 QuickBooks Online. How to access the software. Let's 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 then 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. First question how do we get access to the software QuickBooks Online and how can we do so for as cheap as possible while still having the tools necessary to get the most out of this course. First we'll list a couple different options you could use to access QuickBooks Online then we'll go into each of those options in more detail discussing the pros and cons of each of them and how that method of accessing QuickBooks Online can utilize and fit into the course. First into it often offers a free 30-day trial period which is a great tool to practice with the software. They also often offer a free student version which in essence gives you an extended period of time past the 30 days to practice which which is great. They have a free test drive which we'll talk more about shortly and then when buying the software you might want to look into discounts talking to someone who is a QuickBooks user or your accountant who could possibly find some discounts on the purchasing process. First let's talk about the free 30-day trial period. Now this is the first one that of course would come to mind in a practice course such as this but we do want to note at the start that this will be a long course it might take you more than 30 days to really fully maximize the utility of the course. For the first half of the course we're not going to be using the free 30-day trial but rather will be using the test drive. So I want to point that out now so that you don't access the free 30-day trial and then kind of waste the time frame of the 30-day trial as we're working in the test drive so that you can maximize the utility of the 30-day trial in the second half of the course when we're going to be starting a new company file. Obviously the downside of the 30-day trial is that you typically only have 30 days in order to practice with the software and you don't have any data in the practice file so oftentimes it's not the best place to start because the best place to start is often with a file that already has data within it so that you can then deconstruct and see how the financial statements were built that's why we'll use the test drive for the first half of the course. So while the 30-day trial typically is available you probably don't want to access it right away if you're going through the course from start to finish. If you want to start in the middle of the course when we're going to be starting a new company file that's the time to start the 30-day trial. Note that you also might have your own QuickBooks file with your own company data in it and that's a great tool as well. In the first half of the course we're going to be deconstructing what has been put into the company file and you could follow along with your own data in that part of the course although even then you might want to use the test drive file because your data will be more similar to what we're using or possibly go back and forth between the two of them. In the second half of the course you're not going to be wanting to enter new data into your QuickBooks file. So if you could still get access to another version or get a 30-day trial version of another company file at that time to practice with that would be a great tool. Now when you access the 30-day trial it used to be that you would go to the Intuit Purchasing page and there'd be a little toggle above the purchasing page. It would look something like this and there was a toggle that would say here's the 30-day trial or you can get the discount. At this point in time they've removed that toggle and you have to go to a completely separate page in order to access the 30-day free trial. The easiest way to get there is to just type into like a Google search a free 30-day trial for QuickBooks online or something like that rather than go into their actual Intuit website because the Intuit website will be driving you to the purchasing page which doesn't currently at this point in time have that toggle as it used to. So you want to type in it'll look something like this down below will go into it in more detail in future presentations. When you're doing the purchasing of QuickBooks here the purchasing plans will talk more about them in a future presentation. Then you've got the free student version. So if you are a student you can look at the Intuit requirements to be qualified as a student in like an institution an educational institution generally then you might get access to something similar to the free 30-day trial but possibly have a longer time frame than 30 days which would be great. That would be a great tool the longer you have that would be better because we will be doing an extended project and it could take longer than 30 days depending upon your work schedule within it. Then we have the free test drive. Now the free test drive is great because you can access it without even having a QuickBooks file you can go into just an incognito mode in your browser even and access the QuickBooks online test drive. The reason this is a good tool is because it already has data in it so it kind of simulates a situation where you're going into a job in the accounting office and you're not setting up a new accounting form or a new accounting software but instead are going to be working in accounting software that has already been set up and then you're going to kind of deconstruct what has been done in the past to give you guidance on what's going to happen in the future and that's what we'll do for the first half of the course. We'll take a look at the end product the financial statements the balance sheet the income statement related reports we'll think about how they were constructed and we'll be able to drill down on the financial statements to get to the source data input forms used to do the data input to record the financial transactions to create the end result of the financial statements. So that's the best way to start navigating around the system. If you start a new company file without any data in it you don't really have anything to navigate through all you can do is just basically start entering data at that point in time. That's why the test drive is the first thing that we're going to use for the first half of the course and it's a free tool to use. Once we have an understanding of how to how the financial statements are put together how they're constructed from deconstructing them then in the second half of the course that's when we'll start a new company file and that's a good time to use the free 30 day trial if it is available because you want a nice fresh company file at that time with nothing in it so that we can practice putting down those foundational items like the general ledger and the items to make the data input as easy as possible. And then of course when buying the QuickBooks software you might want to talk to a QuickBooks professional or your accountant to see if you can get any kind of discounts on the purchase of the software.