For organizations with calendar year renewals, the turn of the fiscal year can come with significant outstanding dues receivables. This amount can be so great that stakeholders may request financial reports that specifically exclude open dues from the Outstanding Accounts Receivable report or the Balance Sheet.

For all intents and purposes, QuickBooks Online does not allow multiple A/R accounts. Instead, the system allows users to designate Departments at the transaction level. These departments can be used as a filter for Outstanding A/R, the Balance Sheet, and myriad other reports within QuickBooks.

If you intend to segment your QuickBooks data to specifically exclude dues, it's important that you understand the structure of the QuickBooks filter that you will be relying upon.

Notice in the screen shot below that your filter options for Department include "All," "Not Specified," and "Specified." What is missing from the list is an option to include "All Except for a Specific Department." This means that you cannot run a report to include all transactions that have either "Department A," "Department B," or no department at all.

With QuickBooks' limitation, you will need to choose one of two paths. Either, you should use Departments only for your dues transactions, or you should make sure that all of your transactions have a department assigned.

Whichever option you choose, remember that Novi makes it simple to assign departments for each member type.

If you limit your use of Departments to only dues transactions, you would choose "Not Specified" in the QuickBooks filter to exclude your dues transactions yet include all of the others.

If you decide to use Departments across the board, then you will need to go "all in." Missing just one transaction could throw off the numbers that you present to your board and other stakeholders. If this is the route that you decide to take, then you would select each one of your Departments with the exception of "Dues" from the "Specified" list in QuickBooks.

The challenge with Option 2 is that it opens up the possibility for human error.

As mentioned above, Dues transactions can be automatically set to have a specific department within your member type settings. This lessens the chance for human error. Unlike the setting QuickBooks provides for Classes which would warn a bookkeeper when a transaction isn't assigned a Class, there is no such warning for Departments. It is entirely possible that a few transactions could end up missing a transaction, and the reports you provide to stakeholders could be off because of it.

Here's a sample A/R Aging Summary report. Notice that Amy's Bird Sanctuary and Bill's Windsurf Shop both have current balances.

We customized the report by filtering "Department" to "Not Specified."

You'll notice that Bill's dues are no longer showing as current. Amy's are still showing because her transaction had no Department listed.

This same segmentation can be seen on the balance sheet.

Or the "Dues" Department can simply be filtered out as is was to create this report. Notice that Accounts Receivable (A/R) is showing only $27,816.52, the same number marked as "Not Specified" in the report above.