 QuickBooks Online 2024 Journal Entry Form. Get ready because we're moving on up with QuickBooks Online. Here we are online in our browser searching for QuickBooks Online Test Drive, looking for the result that has Intuit.com and the URL Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks, selecting the United States version of the software and verifying that we're not a robot. Opening our reports, like we do every time, reports on the left-hand side. We're in the favorite reports. Going to right-click on the balance sheet and open link in a new tab. Right-click on the profit and loss, open link in the new tab, scrolling up to the middle tab up top that has been opened. Closing the hamburger, there's our balance sheet tapping to the right. Closing the hamburger, there's our profit and loss. Otherwise, no one is the income statement. Going to the first tab, that's the setup process we do every time. Data input in the first tab, looking at the result of that data input to the tabs to the right. Selecting the dropdown, we've been looking at the cycles, customer cycle, vendor cycle, and then we jumped over here to the other forms, which are forms that we use quite often. They're used often and therefore are in the area where we have the normal data input forms, but they don't quite fit exactly into a cycle. This time, we're going to look at the journal entry form. Note that we want to keep separate in our mind the concept of recording a journal entry and entering a journal entry form. In other words, most of the forms that we have looked at within the cycles, invoices, received payment, expense, bill form, and so on, will record a journal entry in the sense that when we do the data input for these forms, they will have an impact on the financial statements and possibly related reports, balance sheet, and the income statement or profit and loss. At least two accounts will be affected. We can represent the impact on the financial statements with debit and credit format or with just an increase or decrease kind of description of the accounts or the transaction or journal entry that will be happening when we enter these forms. When we use a journal entry form specifically, that means we're going to use a form that will be in the format of the debits and credits, meaning we're going to assign the transactions directly to the accounts without the use of some other form. If you have an accounting background from a school background or a textbook, then you've probably first learned transactions from a journal entry standpoint. You start to learn the debits and credits for each of the different types of transactions and if you're then moving into a QuickBooks area, then you have to be careful not to use the journal entry form when it's not necessary, when there's another form that you could use. So remember the general idea here would be that you want to use the forms in the cycles if there's a form to use and then only when there's not a form to use or you have some special use like adjusting entries at the end of the period do you enter the transaction simply with a journal entry? That doesn't mean that you don't use your debit and credit knowledge. You do because you're going to be able to understand better if you know debits and credits or accounting double entry bookkeeping well then you'll be able to understand what these forms are actually doing. You'll be able to visualize what the impact on the financial statements will be better. However, if you're going to record a sale, you want to do it with an invoice rather than a journal entry for example because you want to be able to track the invoice in the customer center over here which you won't be as easily able to do if you enter basically a journal entry. So when would you use the journal entry then? You might use it for a transaction that doesn't happen periodically. So all these transactions in the cycles are the ones that happen periodically. If something happens quite often you would think there would be a form for it so that Quickbook can standardize it. We can make the data input as easy as possible so that someone doesn't need an accounting background to do the data input of a particular form even if it's fairly complex such as an invoice that deals with inventory for example. So then if it doesn't fall into one of these forms, the transaction you're looking at I would always ask the question is cash affected? If cash is affected then you would think that you could use an expense form or a deposit form or enter it into the check register which would be an expense or deposit form and if there's no cash affected then you might enter a journal entry for example a transaction for the purchase of equipment that you paid for with a loan meaning you financed the purchase of the equipment. We don't purchase equipment all the time so it's not a normal transaction over here and we didn't pay cash for it so we're not going to use an expense form so you might end up using a journal entry type of form in that case. You would also use journal entries possibly for year end or period end adjustments and using journal entries is on purpose at that time because that'll give you a differentiation between what you're doing in the adjusting process and what you're doing in the normal kind of bookkeeping process and that's actually nice and helpful for when you sort your reports. So let's give an example if I go into a journal entry we can see that we have just a journal entry layout and let's say we made this as of 010124 and so it's going to number the journal entry up top and then I'm going to enter the transactions directly to two accounts it's going to do so with debits and credits if you don't know debits and credits well if there's only two accounts affected then you can kind of test out the debits and credits and if you go the wrong way you can switch it if you get to a longer transaction like a simulated payroll transaction or something then it can get quite complex if you don't know the debits and credits but we can also enter the journal entries into registers which we might look at shortly as well so let's say that we were going to purchase equipment or something and we financed it so we're going to say it was equipment that we're purchasing and I'm just going to make a new account for it actually let me say equipment and I'm going to make a new account I'll just make a new account because I'm going to say it's a fixed asset account so I'm going to say it's a fixed asset account and it's going to be