 QuickBooks Online 2024 Vendor Expense Purchases Pay or AP Accounts Payable cycle. Get ready and clear your mind because we don't overanalyze, we intuit within to its QuickBooks Online. Here we are online in our browser searching for the QuickBooks Online test drive. The primary tool we'll be using for the first part of the course looking for the result that has Intuit.com in the URL because Intuit is the owner of QuickBooks. We'll be choosing the United States version of the software and verify that we're not a robot. Let's open up our financial statement reports like we do every time. I'm going to right click on the tab up top so that we can duplicate that tab. Right click it on the tab as it is thinking so that we can duplicate it again. As that's thinking I'll go back to the middle tab down to the reports on the left hand side like we do every time going into the balance sheet report which should be one of the favorites. Back to the tab to the right down to the reports on the left hand side this time opening up the profit and loss or income statement type report and so that's our normal setup we have in the first tab where the data input will be happening then we have the financial statements balance sheet and income statement which will be populated and formatted adjusted as we do data input the data input forms typically being found in and under this plus button. Remembering the primary goal of us at the bookkeeper or as the bookkeeper to primary goals one being to create those financial statements we're doing the data input to create the financial statements at least in part for United States businesses to do income taxes and also for our own reporting needs and possibly for other external users of the financial statements that we might have to provide this information to and as the bookkeeper we want to facilitate our communications as smoothly as possible with the people we do business with those including the customers the vendors the employees and others so what we want to do now is look at this by cycle we're going to start off with the vendor cycle when we think of the vendor cycle we're thinking of the money is going out at the end of the cycle so we might be on a cash based method we might be on an accrual based method but at the end of the cycle we would expect that we're purchasing goods or services why because we're going to use those goods and services in order to help us generate revenue in the business and eventually we're usually going to pay for those with an outflow of money. So first thing to note here is that the term vendor whenever we look at these terms in in QuickBooks software we have to understand which side of the table we are on because when we use these kind of terms they have a different structure or different use possibly in normal language possibly a different use when you're talking about accounting which usually means or something that someone who sells stuff right a vendor would be someone who sells stuff and then from accounting software it could be even different possibly even more restrictive such as in this case vendors aren't just people or companies that sell things they are the people that we we buy stuff from so notice that we might say that we ourselves are vendors in a sense because we sell stuff to people so we are a vendor but we have to think about the side of the table that the terminology is pointing to when we're using software so when we're using most software and definitely with QuickBooks the term vendor means that that's the people that we're usually paying money is going out in order for us to be purchasing something customers on the other hand of course are going to be the people that are paying us we we are also customers as a business because we're the customers of the vendors it's just we're on the other side of the table so we can also define ourselves as customers but clearly when we're looking at this from the software perspective the customers are the people that are going to be purchasing goods and services for us and therefore at the end of that cycle we would expect money coming in in that case so we're looking at the vendor cycle here so the first thing we need to understand is the flow of the forms that are going to be involved in each of these cycles you want to start to visualize the accounting process as a cycle and have cycles within the full accounting cycle meaning you might the whole process is going to repeat possibly you could think of it as monthly because then you you create the financial statements possibly on a monthly basis and do the the bank reconciliation possibly adjusting entries and then within those cycles you have you have the cycles of the vendors customers and employees which might have their own timeframes as they turn over as we purchase stuff as we try to collect our revenue for the accounts receivable and revenue and as we pay our employees for example so each of these cycles we want to think of differently because they could be a little bit different depending on the industry that we are in and the type of company that we're running so the easiest way to see this to me is to look at a flow chart so we're going to jump over to just a flow chart over here this is once again a desktop version of the home page but all we're looking at are the forms the forms are in essence the same for any kind of accounting system so we're just going to follow the forms and then of course we're going to use the forms that are in the QuickBooks online to when we actually enter the forms so just one more quick look over here you'll note that when I see the drop down you see the forms here but they're not in a flow chart format so we're going to jump over here and just see them in more of a flow chart type of format so we're going to start from the easiest kind of cycle for the vendor cycle the purchasing cycle and then we'll get to the more complex cycles so what would be the easiest system you could possibly set up for the vendor cycle it would basically