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Having a difficult time keeping track of all of your different transactions in Quickbooks? Most small businesses probably won’t have an issue with this, but larger businesses performing dozens or even hundreds of transactions per day will naturally have a harder time locating specific transactions. You can spend hours scanning through all of your recent transactions trying to locate a particular one. Thankfully, Quickbooks has a solution for this problem: class tracking. To learn more about class tracking and how to use it, keep reading.

What Is Class Tracking?

Unless you’ve used it before, you might be wondering what exactly is “class tracking.” Basically, it’s a form of categorization that allows Quickbooks users to track their account balances based on department, location, separate properties or any other meaningful breakdown of your business. Rather than performing the tedious task of scanning through each and every transaction in your account, you can scan through the respective “class.” Taking advantage of this key feature will prove to be a huge time-saver.

Note: classes should serve a single purpose only. If your Quickbooks account is set up to store accounts based on location, then you shouldn’t use them to store accounts based on department or any other criteria.

Setting Up Class Tracking

To set up class tracking, log in to your Quickbooks account and select “Edit” followed by “Preferences” from the home screen. On the left-hand side of your screen, you should see a long list of options. Select the “Accounting” option from the list followed by the “Preferences” tab. A new window of options should appear on your screen; one of the options in this window is a toggle button for class tracking — click it to turn on class tracking for your account. Select “Ok” to finalize the changes.

With class tracking now turned on, you can assign a “class” to any current or future transactions. When you are adding a transaction to your Quickbooks account, look for the option labeled “class tracking.” Selecting this option will allow you to take advantage of this highly useful, time-saving feature. By adding a class to the appropriate transactions, you can go back into your account later to run reports for them. Running a report for a specific class will yield noticeably fewer results, making it easier to locate a particular transaction.  Just remember to only use class tracking for a single type of criteria; otherwise, your reports will be incorrect.