Getting Started With QuickBooks Online - A Broad Overview

1. Introduction: this'll loss is a board over you off QuickBooks online. You learn capabilities on the beaches off way will not be digging deep into the features, but we will learn the functionalities on tossed. That little online QuickBooks online is a powerful tool that works great or small to lead inside. Stay teams classes that will delve deeper into A with features include abilities put books online. 2. Lesson 1 The Dashboard: the first place you land when you sign into QuickBooks online is the dashboard page. The dashboard gives you a quick glance of how your company is doing by way of expenses and also profit and loss for a defined period of time. You can actually customize the period you'd like to see by clicking on the down arrow. You can also see your invoice activity for the last 365 days. So that's what the last year and also for the last 30 days. At the bottom of the screen is your sales activity, and you can define the period you'd like to see by clicking on the down arrow and picking on the period that you'd like to review. There's also a privacy button, the highs, all of your company's transactions if you ever feel the need to do so. So, for example, if you have, if you're working in an office environment and somebody walks up to your desk, I want to have a conversation with you. But you don't want this person to see the financial activity off your business. You can click on this pretty button to hide it until the person actually walks away. The left hand navigation bar contains all of your major transaction centers, and the top navigation bar contains the gear icon and the quick create butts in on. We'll be going over all of these navigations in subsequent lessons. You also have the ability to upload your logo by clicking here and then uploading it from from within this area. Once you find the logo that you want, you just click on it and uploaded into QuickBooks online. On the right side of the screen are all of your bank accounts and credit card accounts that you have connected to QuickBooks online. These could be actual bank accounts that could be credit card accounts and even PayPal accounts. If you use PayPal to receive money or if you pay your vendors with PayPal, so that's a quick overview of the dashboard. In the next lesson, we'll be discussing left hand navigation 3. Lesson 2 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The Banking Tab: so the first stab we're going to review is the banking tab. When you click on the banking tab, you will automatically taken to the banking center. The banking center allows you to link all of your bank and credit card accounts to QuickBooks online. Once you've linked all your accounts, you'll you'll see them lined up up here on the first row. So right now there's a MasterCard, a credit card and checking account and also a savings account that's linked to QuickBooks online. Also, QuickBooks automatically upload all of your transactions on a daily basis. Now you can also manly update your transactions by clicking on the updates. Tap. When you click on the update button, your banking transactions automatically upload from your bank it your from your banking center into QuickBooks online. You can also add an account from here by clicking the add account butts in. When you click on add account, you can add any additional accounts. You can add any checking account. You can add any credit card accounts, and you can even add a PayPal account if you use PayPal. Also, if you decide that you don't want to link your bank accounts, to QuickBooks online. You can actually upload your banking transactions using a CSD file by clicking on this down arrow and clicking file. Upload. When you click on fire upload, you can browse for your files. Pick the CSP file that you want and uploaded into QuickBooks online. Once you upload it, you'll click next, and everything else is pretty much self explanatory. It takes you through the process. Once all of your transactions have been automatically or manually uploaded from your banking center into QuickBooks online, you will see all of the data under the four review tab, so everything that's under the former view tab has not yet been reviewed by you. Also, if you see these numbers like you see Number seven on the corner here, 25 on the one. This tells you the number of transactions that have been uploaded from your banking center into QuickBooks online that have not yet been reviewed. So you have you have 77 transactions from your MasterCard that have not yet have not yet been reviewed. You also have 25 transactions from your checking account that have not yet been refuted, and from your savings accounts, you have one transaction that still needs to be reviewed. Once all transactions have been reviewed by you, then you can those transactions live under the in QuickBooks tab. So let's let's just do one. So let's say we review this particular transaction well hit match. Now, this means that that transaction is inside off QuickBooks online, and it's ready for you to do whatever it is you want to do with it. Well, you click on in QuickBooks, you'll see that that transaction is in QuickBooks online, and then you have the excluded tap. The excluded tab is used for any transaction that you do not want to see inside off your QuickBooks. So what type of transactions would you exclude? You can exclusions actions that have been uploaded twice, or transaction that, for some reason, is not was not supposed to hit your account. But it did for some reason or another. And also you can exclude a transaction that you're just not sure about, so that that type of transaction you may want to delete, but you're not sure if you should, so you can actually exclude the transaction until you've made a determination as to whether or not that particular chat transaction should or should not be deleted. So those are some of the reasons why you would use the exclude function under the banking center. We also have the bank rules tab. Now, bank rules are a great feature, and they could be used to automate your accounting process. So how this works is if you have a transaction that Serie A current transaction that doesn't normally change from month to month, you can apply something called the bank rules to that adaptions action that have it works is, let's say, for example, you have a telephone bill from 18 T that comes every single month. You can actually create a rule that says whenever an item is uploaded from either your credit card accounts or from your bank accounts into QuickBooks online. If it's from A T and T, I want you to do this with it so you can choose what you want to do with the transaction. In most cases, you would say, I want you to put anything that comes in from A T and T into this account. So what happens is it automatically goes into a particular account, so this saves you a lot of time in data entry. It saves you a lot of time when it comes to doing your monthly bookkeeping because everything is automated and it goes right into the accounts that you wanted to go into. Now I do have to say this. It's a great tool, but if you do decide to use it, and if you do decide to creates automatic transactions, I strongly advise you to make sure that you go back and you check on a monthly basis to make sure that these transactions went into the correct accounts. Because anything can happen. If it goes into the wrong accounts, it could cause problems when it shows up on your financial statements. So, yes, it's a wonderful tool, but make sure that you check it and make sure everything goes into the proper account. 4. Lesson 3 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The Sales Tab: the next tab is the sales tab. The all sales tabs shows you all of the sales that you have that you have in QuickBooks online for the last 365 days. So that's what the last year you can feel to this page and you can filter it by transactions. So if you want to look at a certain type of transaction, you can click on this down arrow. You could look at estimates, invoices, cells receives or whatever type of transaction you want to look at. You can also filter it by status, so status would be open transactions. Overdue transactions paid transactions pending transactions, and so one end still force. You can filter it by date, so if you want to customize it it right now we're looking at for the last year at last 365 days, you can filter it by a particular day by a particular year. For example, if you want to just look at this year this quarter this month and then also you can customize you can create a cup custom date. If there's a particular time period that you want to look at you can also filter it by customer. So right now we're looking at all of your customers if you want to. If you want to look at particular customer, here's where you'll come to do that. You can also do a quick filter by clicking on any of these bars on top of the screen. So, for example, you have estimates you can see that in the last 365 days there have been no estimates. You could see that there have been two unbilled activity charges. If you click on, if you click on that, it's going to show you the two charges. You have 10 overdue invoices. You can click on that, and you can see all of the overdue invoices. You're gonna get all of your open invoices. And also you can look at all of the invoices that having paid within the last 30 days, so this is another way to get to certain transactions that you would like to take a look at . You can also important actions from square or any other type of cloud software that you use in fortunes actions. The new transaction tab allows you to create new transactions for different types of forms like invoices, receiving payments, estimates, sales receipts and credit memos, and so on. The next tab is the invoice tax. The invoice tab shows you different types of invoices. It shows you all of your overdue invoices. It shows you on your invoices that are not yet do. It shows all the invoices that have not yet been deposited and all the invoices that have been deposited, overdue invoices and not due invoices off for the last 365. While the invoices that have not yet been deposited or the ones that have been deposited are for the last 30 days, you can also do back transactions from the invoice screen. By clicking on this box, you can print and send invoices by the batch. You can also create new invoices from this screen by clicking on the new invoice tab. Once the invoice has been created, you can save it and send it, or you can save and close. Or you can save and create a new invoice. The next tab is the customers have on the customer screen. You can you can add a new customer by clicking on the new customer tab. You can also import a batch of customers by clicking on the down arrow, clicking import customers and then browsing for your Excel, your CSP file and importing a batch of customers. You can also email customers directly from the customer screen by clicking on the customer that you'd like to email, flicking the down arrow and then clicking on email. If you would like to email a batch of customers, you can click on the square and then click on the down arrow and then click on email. And it's going to send an email to everybody that you have clicked within the customer list to the right side of the screen. You can receive a payment directly from the customer window by clicking on the Sith payments, click the form of payment and then accept the payment. Also, you can click on the down arrow, and there are a few things that you can do directly from the screen. You can send the customer reminders it. Your customer has not paid an invoice. You can actually send the customer a reminder from the screen that in the know that the invoice is due, you can go in here and change the message to anything that you wanted to say, and then you can send the reminder to your customer. You can also create statements from this window by clicking on create statement. So if your client has on ongoing statement, if they have re occurring payments or they have a statement that they have not finished pain, you can create the statement from this screen. You can preview the statement before you send it out. So in this case, this particular clients had has a balanced you of $239. The initial the initial payment was $567 they provided an up front payment, and it also provided one payment since then, and the comedy have a balance of two things. You can also stand the statement directly from this screen by picked by clicking on save and send, you can create an invoice directly from the screen. You can also create a cells, and you can also create an estimate all directly from the customers screen. The next tab is the products and services tab. It's important to set up products and services if you want to provide your customers with an invoice or a cells receipt for products insect that they purchase from you. The products and service area houses, all of the products and services that your business sells under name. You have the name of the products or the furthest. If you hold infantry and you use school numbers, you can find the numbers under the school column. You have a type of item, whether a service or infantry. The description off the products will serve this. The sale price, your cost of the products, whether the product is taxable, quantity of each inventory item on hand and your order points. You can also edit a product or service by clicking the edit tab, and you can make your changes within this window they use. You can save it and close it. Also, if you click on the drop down arrow, you can make a particular product or service inactive. You can also duplicate products and service by clicking the duplicate tab. Once you click on the duplicate tab, you're going to get a new window and is going to say that's when you know that this is a duplicate and you can fill out the information that you would like on this particular in this particular window, you can also run a report for each service or product type. The report provides you with the details on how much of each product or service you have sold within a defined period of time. You can customize your time frame by changing the dates in this area. So right now we're looking at the last 90 days. You can email this reports. You can also print the reports, and you can export the report. There's an Excel file or a PDF file. If you click on the gear icon, you can also include columns that currently do not display on the report. So if I wanted to click on the date that a particular transaction was created, I can click on create date, get out of here, and then now you can see the date and the time that a particular transaction was created. Also, if I want to look at, you can also expand the display items by clicking on show more. When you click on expand more, you can see other items you could also display on the report, even on you can click on the customer to see who you sold it to. You can also click on the vendor that tells you who you purchased the product from and you can click on created by. It's going to tell you who created the plot of the products and you can click on school is going to give you the school number. So now let's get houses here so we can look at the brand new reports. As you can see, the report has expanded its giving us who created the reports. It's letting us know who the customer waas. It's also letting us know that none of these items have a school number, which means that they're all services. When we click on the drop down arrow often inventory item, we can adjust the quantity off infantry. We can also adjust the starting value off the infantry, and we can reorder the infantry all from the products and service screen. If you click on the gear icon, you can see that all of the columns that I displayed have a check mark. Now let's expand this so we can see the rest of the columns that are displaying now If you want to add a column, all you have to do is just click on the column that you want to display in this. In this instance, let's click purchase description and you see how the column automatically shows up as part off the displayed columns If we click on income accounts because we can now see that the income count is now past of the displayed column, So you have the option of picking the column that you'd like to display on the products and service screen. You can also print the list. Uh, you can export the list to an Excel spreadsheet. 5. Lesson 4 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The Expense Tab: The next tab is Theo Expenses tab on the expenses screen. Under the expense option, you can print checks, you can pay bills and also under new transactions, you can create new bills, create a new expenses, You can write checks, you can write up purchase orders, and you can also apply vendor credits to your vendors. Okay, To print a check, you just click on the on the print check option, and it takes you to the print check screen that you can pick the check that you'd like to print. Now, if you don't want to print all the checks on the screen, you couldn't unsullied. It's all of the options that are selected. Then you can select the check that you want to print, then click on preview and print. You can look at the check before you prince it everything looks okay. Then you can go ahead and print the check now to make a bill payment, you find the bill that you want to pay. We're going to make an insurance payments. You just click on make payments once you get to the payment screen. If everything looks okay, you click on save and close once you click on saving close, that means that that bill has been marks is paid in QuickBooks online, and the transaction will now show up on your profit and loss statements. Now let's find to find the bill that we just paid. Just pay the insurance bill. And, as you can see, since the bill has now been paid, the make payments option has gone away. Not just for your information. QuickBooks has added a feature that allows you to pay your bills directly from inside the software using something called Bill Pain. This is a great new feature that allows you to pay your bills with just one click. You can also create new purchase orders from this screen by clicking on the new transactions Option. When you click on the new transactions, Arrow is click on purchase order. Once you get to the purchase order screen, he choose the vendor that you want to purchase something from, and then you pick your products. Once everything has been filled out. If everything looks good, you can click saving close or you can click saving send. If you decide to send it directly from the screen, you just click on save and send. You can review the purchase order from this screen to make sure everything looks good. Look at the subject line and make sure it says what you wanted to say. And then you can create an email to go along with the purchase order and then click send and close. Now, if you create a purchase order and you don't send it from the create screen, you can actually also send it from this screen. So let's find one that has not yet been sent. Okay, so here's a purchase order for 1 25 going to Tim to Tim Phillips. You can click. You can send it directly from the screen by clicking on Fend. When you get to the screen, just make sure the email address is correct. Make sure the subject line states what you wanted to state, and then you can change the message from here if you choose to and then press send. Also, once you and the Oventic have agreed on the purchase order amount, you can just click on this down arrow and you can copy this purchase order to a bill by clicking on copy to Bill so once you've copied it to a bill. Now it's a bill in the system and it's ready for payments, so we'll click on save and close. And now that we've copied the purchase order to a bill, we can now go ahead and make the payment from the screen by clicking on make payments. Everything looks good. We click on Save and Close, and now the bill has been mocked as paid inside of QuickBooks online. Under the vendors tab, you can add a new vendor. Well, you could import vendors using your CSB file or using an annex Tell spreadsheet. You can also prepare 10 99 feel vendors. So if your vendors are 10 99 contract workers, or if you have to provide your vendor with a 10 99 at the end of the year, you can actually click. Click on the prepared 10 99 to prepare the 10 99 4 your vendor, and you would do that by clicking on Let's get started. You can also pay vendor bills by clicking on pay bills, and it will show you a list of bills have already created for your vendors, and you can go ahead and make a payment by clicking on the vendor that you'd like to pay and then clicking, save or saving close. Now you can see you have to build it, are open on one that's overdue. That needs to be paid. Anything that has the red bubble and the white exclamation mark means that it's an overdue payment that needs attention right away on the vendor screen. You can create transactions for a specific vendor by clicking on the down arrow. By that bend his name. You can create a bill for the vendor, create an expense, write a check, create a purchase order. And you can also make that vendor in active if you no longer utilize that particular vendors services. This was a quick overview of the expense tab in QuickBooks online. Stay tuned for a more in depth class. 6. Lesson 5 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The Workers Tab Contractors: the next tab is the workers tab. Under the workers tab, there are two sub tabs. Employees and contractors. If you run payroll using QuickBooks online, this is where you will set up your employees and import all of their information. You can add an employee by clicking the ABS and employees tab if you don't currently use QuickBooks online to run payroll, but you are considering doing so. You can click on the get started tab to start using the payroll feature. Click on the contractors tab to add a new customer to your Q B o phile. When you click on ADD Contractor, you have the option to invite your potential contractor to fill out the information that you're going to need to get them set up. Start by filling out their name. We just come up with a fake name, Joe Doe, and I'm going to use my email address for this demonstration. So that way we can see what the email looks like that the contractor receives. Once you fill out the name and the email address that you're going to click on, add Contractor and now that contract first should receive your email containing your request. Now let's switch to the email so we can take a look at what the email looks like. So here's the email that was sent to the contractor. Let's click on that. And this is what the contractor receives. So the email just lets the customer and know that you use QuickBooks online to run your business and that the IRS requires that they collect key information from you so they can send you a 10 99 at tax time. And then it invites the contractor to create a free into it a free Intuit file so they can go ahead and send you their name, address and their tax i D. Number. So what your contractor will do will be to click on the actual details. Now, when they click on agile detail of now and Intuit, Screen comes up requesting that they create in accounts that free accounts so they can go ahead and fill out all the necessary information that you need to create their 10 99. If your contractor says that they didn't receive the invitation, you can resend it by clicking on the need to send the invites again and the one she do that ? You have the name and you can just click on said Now, because the email address is already in here that you can just click on send down and they will receive the invitation again. Also, if for some reason you and the contract to decide that you need to fill out the information or that they'd rather you feel the information out, you can do that by clicking on Waiting for Contractor When you click on Waiting for Contractor. If it's an individual who's using their Social Security number, then just click on individual and fill out all of the information, including their Social Security number, and then press save. If it's a business that's going to be using their tax I D number and click on business, and then you can input the business, name the display name and then the person's federal identification number and their address and all the other information, and then click on save. So once you do that, now, the contractor has been set up in your system. If you want. Another great thing about this feature is you can actually write checks from the contracts of screens. Let's go back. Now we have three contracts is on the screen. You can write checks from the contractor screen. So if you wanted to write a check for John for Joe Doe, you just click on right. Check also, if you click on the down arrow, you can create an expense, and you can create a bill that's all. Associate ID with the contract at the end of the year. When it's time to prepare 10 90 nines and you have all of your contractors on this page, you can just click on Prepare 10 99 for your contractors and then you click on Let's get started. Once you click on, let's get started, you can go ahead from from within QuickBooks online. You can then prepare all the 10 99 4 year contracts is and send them directly from the system to the I. R s. 7. Lesson 6 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The Reports Tab: the next tab is the reports tab. QuickBooks online has a wide variety of built in reports to help you see where your business stands at all times. Reports help you see the big picture at a glance. Reviewing reports will allow you to make better and more intelligent decisions for your business. QuickBooks provides a list of recommended reports, and these reports are reports that are useful and necessary for most businesses. As you start creating your own reports, the software actually remembers the reports you run the most and fouled them under the most frequently round reports option. You can also create custom reports, and these reports are reports you build yourself based on the type of data you want to analyze. The All Reports tab contains all of the company's reports in one place. QuickBooks, on my plus currently has three management report templates, one for the sales performance of your company, +14 expense performance and their management report that provides company overview details . These reports provides an overview off your company's finances. Management reports usually have a cover page, an executive summary page, an appendix page if needed, and any specific reports you select to include as part off the report, package management reports are only available in the QuickBooks Online plus version, which is the version This course is based on. Each reports has a professional layout and contains information about your company. To view management reports, click the Management Report link to view a report for a particular time period, click the Down Arrow under the report period and choose the period you would like to view. You can also customize your dates and then click the view option beside the report. You want to look at the cover page and the table of content page are filled out when you edit the templates and include all information you want from the management report page, you can edit a report you can send by emailing a report. You can also export the report as a PdF document or as a word document, and also you can make a copy off the report. Now these reports are templates, so its advisable. If you decide to create a sales performance report for your company, you would want to click on the copy option to copy the report. Once you've copied the reports, then you can rename the reports to whatever you want to rename it to that where you're preserving all of the actual templates. Now, if we wanted to edit this particular report, we'll click on the down arrow, then click on edits. We could go ahead and change the name up here, and then you can start editing our reports. Now this is a cover page, and this is the information that can appear on the cover page. So you have the cover title, the subtitle, the report period and who is prepared by the date that is prepared by an any type of disclaimer that you would like. T show up on the management report page, and then you have your table of contents page and the table of Contents Contents Page is going to be based on whatever reports you decide to include in the management report package, and then you have all the other pages. You have preliminary pages, you have your reports page. The reports page is where all of the reports live. So right now we have the profit and loss statement on the management's report. We have the aging detail and also the sales by customer summary If you want to add an additional report to the management report, then just click on, add new reports, and then you can select whatever type of report you'd like to add to the report package. As you can see, you have an option of a ton off different reports that you can absolute. And of course, you can pick your time period here. So this is a quick overview. Off reports in QuickBooks online. Keep in mind I will be creating a more detailed class that's going to show you how to actually use the report feature step by step. So look out for that class. 8. Lesson 7 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The Taxes Tab: next stop is the taxes. Tub collecting and paying sales tax can get a little tricky if you work with several states that break their tax payments down by localities. Some businesses have a mix of taxable and nontaxable products, as well as some customers that are taxed on others that are not. QuickBooks online allows you to apply sales tax to selected products or items and to selected customers. QuickBooks online also keeps track of how much sales tax is collected on for what tax an agency is collected for. With this information, QuickBooks online can create the checks for the appropriate taxing agency or agencies when the sale faxes do. To enable the sales tax feature, you first need to click the sale facts link in the navigation bar. From this window, you can view sales tax liability reports. You can view taxable customer reports. You can also edit sales tax settings, and you can add or edit tax rates and agencies. So if you wanted to add a brand new agency, you would click on the add at it tax rates and agencies. And here are the current agencies that are in the system. If you wanted to edit any of these agencies. You just click on the agency. You want to end it and then click Edit. If you want to add in your agency, you would click on new and then you'll type in the name of the agency wants ads, which particular state and then the agency name. And then whatever the whatever the tax rate is for that particular agency, you'll fill it out here and then you'll save it. Well, nothing to say. So they're going to go ahead and just cancel an ex out of it. Also, if you wanted the activates a particular taxing agency, you'd click on the agency you want to deactivate, and you click on the activate Now to view your taxable customers. You'll click on you taxable customer report, and the report is going to pop up. That's going to have a list of your customer contacts. And then if that particular customer is a taxable customer, is going to say yes. Underneath the heading taxable To view your sales tax liability reports, you'll just click on the tab that says View cell sacks libeling to report this report is going to provide your current sales tax liability, you can pick a period that you'd like to look at in this case, it says it says this quarter. But we're going to change that to Aled dates and then click on Run Reports. So this is basically telling you that you have a sales tax liability for $409.44 and that self tax liability is attributed to the Arizona Department of Revenue. This sale, the taxable sales amount is $422 and the tax on that is $29.96. Now, within Arizona, there's a city called Tuscany City that gets 2% off the sales tax. See also breaks that down and says, OK, so based on the $422.2 percent of that is $844. You also have your California sales tax agency and the taxable amount. There is $505,118 the tax do is $409. Now remember, I actually deactivated California, so you can see here where it says inactive, and that's from what we did earlier on by deactivating California. You can also edit your sales tax settings in order to edit yourself. Fact settings. Just click on the link that says at its sales tax settings. When you get to that pays, you can answer a few questions. One of the questions is, Do you charge sales tax? If the answer is yes, then of course you're going to have the radio button clicks next to yes. And then another question is, it says Mark All your customers taxable. Now, if this particular box is checked, that means that whenever you include a new customer into QuickBooks online automatically, that custom is going to be marks as taxable. That means that whenever you create an invoice of that customer, the total amount is going to be taxable, same saying with the products and services. If this box is checked whenever use include a brand new product or service inside of QuickBooks online, that particular products and service is also going to be taxed, which means that if you use the products on service on any invoice is going to be a taxable item and the drop down box is going to show all of the agencies that you have in the system that you collect sales tax full, and that's a brief overview of the sales tax center. I'll be creating a more robust class that goes into much more detail on how to use a sales tax center for your business. 9. Lesson 8 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The Accounting Tab: The next tab is the accounting tab. The the accounting tab houses the chance of accounts and the reconciliation area off QuickBooks online. Now the chart of accounts is the hot beats to any business. In order to access your chart of accounts, you're going to click on the See Your Chart of Accounts tab and all of your accounts show up. The chance of accounts contains every single account that you need to run your business. So all of these accounts are found on the profit and loss statements or on the cash flow statement on the balance sheet. So it's very important that these accounts are set up properly. It did not set up properly. It can cause some serious errors as you try to generate reports. So I advice most of my clients that even if you decide to do your own bookkeeping, that you should allow a professional to set up your chart of accounts because doing the data entry side side of things, which is what you'll be doing, it's not that challenging because all we're really doing is you're filling out forms, and then these forms are creating your transactions behind the scenes, so QuickBooks is doing doing stuff behind the scenes, and all you see is the information that you are creating on the forms. But where a problem may arise is if you're not sure where Eastern's action that you create using a form is supposed to land. That could be an issue. So, for example, if it's supposed to land on the balance sheet, but instead it lands on the profit and loss statement that could be. That could be a big problem, so make sure you have your chart of accounts reviewed by a professional. Now we have the reconcile. But in the reconcile button, basically is the area that you would come to to reconcile your bank statements and your credit card statements. What you would do is click on reconcile and accounts. When you click on record Silent account, you're going to pick. Either you're checking accounts with no savings account or a credit card account to reconcile. Now it's very, very, very, very important, and I can't stress it enough to make sure that you reconcile your accounts at the end of every month because this is the only way we're going to be able to determine if there are any errors on your reports. So if your bank statement doesn't reconcile that you know their issues and only that even with your credit card statements and order a few to determine whether or not they have been some erroneous charges. If the credit card company themselves made a mistake, I would have to reconcile your account in order to catch those errors, even with the bank, because the bank makes Ariz at times. Also, in order for you to catch any areas that the bank makes, you're going to have to reconcile your accounts in order to do so. In addition to that, if you put a transaction in the wrong place and therefore he shows up on the wrong account , you can determine all of these things when you reconcile. So if you're going to do your own bookkeeping, I would suggest that you outsource to areas. One is how somebody review your charts of accounts when you're done, or have them study up for you and then pay someone at the end of every month to reconcile your checking accounts, savings accounts and your credit card accounts, information and QuickBooks online. Because if you have a professional person reconcile, they fool you. They can determine whether or not all of the transactions are in the right accounts and therefore showing up on the correct financial statement. Once again, that was just a brief overview off the accounting tap in QuickBooks online and I will be creating a more detailed and in depth class, showing you houses, set up your chartered accountants and making sure that you you understand what financial statements each account is supposed to appear on and also a more in depth class on how to reconcile, Go checking accounts, the savings accounts and your credit card account information and QuickBooks online. 10. Lesson 9 The Left Hand Navigation Bar The My Accountant Tab: The last tab on the left hand navigation bar is the my accountant Tab. This is where you will come to if you want to invite your accountant to view your QuickBooks online file. If you if you work with an accountant or you have an accountant that does your bookkeeping or your accounting or you haven't accounted that you want Teoh higher to reconcile your statements at the end of the month. Or if you want to hire someone to set up your books before you take on the bookkeeping, or if you just want to have an accountant do your book for you on a monthly basis, you would come to this screen to invite your accountant to your QuickBooks online. You will include your accountants and email address here, and then you will click on Invite Accountant. Your accountant will then receive an email from you, inviting them to accept your request. When they accept your request. You are now added to their QuickBooks accounts and file, and now they can access your QuickBooks folder. They can go. They can come in here and they conduce one of your accounting, all of your bookkeeping, where they can set up your files or wherever it is that you want them to do for you. They could do it remotely from wherever they are, so they could be living in Timbuktu and you could be living in a totally different country . It doesn't matter how far away you are. Your accountant can access your books. So that's one great thing about QuickBooks online. If you don't have an accountant and you're looking for someone in your area or not even in your area, if you're looking for somebody who specializes, maybe in a particular niche. For example, if you are really a realtor or if you are a doctor, you're trying to find an accountant that specializes in those areas, then you can find a pro by clicking on this tab that said, Find a pro to help. When you click on find April to hell, you'll be taken to a screen where you can filter what you're looking for. So what location are you? You can pick a location that you'd like to find service provided. What kind of service do you want? Are you looking for or that you're looking for bookkeeping? You're looking for financial planning you can check whatever box you're looking for or you can check as many boxes as you want the industry served. What industry are you working in there? You trying to find a pro that specializes in consulting, specializes in computer software? Or basically, you're saying go telling them what industry you are in and then put a product supported. In this case, you're probably gonna be looking for someone who is supporting QuickBooks online, if that's what you're looking for. And then once you do all of that, you are you're going to have matches and you can also pick the distance and it goes anywhere from five miles to 1000 miles. You can pick that and then you're going to have a bunch of prose pop up and you can pick and choose whomever you'd like to speak with. And you can also sort your matches by best match by distance by rating. Last name, first name. So you have a whole bunch of options. You can filter this search by. I hope that helps. And that's what I have for the my account. Since Tab 11. Lesson 10 Creating Projects in QBO: QuickBooks online has introduced a brand new feature called Projects. This feature is only available in the QuickBooks Online plus version. The project feature helps you organize all of the moving pieces off a projects you are working on, including all the transactions you create for the project, all the time spent on the project and special reports that provide you with the financial detail about the projects. So you know where you stand with each project or job at all times. This is a great way to keep track of the cost of a project or a job in order to turn the project feature on, click on the Gear Icon and then click on accounts and settings, the advanced tab and then organized old job related activity in one place and check the box . Once we shut the box, you see that it has now gone from off to on and then you'll save it. Now keep in mind. Once you turn on the projects feature, it's permanent. You can't turn it off. Once you turn on the projects feature, you will see the option on the left hand navigation bar. So in order to add a projects you just kick on projects. Add your first project, and then you'll give the project in name and then you'll pick a customer that the project is associated with, and you can leave a note that's optional, and then you'll save it on the project pay. You can change the status of the projects by clicking on this down arrow. Want to project is complete, you can click on complete, So if you want to cancel the projects you can click on. Cancel the transactions. Options shows you a list of all the transactions that you have for this particular project . If there are any invoices, expenses estimates for this particular project, this is where you will see that information. Also, you can add transactions to the projects by clicking on this down arrow and adding, and whether an invoice receive the payments, create an expense, creating next estimates at a time or purchase orders or from this area. You can create projects oriented reports, which means that these reports that you can create on the on the project screen are only available on the project screen. There no available under the normal reports tab, so you have the projects profitability reports, which will let you know what you have spent on a specific project. And that's a broad overview on the projects feature. I will be creating a more robust class on how to use this feature from A to B. 12. Lesson 11 The Quick Create Menu: The next item is the quick create menu. The quick create menu houses the customers, vendors, employees and other. This is where you can come if you want to create invoices or any other type of transaction for customers. Vendors. If you want to do some type of employee payroll transaction or other types of transactions now, as you can see under the quick create menu, we can create invoices for customers. We can receive payments we can create estimates for vendors weaken. We can create expenses. You can write checks. We can pay bills for employees, of course, weaken do payroll and then, under other weaken weaken do bank deposits weaken the transfers. We can also create journal entries. Now, if you remember, all the items you see that could be done under the quick create can also be done from the left hand never navigation bar. The difference is you can get to those transactions a lot quicker by using the quick create menu. And that's really the purpose of the quick create many. You can also show less if you want and just show certain items, and if you want to show more, you just click on show more now. Some of the items under the other heading may only be accessible here. For example, bank deposits. You would use the bank deposit tab if you went to the bank and deposited that. So you deposited checks were deposited cash that a client pays you. You will come in here, you click back deposits and you'll go ahead and record all of the deposits on this window. Also, we have the transfer. If you're transferring money from one account to another account, you can click on transfer, and you can achieve that in this window and then also we have the journal entries. If you want to create a general entry, you can access the gentle inch window from here. Now I encourage my clients not to use journal entries. I always let them know it's always best to lead the journal entries for the accountant or for the bookkeeper if they want to make some type of adjusting entries. I personally prefer that you stick with using forms in QuickBooks online and not tamper too much with journal entries unless you know exactly what it is that you're doing or what you're trying to achieve. And That's pretty much it for the quick, create menu. It's just a place you can come to to create transactions for your customers, vendors and employees a lot faster than using the left hand navigation bar. 13. Lesson 12 The Gear Symbol: the gear icon in QuickBooks online consists of four main sections. The your company section, the list section, the Tools section and also the profile section. Under the Your company section, you can edit all of your accounts and your settings. You can also manage all of your users. So if you have more than one user of your QuickBooks online software, you can manage all the uses here. Also, you can customize all of your forms. You also have access to your chart of accounts, and I think the chance of accounts is one of the items we looked at when we were talking about the accounting tab on the left hand navigation. We're not going to look at all of the different options, but I do want to take you to the accounts and settings so you can see exactly what that's about. Under the accounts and settings you get to set up your company. So under company name, you have your actual company name and you can also include a logo from here. Then you have the company type. You have the contact information, your company's address, and you can edit all of these different items by clicking on the pencil icon under the sales tab. This is where you set up all of your sales preferences. You can customize how your forms look. He didn't set up the types of messages you want on your forms. You can also have your default email message sent with reminders. You can also turn on whether or not you want to track the quantities and pricing of your inventory. You basically just turned preferences on and on all depending upon what you want to see on your forms. Same thing with this. With the expenses tab, you can just come in here and you can turn items on and you can turn items off depending upon what you want to see that we clicked on bills and expenses. One of the questions is show items, table on expense and purchase forms. So if you want to show items table on the expense and purchase forms, this would say on If you want to turn it off, you can just check the box to turn it off if you want to track expenses and items by customer. If this check boxes checked, it's basically telling the system to track expenses and items by the customer. Also, you can mark up items. So in other words, if you purchase an item for a client and you want to intern, make money off of the the item that you purchase for the clients that you can mark it up so it buying items for clients isn't necessarily part of your business model. But for some reason you had to buy something for clients or you had to buy something to use for the client. You can actually build a client for what you have to purchase, and you can mark it up if you want to. If you click the check box, you can pre defined how much you want the item to be marked up. So this would mean whenever you have an item that you elect to be marked up if you if you say 20% that means that every item is going to mark is going to be marked up by 20% by default. But of course, you can also go in on the actual form and make the change if you need to, and you'd have to save it and then you have your purchase orders you have all the different options for your purchase orders, you conclude a default message on the order. You just type it here, and then that particular default message will show up on all of your purchase orders, and then you'll save it. And then you can configure the message for your default email message that's going to be sent with each purchase order. So how do you want to greet the client? Do you even want to greeting? If you don't want to Greeting on the email, you can just uncheck this box and there'll be no grease and used. If you'd like to use a greeting, you can check the box, and then you can pick whatever you would like to use as a greeting. You could say dear Or you could say to Do you want to use a 4 May? Do you want to use the title just the 1st May in the company display name. So you have all these options and all these preferences that you can company accounts and setting area to configure under the list heading. You have all of your company's lists. You have the all lists, you have products and service lists. You have re occurring transactions list, and you have all of your attachments Now, even though you have the products and services and the re occur mentions actions on the lists. If you click on all lists, use also see those same lists. And here we have the re carving transactions, and you have the products and services on the old list. You also have to a chart of accounts. You have your custom forms and styles, your payment methods will terms and your attachments under the tools heading. You have tools that you can use to import data from outside of QuickBooks online into QuickBooks online. And you also have a tool that you can export data from outs of QuickBooks online. And for some reason, when you're exporting data from QuickBooks online, it only allows you to export if you are using the Internet Explorer. Not sure why, but that that's the case, and then also under the tools you have reconcile. This is where you can reconcile all of your accounts, your bank accounts, your credit card accounts, and I think we talked about that earlier when we were talking about the accounting tab at the left hand navigation bar where you could also go in and reconcile your accounts. And then we have the budgeting feature. The budgeting feature is a really good tool to use to create your company's budget, so it's at a budget. You just click on add budgets. They will take the name of the budget the year in which you're in, whether you're trying to do it, monthly budgets in quarterly budgets or yearly budget, and then also is going to ask you if you want to pre fill any data now, pre filling data have to mean that you have actual data from prior years. So actual dates from 2000 and 17 if you clicked on 2000 and 17. If there is data from 2017 then it should pre fill. And as you can see, it started pre feeling From August off 2000 and 17 you can further subdivide the type of budget legal creating by clicking on the down arrow and click and customer. When you click customer, you can actually create create a budget by customer. If you have a customer that you would like to create a budget for you can. You can pick and choose whoever you want to use, even if it's more than just one customer. You can. You can click any number of customers you want, and you can actually create a budget around those particular customers. Another great feature under the tools is something called the Audit Log. Now the audit log tells you who has been in the system. So if you have more than one person using your QuickBooks online and you'd like to monitor the types of things that they're looking at and it types of things that they're doing and also you just want to make sure that if something happens and you're not quite sure who did it and nobody wants to fess up, they're the ones you can actually go into the ordered log to see who changed, what's on what the event was about. So it gives you the date that the change happened. It tells you the user, whomever it is that made the change, and then it tells you the event. What did this person do? They logged in or they looked out at a particular time. They meditate something in products and services. They changed some kind of setting. You can also view the history off certain items and under the profile heading, you can change your user profile, edit your user profile, you can get feedback, and also you can sign outs underneath the profile option. 14. Final Project Assignment: for those of you that do not have a QuickBooks online company file and even for those of you that do I have included a link in the projects assignments area uses linked access. The QuickBooks online test drive company using the test right company will help you get started and learn how to use and navigate your way around with books on mine. This test drive company has sample data that you can play around with. You can create all types of transactions just to see how things look and to test certain features. Don't worry about messing things up, because once you start out of the company file all the data default back to its original state. So every time you sign back into the software, all of your practice data has been wiped clean. Hopefully, you enjoy the ride, and you consider using QuickBooks online in your company as your new book