I’m sure you’ve done it, typed your email address to login and accidentally entered your password on the end without pressing the tab key? Now when you login it shows your password at the end of your email address for everyone to see. Well, in this post I’m going to tell you how to fix that.

Firefox actually makes this very difficult to figure out but its actually quite easy to fix.

• 1) First go to the Lizzy login screen and type the first few letters of your login and see the drop list that displays.
• 2) Use your arrow keys to scroll down to the one you wish to delete.
• 3) Press the shift key and then the delete key on your keyboard and presto, its gone.

In both Chrome and Safari you can delete these from the preferences/options screen. Safari is listed in the AutoFill section and Chrome in the Person section of its config page. Not sure why Firefox needed to hide it but now you know.

From time to time we get asked questions that we have to stop and think about, so I figured I’d take a minute to document one such occasion. What happens on the GL when you log time on that “Internal Only Service Technician Labor Page” of a service ticket?

So buckle up and lets get started.

1) In Settings-> Invoicing-> Defaults, you will see a section labeled Cost / Expense / Inventory Accounts. In this section you will see 2 accounts specified, one for Labor Cost and the other for Payroll Expense.

2) When you create a service ticket and specify that Bob worked on it and you’ve told Lizzy that Bob makes $15/hr, Lizzy will hit the Labor Cost account for $15 for 1 hour of work and will offset that hit with an opposite hit for Payroll Expense. We store this negative side in payroll expense until you cut payroll.

3) Now lets say you pay this technician $40. When the paycheck is hit, the payroll expense account hits for $40, but remember we had a $15 negative hit from the service ticket. This results in a net payroll expense of $25 and would represent broom time or unaccountable time.

So now our P&L will show the cost of labor on service tickets and the expense of payroll for a combined total. Also keep in mind that when you setup payroll you have the option of specifying different accounts for different departments, so you want to be sure you choose the service department expense account and not some other department. By default, all of this is setup, so unless you’re making changes it should already be good to go.

I hope that helps you to understand what happens on the books when you’re working with service techs in Lizzy.

Until next time…

One of the things I’ve been asked in the past was how we track our credit cards with Lizzy, to insure that when we run our Balance Sheet, it accounts for everything we’ve done. Another reason for wanting to keep it in Lizzy on an on-going basis is to minimize the amount of work at the end of the month to reconcile all of the accounts and cards. In this blog entry I’m going to walk you through, step by step, how to deal with credit cards and how to enter payments at the end of the month against those accounts.

Lets get started:
1) We’re going to go to the Chart of Accounts first and create a new account for our credit cards. If you don’t already have a master account for 230.00.000 “Other Current Liabilities” then lets create it first. At the top, don’t select a master account, but fill in an account number of 230.00.000 and a name of “Other Liabilities” and select the checkbox that we want this to be a Master Account. Click the save button and now we’re ready to start creating our accounts.

Now select 230.00.000 in the master drop down, enter our first account for MasterCard as an example: 230.00.100 and a name of “MasterCard Balance“. Select the Account Type as “Credit Card“. Don’t select the master account check box on this one as we want this to be our account number we’re going to use later. Save and create one account for each card so that we can easily see the current balances on our balance sheet.

2) At this point you may also want to create an interest EXPENSE account to record interest charges into each month and if you want you can create a credit card fee expense account as well. These are really up to you how you want to record the extra charges.

3) Now go to Settings-> Accounting -> Bank Accounts and create a new account for each card and select the respective account for each. When you’re done you should now have separate bank accounts for all your checking accounts and all your credit cards. Make sure while you’re here you edit the Company checking account and select to have it be the default so that you don’t have to choose it manually all the time in checking.

4) Now is where the fun begins. As the people with the cards use them, start a policy that they turn in their receipts daily in order to allow you to enter them into the respective checking accounts listed now in Lizzy. You will enter them as if they were debit card entries and you’ll select the account each should go against in order to show properly on the balance sheets. There really is nothing special to do here. You will notice however, that this account will always hold a negative balance because we started at zero and charge things from there.

5) At the end of the month or throughout the month via the credit card companies website, we want to reconcile this account exactly like we would the real checking account. This allows us to easily track things that haven’t been turned in as they’re happening instead of waiting months later and trying to remember what happened or what something was for.

6) Eventually we will need to make a payment towards the credit card account and this is the only part you have a couple steps to deal with. I will list them here:

6a) Go into the real checking account and make a payment to the card vendor. Select the Flush Account (usually 199.99.999) to write the check against. Print your check as usual.

6b) Go into the credit card checking account and we’re going to enter a deposit for the same amount and select the same flush account for it.

Now what you’ll end up with is a balance transfer between the accounts, however, we had to do it manually because we needed to write a check that we could print. In the event you really do pay with a balance transfer you can skip this and just use that menu option to move the money between the accounts.

Hopefully you see that this a very slick way to track credit cards in the system and still maintain a simple flow of information from the purchase to reconciliation.