Quickbooks Expense Report: 3 Critical Aspects

Effective financial planning is imperative for businesses operating in any scale and industry. Tracking finances helps companies to keep track of upcoming trends, opportunities, and areas of improvement. QuickBooks is one of the popular accounting software used by small- and mid-sized businesses across the globe. Small business owners typically use QuickBooks to pay their bills, manage their invoices, and track cash flows. They also use it to generate month- and year-end financial reports and prepare quarterly or annual business taxes. 

In this blog, you’ll learn about QuickBooks and expense reports. You’ll also find a list of QuickBook expense reports templates. 

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Quickbooks
• What is an Expense Report?
  • Key Expense Report Metrics
  • Benefits of an Expense Report Software
• Steps to Create a Quickbooks Expense Report
  • Step 1: Select a Template
  • Step 2: Enter and Pay Your Expenses
  • Step 3: Choose the Supplier
  • Step 4: Record an Expense
  • Step 5: Print or Send the Report
• Best QuickBooks Expense Report Templates
  1. QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Expense Sheet Template
  2. QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Event Budget Template
  3. QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Weekly Expense Report Template
  4. QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Business Budget Template
  5. QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Personal Budget Template
  6. QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Travel Expense Report Template
  7. QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Business Expense Reimbursement Form
• Conclusion

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of accounting 

Introduction to Quickbooks

QuickBooks is a popular accounting software solution used by small businesses to manage income, expenses, and keep track of the financial health of their business. Enterprises use it for paying bills, invoicing customers, preparing taxes, and generating reports. QuickBooks has an extensive list of solutions that work great for everyone, from freelancers to small or mid-sized businesses.

QuickBooks is a cloud-based application, allowing companies to avoid installing any specialized infrastructure to use the software. Every change in data gets stored in secure cloud servers, and QuickBooks updates itself in real-time to the latest version that helps employees stay on top of changes and updates. Scott Cook and Tom Proulx founded the company in 1983, with its headquarters in Arizona. Today, QuickBooks has a massive customer base of over 4 million companies spread across the globe. 

Apart from core accounting tasks, QuickBooks comes with various features such as Payroll Management to help enterprises manage various business operations. Using QuickBooks, companies can also monitor their sales status as the application provides features like Sales Reporting, Inventory Tracking, Customer Information Management, etc. 

With QuickBooks, companies can connect multiple bank accounts to monitor their transactions. It also automatically downloads and organizes past transaction records. The accounting platform also offers a user-friendly, straightforward, and an insightful dashboard that displays all the critical data points like total sales, budget, total expense, and many more on a single screen. 

What is an Expense Report?

An expense report is a form that lists expenses necessary for the functioning of a business. Usually, expenses for organizations include raw material costs, IT infrastructure costs, wages of employees, and more. A business may also ask its employees to submit expenses to make up for business-related purchases, such as gas or meals. With QuickBooks Expense reports, companies can not only get an overview of the expenditure but also can track spending on individual projects.

Key Expense Report Metrics

Every business expense report must track the following metrics:

• Date: It should match the date on which the expense was incurred to the date specified on the receipt. 
• Vendor: This refers to the vendor’s name from whom an employee or the company purchased a specific item or the one whose services were availed.
• Nature: Relates to the type of expense incurred like air tickets, meals, car rental, etc.
• Total Amount: This is the total cost of an expense incurred, including taxes. The amount should match the amount specified on the receipt/invoice.
• Account: Refers to the account to which such an expense is to be charged. 
• Description: A brief account of expenses, so everyone knows what each of the business expenses is all about.

Benefits of an Expense Report Software

1. Faster Processes

The old method of printing paper copies and attaching receipts was time-consuming and slow. An expense management software helps automate the workflow. It automatically routes the report to the appropriate person for approval. After approval, it automatically forwards the payment process to vendors. 

2. Faster Employee Reimbursement

With Expense management software, employees can submit expense reports, and managers can review and approve claims without delay. These tools eliminate the frustration of errors and delays, enhancing employee satisfaction.

3. Fewer Delays and Errors

Besides reducing the time to reimburse employees, automation improves accounting accuracy. It can flag errors and duplicate entries, prevent overpayment, and even notify managers of any discrepancies. The software also sends notifications if a payment is overdue.

4. Data Security

Data security is a massive concern, and robust business expense management software adheres to industry-standard security measures, keeping your data safe. They also offer security features like auditor-access, role-based access, and IP-based access to ensure that employees only have access to data the company approves. 

5. Expense Policy Enforcement

Even the most meticulous managers can miss new expense policies and changes in the tax law. With expense management software, managers can enforce custom rules that are tailored to their business. Automated expense management software can also flag out-of-policy expenses.

6. Secure Cloud Storage for Expense Receipts

In a cloud-based solution, all-expense receipts are stored in a secure cloud. It makes it easy for finance teams to look for any expense, receipt, or report using filters. 

7. Real-time Insight into Expense Data Analytics

An expense management software like QuickBook offers real-time insights into employee spending. These insights are available on the expense management dashboard, where managers can view spending by projects, departments, categories, and more.

8. Increases Operational Efficiency.

Employees’ reports must be time to optimize cash flow. Expense management software is integrated with project management, time tracking, accounting, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The process becomes simpler for employees and managers to update, approve, and report. Since employees have to spend less time on mundane and time-consuming manual reports, they can focus on the tasks that bring value to the organization.

Steps to Create a Quickbooks Expense Report

Follow these steps to create an expense report in QuickBooks:

Step 1: Select a Template

You can choose a template from any QuickBooks integration to create an Expense Report or start from scratch. 

Step 2: Enter and Pay Your Expenses

Start with entering and paying your expenses. Open bills, go to the plus sign menu, and under vendors choose a bill.

Step 3: Choose the Supplier

You can choose a previous supplier/vendor or add a new one. However, you’ll have to go to the supplier’s page later to enter additional information. Choose a category for the service or products you’re paying for from the Account drop-down menu and add the amount. If you want to wait to record the bill until you pay it, just enter a cheque.

Step 4: Record an Expense

You can also use the expense form to record, and you can also select if you paid with a credit card, debit card, or electronic funds transfer. If you have a bank account just for office expenses, you can also download your transactions from your bank rather than entering them manually. 

Step 5: Print or Send the Report

Check all the totals and send the expense report.

Here are some tips that you can use while developing your expense report:

• Generate Expense Reports: As a business entity, preparing expense reports in a template is easy. But, as your business scales, the number of expenses will grow. Connect your bank account or debit card with the expense tracking software. It’ll automatically download transactions and categorize them, saving you time. 
• Add or Delete Columns: You can modify the default expense categories to match your business requirements. For instance, if your employees frequently travel, you’ll need the ‘Travel and Meals’ column. 
• Calculate the Total: Various expense categories can have a subtotal and the total of all the expenses. You should always add grand totals and the subtotals to your expense Report to simplify expense tracking. 
• Attach Associated Receipts: It’s a great habit to add associated receipts to each expense report that require reimbursement of expenses incurred. The proof of expenses will foster credibility. It can also be used to ensure that no room is left for doubts and errors. 

Best QuickBooks Expense Report Templates

QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Expense Sheet Template

The expense sheet template is a simple spreadsheet made to keep track of personal or small business expenses. It includes details like the description, payment method, date of payment, subtotal of each expense category, and the amount paid. Therefore, this template gives you a clear picture of all purchases and expenses incurred. 

QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Event Budget Template

Event budget templates provide item-wise details of both revenue and expenses sources. It also provides a comparison of projected figures and actual amounts, giving a clear picture of the gap between budgeted versus substantial income and expenses. There are pie charts to display budget distribution. 

QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Weekly Expense Report Template

Some business entities require their employees to submit their expense reports every week to keep track of the expenses and regular reimbursements. Weekly Expense Report Template reports various expense categories.

QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Business Budget Template

The Business Budget expense template records the cost of goods and services, allowing businesses to compare their operating expenses against income. Besides, this template helps you relay the projected and actual expenses and income.

QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Personal Budget Template

It’s for employees or users to track their monthly savings, incomes, and expenses. It’s a visual representation of your costs, revenue, and savings. This dashboard provides a clear view of the user’s financial standing.

QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Travel Expense Report Template

It’s for businesses that have employees frequently flying or commuting for business purposes. This Quickbooks Expense Report template will help companies understand their travel expenses like food and meals, lodging, airfare, taxi fare, etc.

There is also a section where the employees can report miscellaneous expenses. There are more details to fill in information like destination, the purpose of the trip, and contact details. 

QuickBooks Expense Report Templates: Business Expense Reimbursement Form

It’s one of the most straightforward QuickBooks expense report templates to record the type of business expenses, the corresponding amount, and the expense date. Users can add more columns to customize as per need. 

Conclusion

This article introduced you to QuickBooks expense reports. You got a deeper understanding of expense reports and their key features. It is imperative to have the right set of accounting tools for businesses to manage their finances in today’s world properly. QuickBooks is an expense management solution that has many significant benefits for small and medium-sized businesses. Choosing QuickBooks expense reports is the best method to check your income and expenses.

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