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About this lesson

In this lesson, we explain renaming rules, set up new rules, edit existing rules, and disabling rules.

Exercise files

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7.06 rules - Exercise.docx
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Quick reference

Rules

Rules in QuickBooks are "if this, then that" rules.

When to use

Creating rules will save you time as QuickBooks will suggest or enter repetitive transactions on your behalf depending on how you set it up. An example of when this is useful would be your software subscriptions, every month you pay the same money to a handful of providers, let QuickBooks take care of those entries on the bank feeds for you. 

Instructions

  1. Navigate to bank feeds
  2. In the upper left hand corner under your business name, click on rules
  3. In the upper right hand corner click on the green button that says new rule
  4. Fill in the rule
    1. What do you want to call the rule? When you have 100 rules, they'll sort alphabetically, what name will help you find this one?
    2. Indicate if the rule applies to money out or money in
    3. Indicate if it applies only to some bank accounts or all
    4. Decide if the rule should apply to all parameters or just some
    5. Define the parameters:
      1. Description = this option is sometimes iffy, I don't recommend using it
      2. Bank text = this is asking QuickBooks to look for specific text from the bank's downloaded data
      3. Amount = amount
    6. Indicate the transaction type
    7. Indicate the category = which account on the chart of accounts applies to this rule?
    8. Add a payee if appropriate 
    9. Decide if you want QuickBooks to auto add transactions that fit this rule without asking you to review it

Hints & tips

  • Rules are great and a huge time saver, make one or two each time you're working
  • Do not select auto-add until you're comfortable with bank feeds
  • Do not set up a rule for bank transfers until you're very very comfortable with bank fees
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  • 00:04 In this video, I want to talk to you about bank rules.
  • 00:08 When you download the transactions from your bank, it goes into bank feeds and
  • 00:12 you often have a big long list of things you need to work on.
  • 00:15 Bank rules are the same thing as renaming rules.
  • 00:19 And really at their core, if, this, then,
  • 00:21 that rules, they're going to help you expedite organizing your bank feeds.
  • 00:26 So let me go into bank feeds and show you what this looks like.
  • 00:29 Then I click on the Alaska Airlines.
  • 00:33 When I'm looking at my list, I can see I have 223 transactions.
  • 00:38 At the top of my screen, just beneath my business name, I have three tabs,
  • 00:43 I have banking rules and receipts.
  • 00:46 When I click on rules, I can see that I have a rule called acuity.
  • 00:50 I'm going to show you what this rule looks like.
  • 00:52 I'll click on edit to the right.
  • 00:55 My acuity rule, called acuity,
  • 00:58 says that whenever money leaves any of the bank accounts, if the bank text
  • 01:03 contains the words acuityscheduling.com to do these things.
  • 01:09 And the things are, automatically create an expense,
  • 01:12 automatically assign the category as office supplies, automatically name it
  • 01:16 acuity scheduling and then come down to the memo and add the memo.
  • 01:21 So the memo is acuityscheduling.com and then I typed in here added by rules.
  • 01:26 At the bottom of my screen, I've toggled or turned off the auto add feature.
  • 01:33 I've turned it off so that I can review the transactions before they're added.
  • 01:37 Once I feel comfortable with my rule and
  • 01:39 feel like I've done it correctly, if I toggle the rule to auto add,
  • 01:44 whenever acuity shows up in the download list, I won't see it.
  • 01:48 It'll be in the download list in this 223 transactions for
  • 01:52 a split second and then QuickBooks will say,
  • 01:54 I know what to do, the human told me to go ahead and just add that into the register.
  • 02:00 And it won't stop and it won't have me do anything with it.
  • 02:03 Okay, so let me come down here.
  • 02:05 You can see acuity scheduling, it's pre-filled,
  • 02:08 the name acuity scheduling, and the category of office supplies.
  • 02:13 Sometimes you'll see a little green box to the left of this that says rules,
  • 02:17 in this case we don't.
  • 02:19 Let me show you how to make a rule from a transaction.
  • 02:22 So let's use Adobe as our example.
  • 02:25 I'm going to click on any one of these transactions for Adobe.
  • 02:30 When I do this, it opens up the gray box.
  • 02:32 This is where we can fix the payee or the category.
  • 02:35 If we come down there's a blue hyperlink that says create rule.
  • 02:40 I'm going to click on create rule.
  • 02:43 I'm going to name this rule Adobe because I'm also creative today.
  • 02:47 This money is going to apply to all the bank accounts.
  • 02:51 Right now the default says description but I really like to use bank text,
  • 02:55 I find it catches more than if I just use description.
  • 02:59 And then it pre-fills this text over here.
  • 03:02 I'm just going to look left and
  • 03:03 right to make sure there's no extra information to it.
  • 03:07 If, for example,
  • 03:08 it had the month or the store number or something like that, I would wipe out
  • 03:12 the excess information because I want to cast the widest that I can.
  • 03:17 So down here it says what to do.
  • 03:19 I want to create an expense.
  • 03:22 I want to use the expense category or the chart of account account.
  • 03:25 I want to use software.
  • 03:28 I want to use the vendor name Adobe.
  • 03:30 And then here's the memo.
  • 03:32 And then I'm going to say, added by rules.
  • 03:35 It's my preference that I put this in the memo, it's not necessary for
  • 03:39 you to do that.
  • 03:41 The auto add is gray, meaning they will not auto add things to the register.
  • 03:46 I'm going to click it to green so that it does auto add to the register.
  • 03:50 I'm going to select save.
  • 03:56 So now it says 10 transactions have been added to your books.
  • 04:00 And we no longer see Adobe here.
  • 04:02 Let me show you what it looks like in your QuickBooks.
  • 04:05 I'll go to expenses, I'll go to vendors, and we'll find Adobe.
  • 04:10 Here's Adobe.
  • 04:12 When I click on Adobe, it's going to bring up a list.
  • 04:15 These are my list of transactions.
  • 04:17 If I looked at this list of transactions and
  • 04:20 said, that's not going to the right place, how could I be so silly?
  • 04:24 I could change it right here.
  • 04:26 But what I might also want to do is to click on this and
  • 04:29 just see what am I doing, what's going on with it?
  • 04:33 And then here's where I'm going to see my note added by rules.
  • 04:36 That's my reminder to myself that I made a renaming rule.
  • 04:41 So let me click cancel.
  • 04:42 I'm going to take you back to bank feeds and show you that rule for Adobe.
  • 04:47 On the top of the screen I'm going to click on rules, I'm going to see Adobe.
  • 04:52 On the right I'm going to click edit.
  • 04:54 I can see all this stuff and I can see auto add.
  • 04:57 Let me click cancel and I'll show you something here.
  • 05:01 When I look at my list of rules, and this list could go on for
  • 05:05 hundreds of rules, I can see that there's a little plus,
  • 05:09 a green box with a plus under the header of auto add.
  • 05:12 That's how I can tell at a glance that Adobe is set up to auto add to my
  • 05:16 QuickBooks and acuity is not set up to auto add to my QuickBooks.
  • 05:21 So let me take you back to the list of transactions.
  • 05:24 Here's my acuities.
  • 05:26 I've got them all here.
  • 05:27 That's fantastic.
  • 05:29 Maybe I don't want to see them.
  • 05:30 Maybe I trusted that it can just add itself to QuickBooks without asking me
  • 05:34 what to do.
  • 05:35 Let me click on rules.
  • 05:37 Let me edit my rule for acuity.
  • 05:39 We just come down and click this little toggle, and then save.
  • 05:44 And now I see a plus sign here.
  • 05:46 I come over to banking.
  • 05:48 And I look, I no longer see Adobe and I no longer see acuity.
  • 05:52 As you start to think about the places that you go on a regular basis or
  • 05:56 the ways that you spend money on a regular basis, you might find that
  • 05:59 setting up a renaming rule will make your bookkeeping go a little bit faster.
  • 06:04 We find an example of something where you might need to edit.
  • 06:08 This is perfect, so Canva.
  • 06:11 Canva, it's always canva.com, that's where you go to buy graphic images.
  • 06:17 And so at the end it has this string of numbers,
  • 06:20 that string of numbers will change each time we make a purchase at Canva.
  • 06:24 So if I were to make a rule for this, I would say call this rule Canva,
  • 06:30 and this applies to all bank accounts, change the bank text.
  • 06:35 And what I want to do is I want to wipe out that string of numbers.
  • 06:39 So I want it to say, I want QuickBooks to apply this rule
  • 06:44 to all the things where the bank text contains Canva.
  • 06:49 It can be Canva plus more numbers or just Canva.
  • 06:53 And we'll come down and we'll add a payee.
  • 06:57 Come down here, auto add, click save.
  • 07:01 And if we've done this correctly, we're going to see that all the Canvas are gone,
  • 07:04 and there they go.
  • 07:06 Hopefully this makes sense and is one trick that will help you really expedite
  • 07:10 your bookkeeping, both in terms of catching up old records but
  • 07:14 also in terms of maintaining your QuickBooks.

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