Venmo and QuickBooks Online
We love the convenience of Venmo - and it is great for my personal life - but it is has a complicated relationship with QBO.
When I first started using Venmo, it was to send cash to my almost adult kids for gas and groceries - even rent! and it was a blessing! For my personal life it was fast and convenient.
It wasn’t long after that I started using it for Business - paying my contract labor - a local flower farmer - even computer tech. Then the clients wanted to know if they could Venmo me.
I went happily along until it was time to do my year end tax prep and I realized that the Venmo account had not been reconciled all year. I have a bookkeeper, and Venmo was not on her radar.
How hard can it be? I thought, I’ll just do it myself. Ha!
Venmo is both a credit card and a conduit to your checking account. - and in my case multiple checking accounts. The first of the year I decided to link my Venmo account directly to QBO so that the transactions would be downloaded. Then I went to Venmo and downloaded statements.. Now I realized that many/most of my transactions had already been processed thru my checking account, and that only payments from my Venmo balance had not been processed.
So, going forward I have a few rules for managing my Venmo account:
I am not going to link Venmo to QBO - it creates too many duplications.
I will have two separate Venmo accounts - personal and business.
I will not pay any transactions from my Venmo balance., only from my checking account.
I will add Venmo to my month end process:
I’ll download their statement and forward to the bookkeeper.
I’ll make sure any client payments have been recorded in my Flower Management System (I use BloomTrac).
I’ll make a single transfer of funds from Venmo to checking - again to simplify where they are classified.
I’ll make sure the expense transactions that hit my checking account were coded properly - a bit of an issue with Venmo.