think [00:17:00] about it like this. Okay. So let's say you have a customer and you want to look up their historical invoices, and or let's say you're working in a customer's.
QBO and you are looking up one of their customers in their historical invoices. Sometimes, and we see this all the time, sometimes there'll be two customer. Identities and half their invoices are split with this one and the other half the invoices are split with that one. And that's usually because somebody in there accidentally or inadvertently created an additional customer.
And then maybe that invoice isn't available for you to apply a payment to. And so then maybe a bookkeeper will a apply something to nothing, and then it'll just be like a payment and applied payment floating in there. So you don't [00:18:00] want that. You really wanna make sure for all of the customers, there's one customer of record.
That all of the historical invoices are tied to. And then when a payment comes in and this is even the case with a vendor and a bill, when a payment comes in, you wanna apply that payment to the specific invoice because you wanna make sure that invoice is marked paid, and it can be a really, big issue.
Let's say it's not applied to the correct invoice, and then you communicate with that customer further and say that's not been paid. They know they've paid it. So this is a big problem in a lot of different situations,
Dan DeLong: right? And this is, how things get. Decisions might, be made based off of what on reports and
Rachel Dauchy: absolutely
Dan DeLong: you don't have, if you're looking at it from [00:19:00] a list's perspective, right?
Whether that's the chart of accounts, right? You're looking at your financial, lists at that point with your profit and loss and your balance sheets, and you have multiple. You have office supplies and supplies office or whatever it is and you have different transactions split between the two.
You're really not looking at things holistically because you've got a. Things spread across. And that could be,
Rachel Dauchy: yeah. And what could be really, dangerous is if you're looking at an ar aging and it looks like things are still upstanding and they're not that, that can be extremely damaging and you just, don't want that at all.
One example that I'll give is actually this morning I got a invoice from my lawyer and it had an amount. That was past due, and I, that I knew it wasn't right because those invoices I [00:20:00] pay immediately. And so the invoice had said, outstanding balance of blah, blah, blah, and then new charges of blah, blah, blah.
And so I immediately emailed him not saying. Why is why is this showing outstanding? I already paid this, not that. What I said was, I suspect somebody didn't. Apply the payment I made to the correct invoice because I've been doing this for a very long time, and I can see probably what that error was because I wired that payment on March 31st.
I don't think it was, they didn't get it. Oh, I know they got it. I just don't think that they applied it right. So that was the first thing I asked, and I said, check that. And sure enough, that exactly was the problem. It wasn't applied, right? And so if you've got bookkeepers or accountants that are working in a department and they're not applying [00:21:00] things right, that can cause a big problem.
Luckily, I identified it right away and the guy said yeah, you're absolutely right. Here's your updated statement. And it was no big deal. But that, that can be very upsetting to managers decision makers, CFOs. It's a big problem.
Dan DeLong: Yeah.
Merge vs Inactivate
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Dan DeLong: Now now when is a, and. I know that some of these questions I didn't prep you for I'm not sure what the answer was gonna come outta your mouth.
But when is it, when do you need to merge? As opposed to 'cause the other option is I'll just make it inactive. When would merging versus just marking it inactive? Be like when is, merging or necessary?
Rachel Dauchy: I usually try to merge before I make anything inactive. [00:22:00] Inactivating something for me is I just, I'd rather play it safe and leave it there just in case we need it.
Just because something hasn't been used recently maybe doesn't mean that they're not going to use it. When I was working in my books, all of my clients' books, when it was just me. I had greater insight into what was used all the time for me. Now, I'm not in it all of the time, so I'll jump in and maybe take a look at something.
If I'm helping and if I see that there's two customer records, I'll always merge them. Then if I see that maybe somebody created one, one inadvertently and all of the correct information was in one, and the one extra one has no activity, I can see that was an accident all inactivate that one. But for the most part, in a world now where we're sinking a lot of stuff from other systems, I usually try not to [00:23:00] inactivate it.
And I do caution people. See if you can merge it first, because that's usually the case. And it's like they created another one with a dot or a space or whatever, you know what I mean? And so it just needs to be merged. No, I've had a, I've had, actually, I've had a couple situations in which I wanted to be extra sure.
And so I actually asked the client, we had one with, one of our clients where the, it was spelled a little bit different and I didn't know if maybe it was. Just a completely different vendor record. And so I actually asked the client and she said, oh, it's the same thing. And so I merged it but I'll ask if, just to be on the safe side before I merge it, and then I prefer to merge.
Dan DeLong: Let me, oops. I'm hitting the wrong button. Oh, what I do, come back here. I was just about to [00:24:00] show, but I was trying to make this bigger. There we go. So here you can see.
Duplicates or Entities
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Dan DeLong: This Astra section, right? This ASRA Development, Astra Holdings, LP Astra Investments one, two, and three. So that, that looks like they're duplicates and in reality these are, individual entities and they should be separate.
But this
Rachel Dauchy: I was gonna say, that looks very intentional to me. I wouldn't think those are deeps at all. I, my assumption would be, oh no, somebody created 1, 2, 3, and four.
Dan DeLong: And these aren't these, aren't these are individual entities and that they're there that way for a purpose.
But but in this case in, reality there they're supposed to be, but in this example of, Hey, I've got multiple Alt Astra investments, right?
Merge vs Inactivate
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Dan DeLong: The, key factor of whether or not you should merge them or [00:25:00] not is. Are there transactions in, both of them?
Rachel Dauchy: Right,
Dan DeLong: cause because that's what merging does, is it puts you choose a winner, right?
And this, whether, it could be, whether it's an account, a customer, vendor, product or service, you choose a winner and then you choose a duplicate that you want to get rid of. And then all of the transactions that are under the one that you want to get rid of, they get merged into the one that is the winner.
Right?
Yeah.
So that is the determining factor of whether I should inactivate or merged is if there are transactions that you're trying to consolidate now,
Rachel Dauchy: and actually the one on the ones on top, look to me like that could be a duplication. Do you see, you have a OHC. And then you have a OHC conversion [00:26:00] evaluation.
Now I know that you create those 'cause you've got a conversion evaluation. So I know that's not a duplicate, but that's actually a really good example of what I would see sometimes is somebody might have created just a short version of the name and then they inadvertently created another customer record with the long version of the name.
And then the transactions get split between the two. And so in that situation I, usually will pick the longer name and then I'll merge them into,
Dan DeLong: yeah, so typically you'll see things like this where it's, yeah.
Why Duplicates Happen
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Dan DeLong: Mason masonry and stucco, and then access masonry and stucco hyphen one. Yeah. Typically, that's the naming convention that QuickBooks will use when there is an attempt to add something that's already existing and it needs to.
Create a new one instead of, use the, [00:27:00] existing one. Because it's just Yes. Doing what? It's just doing what it's told, and that, certainly could be, I'm gonna, if I don't, if I can't find it, I'll create a new one, and then when it actually tries to create it, that's when QuickBooks says Uhuh.
It's already on the list.
Yeah.
So I'm like, okay, we don't want to error, we just wanna move this forward. So these integrations will, in their infinite wisdom, because of the preferences and mappings and all those things, create a new list element instead of using the one that's already there, which then causes, okay, we now have to merge these two.
And
Rachel Dauchy: yeah, and I dunno about you, but I see a lot of this type of error when. A new client is coming to me that maybe hadn't worked with a professional bookkeeper and they've been using a QuickBooks online file, but they are like DIYing, their own invoicing and they're struggling [00:28:00] with it a little bit.
They don't, maybe don't know how QuickBooks works, and so they've got all these invoices in there and all these customers and historic invoices, but. Not really much else. And you see a lot of duplication like that, and that's usually what I'll do. We'll go in and clean that up and merge a whole bunch of stuff and, get it straightened out.
Dan DeLong: Because maybe there's a default chart of accounts and then like sales and sales of product income.
Merging Accounts Demo
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Dan DeLong: Let's take the let's talk about an, account for example, right? So sales and sales of product income, right there, there really isn't a need to have two of them, right? And maybe you've got transactions.
In both, right? You're looking at your profit and loss. You see some under sales and some under sales of product income, right? And you want to consolidate that under one, right? So the easiest way to do that is to just merge the two, and you do have this option here under actions to make [00:29:00] an active, but.
That doesn't solve your problem when there are transactions associated with,
Rachel Dauchy: right? You always wanna open it up and look and see if there's transactions in there.
No Undo and Backups
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Dan DeLong: And one other thing to keep keep in mind and keep be aware of, is that a. You cannot un merge, right? So if, and that's why it's important to determine which one do you want to keep, you know which is the winner and which is the one that you want to get rid of.
Because once you do it, you cannot undo it. Right?
Yep.
Now this is a case for, having a restore point. Like a backup, like rewind, or if you're using advanced you can go fall back on a restore point. If you do decide to do a bunch of merges and oh, that was the wrong way.
That was I didn't want to [00:30:00] do it that way. But. The way that merges work inside of QuickBooks is that the loser is not deleted, right? So where you would think merging, right? Merge the, two shall become one.
You would think that you would be getting rid of one of them, but in reality, that's not really the case.
So I'm gonna edit this. Sales.
Rachel Dauchy: Although, I dunno if it allows you to do it with this particular one, does it?
Dan DeLong: We'll see, we
Rachel Dauchy: shall
Dan DeLong: see. Okay.
Rachel Dauchy: And I'll say while you're doing this I do have a nitpicky difference between sales and sales of product income. I will always use sales of product income if they're selling items.
I will never use it if they're a service based business. I will use sales. Yeah. I just don't That makes sense. That makes sense. [00:31:00]
Dan DeLong: Probably because if they don't have product to sell, yeah. Why would you have sales of product income? So in order to merge, all you have to do is change the account names to match, and so you start from the loser in this case.
So in this case, sales, we wanted to merge into sales of product income. I just changed the name. To match sales of product income. And now I get this message to say, Hey, it's already, you already have an account by the name. Would you like to merge them? And I would be able to say yes. Now, before I say yes, I want to mention with accounts, detail type is important, right?
So not only does it have to be the same account type, it also has to be the same sales or the detail type. So in this case, sales of product income. You can see the detailed type of both of them is the same, right? If this was actually nonprofit [00:32:00] income and I tried to merge them, it would say, Hey, I can't do that until you make the detailed type the same.
So that's a little nuance of merging accounts. So now I'm gonna say yes, it's gonna go through and. It did let me do it.
Hierarchy and Subaccounts
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Rachel Dauchy: And also you didn't say what if it were a sub account,
Dan DeLong: right? So that's, another thing, another high about the hierarchy of all of those items. Anything that does have a sub like customers can have sub customers accounts, can have sub-accounts products can have sub items if you're, if you still have sub item.
Those types of things, it can only merge on the same hierarchy. Yep. You, and you can't merge if there are existing subs, right? So you have to
Yeah.
Manipulate the items to, [00:33:00] to remove the fact that there are sub items or sub accounts or subs so that it allow if you're doing the parent account or customer.
Then it can't have any subs because in, in reality, those are individual, unique items and accounts. So you are just dealing with one of them here. And it, cannot do all of the subs as part of this merge process, right?
Rachel Dauchy: Oh, and I would argue that you haven't really lived until you've worked on a, core fit cleanup in which you have to go and un.
Nest. Yeah. A whole bunch of accounts just so you can merge them back and forth, Oh, that's fun.
Dan DeLong: Yes. Now you can see on the account that there, or account list, that there is only one sales or product income. Where did the sales go? So if I go in [00:34:00] here and I click the gear and choose to include inactive and go back down to the sales, where'd it go?
Sales. So this is how QuickBooks Online merges things. It makes them, it. So there's my sales account. If I ran a report on this, which I, which I could do, there would be no transactions because any transactions that were under sales are now under sales and product income. But I can still see that sales is still on my chart of accounts.
It's just inactive
Rachel Dauchy: even
Dan DeLong: though they
Rachel Dauchy: name it as deleted.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. it, it's inconsistent. But, in reality, that is the indicator that this account is inactive, right? Yeah. Which I can, make it active [00:35:00] again. And now I do have. Back to Where'd to go.
Rachel Dauchy: Yeah, you can make it active again, but like you just said, you can't merge it.
So now it's there with a blank history.
Dan DeLong: So if I were to look at that again, so there's, no undoing Emerge is, really the, point that we're, getting across, and that's for all list elements. So it could be customers, vendors, employees, chart of accounts, items classes anything that you would be merging, that's what occurs.
And, in QuickBooks online that the, losing one doesn't. It doesn't get undone. So all that happens is it it gets renamed with the deleted in parentheses and it gets marked inactive so that it hides it off of the [00:36:00] list. So if you went the wrong way, right? Oh, I wanted it to go into sales.
You can just edit this account, right? That has all of the history to sales at that point, because when there's sales deleted. I'll put it back. Yes. Again, active. So now the sales is deleted. I can just edit this account that has all of the, transactions in it and just. Call it sales, right?
So now I don't have two, yeah, I have now that's
Rachel Dauchy: the active one, and then that's the inactive one.
Dan DeLong: Exactly.
Customer Display Name Merge
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Dan DeLong: Now with customers it's a little bit different because there is a field that we wanna talk about. Get to the hub here,
let's look at that. [00:37:00] Since we were talking about A OH, A OHC, when I go and edit a customer, this is the, problem. There are this is the field that we need to be concerned about. This client display name, or if you're seeing 'em as customers, it'll say customer display name. But really that is the.
That is what as the display name, and that is, yeah, the only required field when creating a customer, right? So you can have first name, last name, you can have all sorts of other fields listed in here, but the display name is what determines whether or not they're. Duplicates or not, right?
Rachel Dauchy: And that's the one that you would change if you're looking to merge.
Dan DeLong: And you would just edit the display name field to match, the display name field [00:38:00] of the one that you want to keep. You'll get the same thing where it says, Hey these are already in use. Would you like to merge them? You say, yes. And then, it combines and it does the same thing where it.
Renames, the loser with the deleted parentheses and then, marks it inactive. So that's, yeah, that is the, process that goes along with merging and all of your lists that you would need to do this with, whether it's a product of service or, a class or location or. Terms all, of your lists can be burned.
You just need to change the name, the one that you want to get rid of, to match the one that you want to keep. Save it and then it will, merge. That just bearing in mind that. You cannot undo a merge. [00:39:00] It's quite hard to unravel, unravel something that has been merged together.
It's it's,
Rachel Dauchy: yeah, and I, would say if maybe somebody's just starting to experience or experiment with merging, maybe try it with some things that don't have transactions, because then you can. Really test it out. Make sure you're doing it right.
Dan DeLong: Yep. So let's see here.
Inventory Items Limitation
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Dan DeLong: So I wanted to do this with an inventory item.
So let's just see here. So I know we have a pretty gnarly, gnarly inventory names here. So
Rachel Dauchy: is this a t-shirt company with the really difficult nitpicky names?
Dan DeLong: Oh,
Rachel Dauchy: Dan, I told you,
Dan DeLong: which is candy as well. [00:40:00] So this,
Rachel Dauchy: oh my gosh,
Dan DeLong: gonna choose this one.
Rachel Dauchy: Those are so hard to read. Dan. Rename those.
Dan DeLong: Change it.
Save and close, because then now again, the name's already in use. Would you like to merge them? You cannot merge, you cannot merge inventory items. That is something that I wanted to confirm before. Yeah. I made a statement about it. Because there is so much to unravel with.
Rachel Dauchy: Yeah.
Dan DeLong: The, cost of those items.
Inventory items cannot be merged. Yeah.
Rachel Dauchy: There's probably fi, FO layers in there.
Dan DeLong: Yes.
So,
you're not able to, merge them. You would, that would be more of a manual process. If that's the case. And that's why you and you would have to go into each of those transactions, [00:41:00] change the item to which, one you want it to, and then resave it which is.
A pain to say the least.
QBOA Merge Clients Tool
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Dan DeLong: Now, one other thing that that we want to talk about with merging. It is specific to Intuit Accountant Suite or QBOA. This merge duplicate clients, which is,
Rachel Dauchy: Ooh, I haven't seen that before.
Dan DeLong: Yeah, it's been around for a while, and if you're, if you don't see it, if you don't know it's here, this is the only way to access it.
So if you never knew it was under the gear and merged, duplicate clients, then that is, you never saw it, right? Lemme go to the client list and this is where, lemme go back here to the client list. So this issue where you have the ones, which one were we were looking at that had the ones here that was the access.[00:42:00]
Stuck stucco. Make that bigger. Come on now. I can't, it. It's not make, it's not white. Let's close this. No.
Oh, there we go.
All right, so let's. Oh, why is this? I cannot see it with a, with one or not. Let's see.
So typically what happens, right? So this what I'm, the reason I'm pausing here is when you're looking at your client list in Intuit account Suite the ones that have a subscription have this green qb next to it, the ones that don't have a subscription. Don't have this green QB next [00:43:00] to it.
So when you are merging duplicate clients, this option here to merge duplicate clients, this will bring up. See. Okay, got to it here. All right, so this is the Target client. And this does allow you to do multiples at the same time. Again, this is solely for Intuit Accountant Suite users, not no end users of QuickBooks Online.
But this here lists the target customer, which is the client that you want to keep. And then the one on the match client name is, you can click in there. Hello? Oh, I gotta check it first. Then I have a dropdown of all of my other clients that I might want to merge into this Sullivan, [00:44:00] Heiser and Sweeney, for example.
So the caveat to all of this is you cannot merge two clients that each have a subscription. So you, cannot merge a customer that's named one, right? So my, my particular case of when I do, conversions I do a conversion with evaluation first. So this a OC conversion evaluation, and then this A OHC without the conversion evaluation.
I can't merge these two together because they both have a subscription. Associated with it.
Rachel Dauchy: Oh. Oh, I didn't realize that.
Dan DeLong: Yeah.
Rachel Dauchy: Cool.
Dan DeLong: I could merge art matters into one of these because there was no subscription or all American water conditioning into any of these. If they, because it doesn't have a subscription, so
Yeah,
you cannot merge duplicate clients if they both have a [00:45:00] subscription, even if one of them shows us cancel.
Yeah. 'cause it, it's not allowing you to do that. But this does allow you to merge, duplicate clients. When you, when there's a need to, and this is typically what happens when you have, when you start out with a client and then they add a subscription and invite you as a, user, as an accountant user you've got transactions under the client without the subscription.
And then you have the invitation that doesn't have any transaction history, and that's what you wanna do is merge the one that doesn't have the subscription into the one that. Does have the subscription so that both your client list and your transactional history in your books match.
Rachel Dauchy: Yeah, and that happens frequently because sometimes you a lot of times I'll do some work maybe for a client before they even become a regular client, and so I'll [00:46:00] invoice them or something like that, and then I end up connecting them through some.
Some proposal platform and it creates another one. So there's all kinds of issues like that.
Prevent Duplicates Wrap Up
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Dan DeLong: And that's the last thing too. If something has created your duplicates, start at the source and make sure that those are mapped to the right one so that you don't continually have this salmon swimming upstream so that you don't continue to have duplicates and need to merge.
Yeah.
This is something that, a lot of people didn't even know was even a possibility. But it's just something to keep in mind that this is one of those things that once you do it, you can't undo it. You cannot take Kool-Aid out of the water. Once you've dumped your Kool-Aid in there, it is pretty hard to separate the water from the mixture.
It's gonna be a [00:47:00] long painstaking process. So next week and the weeks after, we are going to be doing a, series on the new navigation in QuickBooks Online. I think the dust is settled on where things are and how they are. So we're gonna start a series on. The terminology differences and navigating the left side and navigating the global the, bank feeds, the user interfaces that have gone through quite a bit of a change.
We wanna start this process of updating our material and, content that we have at School of Bookkeeping to the new one because now it's decided that this is the way things are gonna be. So we'll start that process or start the, that series of workshops coming up. In the starting next week.
So until then, have a great week and we'll see you next time on the workshop Wednesday. [00:48:00] [00:49:00]
