 QuickBooks Online. Software options. Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online. 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. Here we are on the Intuit website. Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks. That's intuit.com, Intuit.com. They've got the different softwares that they own up top. We of course are going to be going into the QuickBooks software. Now remember there's two major versions of QuickBooks, the desktop version and the online version. So when making a choice of software as we've discussed in a prior presentation, first question, what kind of software did you want? QuickBooks versus other types of software. QuickBooks is quite good for small to mid-sized types of businesses. Once choosing QuickBooks, next question, do you want the online version or the desktop version? We here are going to be choosing the online version. If you're choosing the online version, the next question is what tier of the online version do you want? That's what we're going to go into here. When we go into the Intuit page for QuickBooks in general, it will usually be defaulting towards the QuickBooks online. I like to go all the way to the bottom of the page because for a long time, even as their page has changed over the years, they have their list of products down here. And I can choose QuickBooks online to know that I'm going into the online version or QuickBooks desktop if I want to go into the desktop version. Now I've laid out the two general versions. You've got QuickBooks desktop and then you've got other tiers within the desktop version kind of leveling up or leveling down within the desktop version. And then you've got the online, which will have different tiers within the online version. It's important to distinguish between the online and desktop and the different tiers within them because you can go from a lower tier of the online version generally up to an upper tier of the online version without too much trouble, pretty seamless process. You just pay more money. They give you more options, right? And you can do a similar thing with the desktop version if you want to level up and get more features within the desktop version because it's not really changing the software. You're just basically in the same platform. They're giving you more flexibility and options within it. But it is more difficult to move from the desktop to online or online to desktop. You can do so, but it's like changing total accounting systems going to a completely new software in essence. They're not on the same platform. They also have, you might have heard of, the QuickBooks self-employed. And this is geared as like kind of the cheapest option for small businesses. However, we're not going to be looking at the self-employed. So I want to just touch on it right now. That's not what we'll be working with in the course. I'll look at it right now, but that's not what we're going to be working with in the course. And I want to caution you with using the software. It might be applicable for you, but notice it's not the full accounting software as like an accountant would typically know it, meaning it may not have the full double entry accounting system, which when I'm thinking about accounting software, that's generally what I'm looking to be getting. So what is it possibly geared towards? Possibly small businesses that are looking mainly to do their taxes in the United States. We got the income tax. So we need basically the income statement in order to facilitate or create the Schedule C for income taxes. So you might say, well, I don't need the balance sheet. So I don't really need the full double entry accounting system. But the problem with that is if you're not using the full double entry accounting system, then you don't really have that huge internal control of the double entry accounting system. That's why we use it. And so that's a big limitation. And if your business ever kind of grows to the point where you need to do more full service accounting, I don't believe that you can move from the self-employed option here to the QuickBooks general, the general QuickBooks tier. You can't just level up. You can't just pay them more and say, OK, give me the balance sheet. Start doing the double entry accounting system from this point forward. So for me, as an accountant, that's a severe limitation. If you're not using the double entry accounting system, you might still be able to get your taxes done, get together, kind of piece together an income statement, and that's fine. But you don't have anywhere near the level of kind of internal controls to verify that it is correct. And then you also want to do the bank reconciliation. So it's kind of like the two things that add a whole lot more confidence that any small business can really do. And so the most attractive thing about this one is, of course, the price. But again, I kind of I kind of caution to do it because as you grow, you can't level up in the same way. You can't just move over to QuickBooks online. It would be kind of similar to just go into a whole new kind of software. So I'm going to go back. That's not the one we're going to work with. It might be applicable or useful or a way to go for some people, but it's not what I would recommend even for small businesses. I would generally think you would want to go to some kind of double entry accounting system. So we, of course, are looking at QuickBooks online. And notice, even if you don't want a double entry accounting system, you want something cheaper than this, there are, you know, you could put together different integrated spreadsheets through Excel and whatnot to kind of pull in data to help you to put together an income statement, basically taking your information from the bank and creating an income statement for it. So if it's the price that's kind of a limiting factor and you just want to kind of compile an income statement, then you still might have other options than that one. That might be just as cheap or cheaper than that even. But in any case, we're going to go to the full double entry accounting software, which is going to be the QuickBooks online. Now within QuickBooks online, you've got the different versions, but each of these versions are in essence the same QuickBooks online platform. So what you need to do is think about which of these have what you need in terms of features and try to pick the one that you want. And if you need to level up, then it should be a fairly seamless process to level up. You're basically saying, OK, QuickBooks, I'll pay you more now. So now give me, you know, the added features and that should be a seamless process as opposed to moving from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks online, which is possible, but not a seamless process or going to another software entirely. It is going to be more difficult. Oftentimes, if you start at a higher tier and then move back down, if you're using some of the advanced features, because then, of course, you're not going to be able to use them if you turn them off. But the idea being that they're all part of QuickBooks online, we're talking about more or less advanced features that they can turn on and off. Now, when we go into the second half of the course, we're going to be actually hopefully looking at the free trial version. So we're going to look at the plus, which is the most popular version and turn it on and for that timeframe so that we can go through a practice file. So if you could get access to the free 30 day trial, even if you have your own company file so that you have a blank slate to practice with, you would want to do that on the second half of the course. For the first half of the course, we're going to use the test drive. So I don't recommend doing this right now. We're just going over the purchasing options so you know what they are. Note that if I toggle this to the right, that's when it turns on the free 30 day trial. They adjust the prices down below because they're trying to give you one or other of the options as we talked about in a prior presentation. So let's just go through the tiers that they have down below. The first is the simple start. So you got the income and expenses is what you would expect invoice and payments. So they don't, I don't believe they have the limitation on the invoice that they used to have. Like some, some software is kind of limit the number of invoices, which is a severe limitation. So that's kind of nice. They've got the tax deductions, the general reports. Now this is where one of the limitations are here. Better decisions run and export reports, including profit and loss, expenses and balance sheet. Notice the profit and loss and the balance sheet are the major two financial statement reports. And the profit and loss or income statement is what you generally need for taxes. If you're small, so proprietary business, because that's what you're generally going to use to basically populate the schedule. See create custom tags and run reports to see where you make and spend money. Avoid surprises by easily tracking cash flow and reporting on your dashboard. Okay, so that's nice. That's notice we have advanced reports over here though and comprehensive report reports and powerful reports. So then we've got the receipt capture. So you have still the capacity to basically take pictures of the receipts and what not kind of a fancy type of tool that could be useful in certain areas to mileage tracking. Make every mile count reliably and automatically track miles with your smartphone, categorized business and personal trips with a swipe add trips manually. So they're trying to integrate the miles and when we when we account for for the auto expense like for taxes. You've got like the mileage method and then the actual method so it could be a little bit tricky to track and they've got some neat integrations for that. And then this cash flow item might help you to be able to predict your cash flow in the future sales tax. So we can still kind of set up the sales tax, which is a great tool for QuickBooks is getting better and better and the United States. We have different taxes for different locations, state and local and in other countries to they're getting better and better at kind of customizing the tax set up estimates. So we can't even make estimates on the simple start before we invoice someone we might try to make an estimate of what's going to happen. And then the contractors, meaning reporting for like 1099s helping us to fill out in the 1099s. And then they got this item down here, which is a neat. We might focus in on this in a section of its own, but one sale channel connection so you can connect QuickBooks online to one account in your Amazon Shopify or eBay store. So this is kind of like a specialty type of need if you need to be connecting to them. Now there's a couple different options if you deal with Shopify or Amazon or eBay and how you might do your accounting. So there's a whole lot of different options, but you might have that kind of integration, which is a neat tool, even with the simple start. Now the difference is being if I level up to essentials, you can see you have a difference here in the enhanced reports. So if I go into there, we say know how your business is doing with sales account with sales accounts receivable and accounts payable. We didn't see the accounts receivable and added sales reports in the simple ones. We saw the main reports we need balance sheet and income statement. But if we want more of these sub reports, then we would we would need to level up. Now the sales reports are going to give us more detail on the sales. They've their sales sub reports. The accounts receivable and payable reports would only be necessary if we are doing an accrual kind of process. Those are accrual accounts, which you can think of accrual accounts either on the purchasing side or the sales side. So on the expensive side or the sales side. So if you have a business where you're basically doing gig work and you're just getting paid through YouTube or something like that. And you just want to get the payment and then record it as income when you receive it just with the bank feeds. Then you're on a cash based system and you may not need the the receivables and payable reports. Or if you're not using bills, but you're just paying things as they become due and you're not entering bills to track the accounts payable, then you wouldn't need an accounts payable report. So then you got the custom tags and run reports to see where you make and spend money. Avoid surprises by easily tracking cash flows. Okay. And then we have some differences down here. Connect three channels include three users. So this is often one of the restrictions that small businesses have and that they want multiple people to be accessing the software. And that's one of the big limitations that QuickBooks Online has is that they restrict depending on the on the level or tier that you have. How many users can access it? Another big component is when the accounting department gets larger than you want internal controls and separation of duties. And that becomes more complex and you got more complex stuff in the advanced version. So a bill manager meant this is another kind of key component for certain businesses. Organize bills in one place plus schedule and make payments online right in QuickBooks. Pay online for free via bank transfer or pay via debit or credit card. And so on the bill situation, you may not need the bills. So the bills are an accounts payable type of a cruel type of account. So when you're making payments in your business, then if you're making payments directly with like transfers like credit card payments or checks as they become due or wire transfers that as they become due, you're not dealing with bills. A bill means you're entering something in the system and tracking the payable and then you're going to pay it at a later time. So if you have to track accounts payable and you have accounts payable, then you would think you'd have to level up to the essentials then. And then you've got the entering of the time. Now the entering of the time, most people would probably tie it to like a payroll and you can try to payroll because you might have employees or yourself that you're entering time for. And then you're kind of processing through payroll or maybe not yourself if it's payroll, but you're going to process it through payroll. But oftentimes more importantly, people are tracking the time as they enter the time so that they can then use that to bill. So they're connecting that to their bills. They have a job cost type of system and you're tracking time in the system and then you're going to connect that to an invoice. That could be a nice tool for specialty kind of areas. And then if we level up to the plus, which they're saying is the most popular, we can see once again in the reports, we've got comprehensive reports as opposed to general and enhanced reports. The comprehensive reports stay on track of inventory. We've added inventory, advanced sales reports and profitability reports. So that's the new item, run specific budgeting, expense and class reports. And now we've got those budgeting reports and then class tracking is another kind of specialty type of feature that can be really useful for certain things where you can kind of break out at least the income statement by class. So if you have different locations, for example, then you might be able to assign a class to your transactions and print your income statement one column showing one location, the other column showing another location and then the total. Or even if you want to track personal and business in the same system, which a lot of people might not recommend, but you can kind of view it for a small business. And you can you can track your expenses as either business or or and your income as business or personal. And then your income statement can be broken out between your business income statement, your personal and the total, for example. So there's various uses for class tracking, but it is kind of a specialty area as well. And then we've got these are all the same. And then you can connect all sales channels. So you got that now unlimited sales channels. If you're linking up to other integration apps or other integration channels here and include five users. So three to five. So as the company is growing, those users become more and more important. And then you have the inventory tracking. Now with inventory, notice there's a couple different things with it, meaning you could if you have inventory, try to try to track inventory. On a periodic system, meaning maybe you track it in Excel or maybe you track it in another software and then you do a physical count or whatever. And then you make a periodic adjustment. So you're not actually tracking inventory on a perpetual system within QuickBooks in that case. Or if you want to track it within QuickBooks on a perpetual system, meaning every time you enter a bill to purchase inventory, QuickBooks not only records the inventory account, but also a sub ledger tracking the units of inventory as well. And then when you sell the inventory with an invoice or a sales receipt, it will record the decrease in inventory and related cost of goods sold automatically. It's kind of like when you when you check something out at the grocery store and you can do a self checkout and the systems telling you how much you owe. But it's also automatically decreasing the inventory to show that it's that it's been sold and tracking the cost of goods sold. So that if you have inventory and you want to track it within the system is going to be a huge differential factor that will lead people to go move up to plus in that. And that's what we'll be working the practice problem generally in. And then you got project profitability. This is a specialized tool for for some businesses that might have projects that they want to track separately. And then you can assign the tasks that you're doing revenue and expenses to the projects. And then you can track individually how those projects are going going forward. So that could be a great tool again a specialized tool, which is here if you love when you level up if you want to use that to the plus version. And then the advanced now the plus version is the one that we're going to mainly be practicing in so that's so that in the mainly because we want to touch in on the inventory. And then the advanced version. So now you've got the same stuff here you got powerful reports. So most customizable reports. So that's usually when people move up to the advanced area or even if they level up like beyond QuickBooks entirely that that's because they need more customization. They've gotten to the point where they're trying to they need they're big enough that they need their own kind of custom software for particular areas such as different locations, different inventory. So monitor critical financial metrics like revenue and cash flow at a glance. Build customized dashboards that measure performance against time period budget and more create custom tags and run reports to see where you make and spend money. So those reports there power reports. These are all the same. And then you can connect any any kind of more channels to connect here on that new option. You've got more than five users. So now you can have a bigger accounting department more people going into the software at the same time. And you can separate their duties a little bit more easily I believe is one of the items down below because if you have a lot of people in the accounting department. You no longer want all of them to have access to everything or even an entire cycle. You want to start integrating better internal controls into the system so you have more flexibility to do that I believe here as well. Business analytics with Excel. So all of the software allows you like most database programs to export reports to Excel. But what you'd like to do is is if you're using that a lot avoid manual errors and have confidence in your data by seamlessly connected advanced Excel. Use pre made templates built a consolidated reports from multiple companies and refresh your data in a single step. So that's one of the key components like if you export a balance sheet to Excel and then you make a change in Excel or something like that. Usually you'd have to make that change every time. So what you would like to do is be able to customize what's going to happen between the exporting in Excel and a little bit more making that process as seamless as possible. So all the other ones you can export to Excel but you have some more functionality I believe here. So employee expenses. So employees submit expense directly to QuickBooks saving time and reducing errors review and track all employee expenses right in QuickBooks expense records are stored in one place. So it's easy to find information batch invoices and expenses create invoices 73% faster with batch invoicing in point and send hundreds of invoices and expenses at once. So obviously if you're scaling up that's going to become more and more important. If you're not if you're not scaled up to the point where that's more important than it wouldn't be. So custom custom access. So here's where we give your team the right access to QuickBooks with custom rules. Meaning now you want to do separation of duty. You don't want to give people access to even a whole cycle. You want to break down their customization who has access to what when you're a small bookkeeper you have access to everything. Right. When you're a lot when you work in a smart larger business then they're going to limit your access. But the thing you have access to is much more complicated due to the size of it. So assigned work by transit by transactions such as deposit sales expense inventory and reports. Delicate work to users or sales reps by their assigned locations to boost productivity. And then we got a deducted dedicated account team that they have on demand training workflow automation and data restoration as well. And then just realize that the payroll option is generally going to be like an add on feature. No matter which option that you choose payrolls got its own kind of tiers and levels. Let's just take a quick look at them. If I scroll all the way down I'm going to try to go into the payroll. So now we're looking at their products again. I'm going to go into the payroll and then I'm just going to go into the pricing. So let's go into the pricing here. So note that payroll in QuickBooks Online like most accounting software is going to be an add on type of feature. It's going to cost more generally to be turning on the payroll payroll can be quite complex even if you only have a few employees. For example, in the United States because you have to deal with things like withholdings. You have to deal with the employer taxes. You've got to deal with the reporting of the forms to the IRS, which include 940s, 941s, W2s, W3s. You might have state requirements for the reporting as well. And you could have other kind of human resources that are requirements that are kind of related to payroll to make sure that you are in compliance. With those requirements as well. So you want to think about if you have payroll, how exactly you're going to deal with it and try to get it right from the start. Because it's one of those things that you want to follow the adage of measure twice cut once as opposed to trying to tinker with it until you get it right. Because it's one of those things that it's just easier to try to get it right the first time most of the time. Your two options in general are going to be, do you want to have a third party payroll provider other than QuickBooks, such as like an ADP or a Paychecks? I'm not advertising for them, but those are just the two larger ones that are examples. And they can then deal with the processing of the Paychecks, hopefully dealing with the 941s, the 940s, the W2s, the W3s. Possibly changes for different tax requirements if you have people that are in different states and so on and so forth. And you just have to then worry about getting that information into your system to properly report the financial statements. Or you can turn on the payroll within QuickBooks, which is the add on feature. You can pay more for the payroll option within the QuickBooks software, which we'll talk about more in a future presentation. Notice here that they've got this nice free toggle file, so they've kind of got some package deals that they have down here. And if you toggle it on for free, that would be great because in the second half of the course, maybe we'll take a look at that as we do our practice problem so that we can practice some of the payroll at that time as well during that free 30 day trial period. So that would be a great thing to test out at that point in time. When you're doing the payroll internally, they have different tiers and levels of how much support they give you with the payroll. But just note that you would want some support from the software because the software will be very good at helping to do some of the calculations. Because calculating like federal income tax, you have to look at tables and whatnot, it can get quite complex. And so you want the support on it also even with easy calculations within payroll, they become complex because there's so many of them. There's so many different reporting requirements within payroll and how we have to sort the data that you're going to want to have some support in payroll. And then the question is, if you're doing it within QuickBooks, how much of that support do you need? So the first thing you might think about doing is saying, which level of software do I need? And then maybe even contact QuickBooks Online for more discussion about the payroll options. Keep it in mind that you also might want to talk to someone outside of QuickBooks, someone that's not dealing with payroll like a CPA that you're just paying for advice before you set up your payroll. Because then you're talking to someone that's not a sales agent. So you might want to talk to someone for independent advice about your software in general, about QuickBooks versus desktop, QuickBooks versus other software, and then payroll. What kind of payroll should I set up? Not because I want to hire you to do it, but because I want your advice to point me in the right direction before I start talking to salespeople. So that's the general thing. When we get into the second half of the course, we're going to be looking at basically the QuickBooks Online Pro Plus. And then we'll try to turn on the payroll if we can. And the first half of the course, we'll be using the QuickBooks Test Drive, which will in essence be the QuickBooks Online Pro Plus as well. Or the QuickBooks Online Plus, possibly not the Pro Plus, but we'll basically be working in the main option. Let's just go back to the first sales page. This one right here, the most popular option, which has the inventory. So we will be doing some tracking of the inventory at that time.