As a small business owner, keeping track of where you spend your money is an important part of your business finances. The good news is FreshBooks lets you automatically import your expenses, helping you save time by eliminating the need to manually record your expenses. Now that’s all well and good, but to truly get a clear picture of where your money is going, you still have to spend time manually categorizing those expenses.
Now you can save your categories for future imports so, after you categorize an expense once, it will be applied to all future expenses of the same type.
Why should I care?
There are oodles of expenses imported into FreshBooks every day, which means you have to spend many precious hours categorizing them. That can be a real pain, especially if you have an expense that comes up frequently – it can get tiresome categorizing your weekly team lunch as “Meals and Entertainment” over and over again.
Starting today, FreshBooks can remember the category you select so when a similar expense is imported, that same category will be automatically applied. If you have expenses that you incur every month, or you purchase things from the same place frequently, this will mean much less time spent categorizing the same expenses over and over again.
This also means that your reports will be that much clearer and actionable. Since your expenses will be automatically categorized, your reports won’t have a large “Uncategorized” section, meaning you have insight into where exactly you’re spending your money.
How does it work?
Next time you have expenses imported from your bank you’ll likely still see some “Uncategorized” expenses. After you select a category for that expense you’ll see this new check box appear:
If you check off the “Automatically apply this category to similar expenses” box FreshBooks will start remembering the category.
Next time expenses are imported FreshBooks will look at the notes section. If the notes of a new expense match the notes of the expense with a saved category, FreshBooks will automatically apply that category as the expense is imported.
Can I check to make sure FreshBooks is applying the categories correctly?
Absolutely! If you go the “Expenses” tab after an import, you’ll notice a blue box at the top of the page. In it there will be a message that says “# expenses imported since your last visit. View imported expenses”. If you click that link it will show you all the expenses that have been imported since you last checked, so you can verify that all of their categories are correct.
When shouldn’t I use it?
If you make purchases from the same location frequently, but categorize them differently. For example, if you buy office supplies, groceries, and your gas from the same store you may not want to save a category for them. Since the categorization is based on the notes, all three of those transactions would have the same notes meaning they would be categorized the same way.
Get started today
Head to your Expenses tab and categorize any uncategorized expenses you may have. As long as you check off the box to automatically apply the category, it will be the last time you have to categorize that type of expense.
Original Article by Rob
