 QuickBooks Desktop 2023, download and open sample file. Let's get into it, within to it, QuickBooks Desktop 2023. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. In prior presentations, we downloaded the QuickBooks Desktop installation software from Intuit, the owner of QuickBooks website, resulting in this icon. We ran the software resulting in the installation of the QuickBooks Desktop software, this icon. Now we want to think about opening a company file. Want to give a quick recap of what the company files are because note they're going to be something different than the software. We want to make sure that we can locate the company files and we're also going to have backup files. We want to be able to organize those to understand them. I'm going to go through the analogy that you're probably getting sick of at this point in time just to drive the point home. And that is if you think about this as equivalent to say Microsoft Word software, notice that the software will be opening up the files which you can think of as being equivalent to the Word documents. You can have multiple Word documents that can be opened by the Microsoft Word program. With QuickBooks, you can have multiple different company files that can be opened with the QuickBooks Desktop program. You may not have multiple files because you might be using QuickBooks for only one company file, but it's similar in its nature in that you could open multiple kind of company files. Now, unlike the Word documents, the actual QuickBooks data files can be quite large. Therefore, you might want to have backups of the data files which will be zipped backup files. We'll talk about how to create those in a future presentation, but notice what we have here now. We've got the actual software which is different from the data file. We'll look at the data file now which is different than the backup files which is going to be a zipped type of file. We want to be able to organize all those things. If you open up the QuickBooks and you just start a new company file, it's quite possible that QuickBooks will then put that company file in some place where you do not know where it is. You want to make sure you know where it is because if something happens to the QuickBooks software where it doesn't tell you it doesn't open directly to the company file, then you're going to be searching for your software that can be concerning, that can cause some worry, so you want to know where it is. I'm going to open up this folder. This is going to be a folder that I'm going to try to store the company files in so we can make our comparison. I recommend setting up a folder where you're going to put the new company file that we're going to open up. Within here, I've got the QuickBooks backup files which is just a folder where I'm going to try to put the backup files. I've got the QuickBooks data files where I'm going to put the actual data file, the thing that's actually going to be open similar in our analogy to the Word document. Now the data files, you want to make sure that you put them in their own designated folder because it's not just one nice tidy file. It kind of comes along with like 10 other things that are attached to it. So you'll be tempted to just say, I'm just going to throw it on my desktop, you know, no problem. But the problem with that is that then your desktop gets quite cluttered because it's not just one nice tidy file. So you want to be able to put it in its own folder where it's not going to clutter anything else up and you want to be able to know where that folder is in case there's any kind of problem so you can find it later. The backup files we'll talk about later, but those are going to be zipped files, which typically you don't want on the same hard drive as your data files because one of the purposes of the backup file is that if your hard drive crashes, you can find the backup files which will be some other location. We'll talk more about them in the future, but I'm going to put them side by side so we can kind of just distinguish between them. So I'm going to be opening this up. Also just realize that when you're starting and working with QuickBooks, there's two couple scenarios you might be using. You might be having your own company file that you already have data in and then you would be using that company file entering more data in the future. You might be doing bookkeeping for a company which once again already has a data file set up and you're going to be taking what is already there and move forward or you might be opening up a completely new file so that you're starting from scratch on your own business for example. I believe the best way to learn QuickBooks is first to look at a data file that has already has data in it and then we can see and we can deconstruct what has happened from the past with the data already in the file. Then it's good to then start a data file. That'll be the second half of the course when we make a data file from scratch because that helps you to build something that hopefully you have some concept of in your mind after having looked at a constructed data file already. So what we want now is to open up a data file that already has data in it and try to deconstruct, navigate around it, see what has been happening before we go in and start a new company file which we will do later. So I'm going to double click on the QuickBooks software and I want to open up the data file that is given within the software. Now note when you open up the software it might open to the company file that you've been working in. If it does you could go to the file tab up top and close the company file up top not the whole thing just the company file that'll take you into the intro screen here. Just a quick recap on this intro screen it's got some of the data files that are recently have been opened here. If you hover over them it'll show you the mapping on where they are located on your computer. If you do not know where your data file is because you started QuickBooks in the past and it just buried it somewhere on your C drive find it, locate it, make sure you know where it's at because if this thing goes away then you're going to panic. You're not going to know where it is. You're going to think it got disappeared or something like that. You want to know where the actual data file is. So make sure to find the data file. In the future we will be creating a new company file. That's not what we'll start out doing but if you were going to create a new company file that's what this button is. You can also do it by going to the file and new company up top. You could restore or open a company file an existing file. So if you had existing files that you've been working with and they're not up here for example this will be a locator tool you also have it up top open or restore. This would be similar to you finding the Word document for example that you want to open using Microsoft Word software. The comparison here being finding the data file that you want to open with the QuickBooks software. So and then we have the open a sample file. This is the one and you also have this finding option. So if you can't find your you could try to do your finding item over here. But this is the one we want to look with. We want to have the QuickBooks sample file. So they give a couple nice sample files which hopefully will be the same as people work with them. So we'll have a similar set of data as we deconstruct that data and try to try to get an idea of navigating the software before we then later create a company file from scratch and then construct it from the ground up. So if we go in this drop down you got two company files once a sample product based business and the other is a service based business. Now I'm going to try to use the product based business so we're going to do the product based business because it's going to have inventory. If and so the idea here being that we're going to use the more difficult kind of thing inventory being more difficult than not having into inventory and if you don't have to deal with inventory then you can kind of peel that away and think about it just a service kind of business and you don't have to deal with the inventory. So we're going to try to use the little bit more difficult components when possible to have a wider net to help more people and then if you have a simpler situation then that's great. So if I click on that it will take a few moments to download the sample file. Do you want to continue? I'm going to say yes, let's continue. It's telling me where do I want to put it. Now just put it in some kind of random area here. I want to go to my desktop. I don't want to put it just on the desktop because remember if it's a data file it could be cluttering my desktop. So what I would like to do then is put it into this file I set up QuickBooks desktop and I want to put this. I think it's going to unzip it right into the data file so I'm not going to go to the backup. I'm just going to put it into a data file and then I'll keep the name as it is and you can see down here that it's a QBW. That's a data file. That's what it means. That's the file name rather than a backup file which is a QBB I believe. So I'm going to go ahead and say okay let's save that and it should then unzip that and open up the data file which I know where it's located now. So it gives us this warning you're opening a QuickBooks desktop sample file so use the sample file to practice while learning QuickBooks. Don't use it as your company file. Okay. Okay QuickBooks. Okay so here we have it. Add into it. We were continuously to perfume our software provide you with the best so on so far I'm going to go ahead and say okay. And so here we have it. So now we've got the sample rock castle constructions you're on an advanced version of Trackmyle. I'm going to close this and it gives me some intros. I'm going to close that. So we're in the sample rock castle construction. Notice they got some customized colors and so on with it. It also has this, you're using the sample file up top which is different than if you were to open up your own company file. So the coloring could be a little bit different because it's a sample file and they got some custom stuff in it but that's the general idea. Now the thing is that this already has some data in it so if I go to the reports for example and I just open up a report we're going to have data in the report and we can now deconstruct the data and that's why we want to start with a file that already has something in it. So this is going to be the file that we're going to use. Now just to get an idea of it notice that I could close this file I could go to the file tab up top and then close the company file close the company and that takes me back then to the intro page here and within the intro page you can see this as a recent file that I opened. If I don't know where that file is and I hover over it you can see it gives me the mapping of it so then I can go ahead and find it if I don't know where it's located so I make sure I know where it is. Okay so now I'm going to close the program just to see where that data file went I'm going to close this out so now we've got the installation software we've got the actual program and then in here this folder is where we put our data file so I put it under the data file right there and you can see again I'm going to make this larger icons that this is the actual data file but I put this other junk in with it now if you were to move this file I think you can just move this one file even if you didn't move the other stuff then this is all you really need but like I said if you were to download this just on your desktop it gets messy because you have all this junk in it so you probably want to create a different data file possibly a different data file for each new company file might be the best way to go so that you have all this stuff doesn't get really cluttered around and if you work with multiple company files that becomes an issue just make sure you know where that file is located in future presentations and also just know if I right click on this file and go to the properties here you can see this is a QBW file a .QBW that's the data file so and if I go back next time we'll do a backup file or not next time but in a future presentation we'll see a backup file and see the difference we have this program we've got the data file which is kind of so this program is equivalent or similar to Microsoft Word program in our analogy the data file is similar to a Microsoft Word document in our analogy which is the company data file and then we're going to have something that's outside of our analogy a zipped file which will be a compressed component or another which will be like a compressed copy of our data file outside of our our company file so we'll get into that later but just note that when you open the data file now I could just double click on my company file here and usually it's just right in my open windows so a lot of times people don't know where it is because they just open it from here and again that could cause problems later you want to know where the company file is or you could do it like you would with a Word document go into your this is the less common way of doing it just double click on the on the data file and that should then open up the program most people don't do it this way but you can and that kind of I think drives home the point that you could have multiple data files and it drives home the analogy of the data file being similar to a Word document if we're comparing QuickBooks and the data file and to Microsoft Word and the documents it gave me a little issue there but there it is now it's opened up so we'll talk more about how to navigate around within our data file in future presentations accounting I don't know anyone in accounting