 QuickBooks Online 2023 Account and Settings, Billing and Subscription, Usage and Sales Tabs Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online Here we are in our Geekray Guitars practice fire. We started up in a prior presentation using the 30-day free trial. We also have open in another tab the free QuickBooks Online sample company, which can be useful to have open at the same time we're working in our company file. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free 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. We're going to be using it here to look at the differences in location using the business view and the accountant view. We're currently in the business view for get great guitars as can most easily be seen by the icons on the left side. I'm going to go to the cog up top and switch it to the accountant view, which is my preferred view. This is the more kind of formal view that I am more used to. But as we go through the practice problem, I'll try to show where things are located under both views. It's the same stuff, but it's going to be located or housed in different locations with different names under the two views. I'll try to toggle back and forth to show that as we go. Now, if you want the sample company open at the same point in time as your company file, you're going to have to open it in an incognito tab, which you could find in Google Chrome by going to the three dots. And then you can open an incognito tab or you can open it in another browser. For example, we here are in Google, you could open it in Firefox or something like that. If you try to open it in the same browser with just another tab, you might run into problems because Intuit's going to try to log you into your account, which is going to cause you problems to get into the sample company file. Okay, we're also zoomed in a bit by holding down control up on the scroll wheel. I'm currently at the 125% on the zoom in. First, a quick recap of our objectives. Obviously, the business objective is revenue generation. Our objective in the accountant department or as a bookkeeper is to facilitate and record financial transactions to create the end result financial statements, balance sheet income statement or profit and loss and related reports so they can be used for whatever they are needed for. At the least you would think income tax preparation and we want to do so as easily as possible. So the business can focus most of their time on whatever they do to generate revenue and less of their time on facilitating and recording financial transactions. We also want to facilitate our financial transactions in such a way that we have good relations with the people we do business with those being the customers, vendors, employees, other. So how we do that when we first set up the QuickBooks process or the QuickBooks file is one, we set up the QuickBooks file, which we did in a prior presentation. Two, we set up the underlying foundational items, which is what we're working on now, which includes some of the items in the cog up top. These being things like the lists, the chart of accounts, the products and services and the settings that we're going to be using, which we're going to be going through more here. Once that has been set up, then we can start doing and facilitating the data input which is typically done by the items in the plus button, which are breaking out by cycle here. And this is what actually creates the financial statement, balance sheet and income statement. And then we further facilitate those transactions and communicate who we're doing business with customers, vendors, employees by using the various centers, which is why what I would call them on the left-hand side, such as the sales area or the customer center, the expenses, which would be the vendor center in my thought process and then the employees, of course, on the payroll side of things. So right now we're still in the setup process. We're going to go up to the cog up top and look at the account settings. We just set up the file. Let's go into our account settings here. Last time we looked at the company information. Now we'll look at the billing, the usage, the sales. So in the Billings tab, this is where we have the information that we used in order to set up the file. So this is what we're basically paying for at this point in time. We got the QuickBooks Plus. Now, obviously we're on the free trial version. So this would be after the free trial. Remember the price is inflated because we use the free trial. So if you were actually to purchase the software, it would typically not be this much money because you're going to look for a discount or something at that point in time. But that's that we have the upgrade. So if we needed to upgrade the plan here, downgrade the plan. Now remember that QuickBooks has different tiers of QuickBooks online. QuickBooks online is different than QuickBooks desktop. But once you're in QuickBooks online, there's different levels of QuickBooks online, which you could basically think of them as adding features as you go up to a higher level within the online software. So therefore it's easier to go up a grade if you need more features. It might be more difficult to downgrade because you might be used to using some of the higher grade features. So just kind of keep that in mind. You want to use the grade that's going to be covering what you need, ratchet up as you need to do so, but be careful when you ratchet up that it's difficult to ratchet back down because then you're going to be used to whatever you've been using. Then we set up the payroll, which also has different tiers that you can use. Remember that payroll is one of those things that you got to think, do I want to do payroll within QuickBooks or to hire someone outside to help me with the payroll? I would really recommend getting advice on that. But we turned on the payroll for the 30 day free trial so we can show some payroll transactions here. Obviously again, you can upgrade, you can downgrade, you can cancel the payroll. Be careful on thinking that you're just going to test out payroll and then switch or something like that. That's not really what you don't want to tinker with payroll really. Some things you can tinker with. If you're trying to fix something, you can try to mess around with it until you fix it. But payroll is not usually one of those things. The adage would be measure twice, cut once in my opinion. It's not like you want to cut, if you're building something, you don't want to cut the piece of wood too short. Then try to fix it by gluing it back together or something that becomes a mess. Then you got the QuickBooks live full service bookkeeping. These are other features that you could possibly look into. Get live support. They're going to give you more support on the bookkeeping if you go into that. QuickBooks online payments, accept payments online. This is an option to make it easier to accept the payments. It's kind of an add on type of feature. We might dive into that in a future presentation in and of itself. Checks and supplies. Get the products you need to help your business easily and effectively. They're basically selling you checks and supplies here in this one. It's kind of almost a sales thing. But you can look into those. There might be some helpful information. Let's go into the usage information. These are your usage limits for QuickBooks online plus. If you need more room, upgrade to a plan with more capacity. Find out more about usage limits. We're using the plus here. We have the different grades of QuickBooks that you have to pay more for. We talked about when we set up the QuickBooks file, some of those tiers. Sometimes if you get larger, these are the types of things that you'll have to basically upgrade on. You can go into here and see when you might need more room and basically have to upgrade at that time. It's time to power up, get more room and functionality you need with QuickBooks online advanced. Accelerating invoices create invoices 37% faster. Custom rules. That's one of the other things that you can often want to do when companies get larger. They want more customization with the people that are using the QuickBooks file so they can apply internal controls. So manage your team's access, priorities, circle member, and so on and so forth. So if you start to have a whole lot of information in the system, then you might have to be upgrading once you hit some limits. So then we'll go to the sales tab here. So within the sales tab, you got the customization, customize the way forms look. So if you go into this item, you can work on those major forms and usually we're thinking about forms that are going to external users. So those forms will typically be the invoice, the estimate, the sales receipt. So because those are the forms that you're given to basically clients generally. So you might want to customize them, put your logo on them. I think we might touch on that a little bit more later, but we won't dive into that now. We're going to use the default forms for the practice problem and concentrate on the financial transactions that we're going to be entering into the system rather than the look of the form in general. But you can dive into that in more detail here. And we might go into it in another section. I'm going to go to the cog dropdown to get back to where we were, account and settings again. And then we were in the usage area. No, we were in the sales area. Then you've got the sales form content. So these little plus buttons will give you more information about it. So the preferred invoice terms. So an invoice represents a bill and it would only be used if you were on an accrual system, meaning you did the work first like an accounting firm or law firm. You send the invoice and then you have to collect on the invoice. Then the question is, when is the invoice due? The default here is 30 days. So whenever you make the invoice, the default will be that it's going to be due within 30 days. You can add more custom fields if you have more fields or something different than that here. You got the preferred delivery method with the option of none print later, send later. And then these little comments give you some nice little information on it. The delivery method default determines the way you'll deliver sales forms to newly created customers. You can change the default delivery method for a customer by editing the customer on the customer list. So you can go into the actual customer and change that default setting by customer. So I'm just going to keep it at the default for none now. Shipping, which would only be applicable in certain scenarios, adds shipping field, date tracking number, destination subtotal to sales form. Related settings are in the advanced chart of accounts and shipping accounts. And you could turn that on or off when applicable. I'm going to keep it on the default of off at this point in time. And then you've got your custom fields. So if you need something that you would like to track that's going to be on some of the forms and you want to add a field for it, which can be useful when you're trying to sort your data, sort your invoices, then you can look into the custom fields here. And then we have the custom transaction number. So we're going to keep the default on that lets you view and change your transaction number. So we'll keep that on as the default service date adds a service date field. If you need to track the date, a service was performed separately from the invoice date. So note that when you when you actually send the invoice, that's when the QuickBooks system will record revenue. If you're on an accrual basis or when you're on an accrual basis, you will do the work first. Then you're going to invoice the client. Now it's possible that you actually did the work before you issued the bill, because maybe you had to then figure out the hours or whatnot in order to issue the invoice or the bill to the client. So now the invoice date is different than the date you did the work. So there's still kind of a disconnect, a timing disconnect there to when the work was actually done and the data input form in the system. So you have this adds a field date if you need to track the date a service was performed separate from the invoice date. So that could be useful in some cases to kind of get your timing right. So adds a discount field to invoice and other sales forms related settings. So you can add a discount if you need to on the sales form so that you have like a discount that you can apply there. And then the deposit deposit as a deposit field to invoices. So you can subtract a customer deposit from the total to calculate the balance due. So when you have like an invoice, you can, if they gave you a prepayment or something like that, or I'm sorry, put a deposit down or something, then you can add that to the deposit field. And then you've got the accept tips, accept tips from customers on sales receipt and invoices. This is a default setting that will apply to all future invoices. So let me open up the discount and the deposit fields just to check those out and then open up an invoice. So I'm going to save that setting. I'm going to close it. You don't have to do this because I'm going to turn them back off, but just to give you an idea. If I go to the plus button up top, the sales forms are invoice forms and the sales receipt forms. So we're in the customer side of things. If I go into an invoice, then if I was to populate an invoice, we'll enter invoices later, but you got the customer field, you got what you're selling down here, you've got your total. And now they've added this discount, this discount item that you can apply here. And then you have your deposit item. So if they give you some money on the, you know, for a deposit, then you can add that field here as you create the invoice. So those, those are those fields. Now, if I'm going to turn those back off, basically these fields will go, you know, away. So I'm going to close that back up. And then just to see that, I'm going to hit the cog button. I'm going to go then to the account settings and then go to the sales side. And then we're going to go to these items. Again, I'm going to turn them back off just so you could see the forms change. Close that back up plus button sales form. And so, so now we don't have those fields. So unless you're using them, it's sometimes useful not to have them in there because then you have a less cluttered field. So you have some customization on what's going to show up on your invoice. Closing that back, hitting the cog button again, going back into our account settings back into the sales area. So that was, and that was that. And then we have the tags here. Let's you add tags to track sales. So this is another kind of custom way they can, can add another layer of tracking. We might look at tags in and of themselves, but they're kind of a specialty usage type of thing. We've got the products and services show products and service column on the sales forms. That's on by default. So it's going to show the products and service items by default. We'll keep that. It can show the number. It can show the number here, but we'll keep it off by default. Turn on price rules. So this is kind of a new thing that's in the beta at this point time. Price rules allow you to provide discounts for specific products to certain customers for a specific amount of time. So it gives you, you know, more optionality or customization over that process. Track quantity and price rate. So that's on by default adds quantity and rate fields to sales forms. We have that on by default. We'll keep that on here. Track inventory quantity on hand. So obviously if we have the tracking of inventory noting that with inventory, there's multiple methods you can use to track it. You might try to stay in a cash based system and basically just expense the cost to get sold when you buy the inventory, which could only be used if you don't have that much inventory. You have a just in time kind of system. You're buying inventory for a sale that you're going to make quite quickly. You can use a periodic inventory system, tracking the inventory outside of QuickBooks, or you can turn on inventory tracking, which will track not only the dollar amount of inventory, but also the unit, the units of inventory. That's what we're going to practice on here. That's one of the differences between the levels of QuickBooks software by the way as well. That's why we had to level up to the plus in essence here that we're using. I believe the main one so that we can track have the capacity to track inventory. So we got the late fees default charge applies to overdue invoices. So when you send off the invoice and you say it's going to do it's going to be due within 30 days. What if they don't pay you? Well, you could try to turn on the late fees at that point in time. And if you turned on the late fees, then you've got a flat fee that you can apply the grace period and so on your default settings for how much you might charge basically for the late fees. We're going to keep them off here. Then you've got the process invoicing. You need to unsave the changes. I'll say yes process. So create multiple partial invoices from a single estimate. Now an estimate is something that you might do depending on the industry you're in. It's typically using like a job cost system that you might make before you create the invoice. If you're in a type of company that has has long term jobs. The job is happens over a long period of time. Then you might have to bill, you know, as you're as you're going. So you might have you might then use this method for that. So normally we do the work first and then we bill the client or we bill the client at the same time that we're doing the work. But if we have these long jobs, that's when you could have it like a like a different revenue recognition kind of principal percentage of completion completed contract. Those are specialty areas. We're going to keep that off as the default, which is the default. And then you've got your email message sent with the forms. So most of the time these days when you send out your your information forms, usually like the invoice is the most common one. You might have a message that's going to send out by default when you email it out. So instead of mailing it, we've got the email. It says use greeting deer versus so you could, you know, say to if you want or have it blank and then full name, or you can choose whatever methods you want to address them as company name, first name, last name or so on. And then and it should pull that information in from the customer data that we enter when we add customers, which will do in a future presentation. This is for an invoice. The estimate is another form that you might provide, say to a customer if you have a system where you're using estimates, the credit memo kind of reverses a sale. So hopefully we don't have to use that too often. The sales receipt is something that you might provide at the point of sale less common to present it to the client, because it might be an internal form, but it might be an external form as well that you give to the client. And then the statements are the things that you create periodically to summarize all the invoices that might be outstanding. So if they haven't paid you, for example, and then the refund receipts. So these are items that you might give to the client. Here's the default message for each of them. So here we've got the invoice, the subject line, and then we appreciate your business. Please find your invoice details here. And then, of course, it'll give an attachment of the invoice so you can customize this message. If you so choose for the invoice for the estimate, please find your estimate details. So on for the credit memo, your credit memo is attached and so on. And then the sales receipt, please have your save the sales receipt below. And then your statements, your statement is attached. Please remit payment at your earliest convenience. And then you've got the attached of the statements, which is like a summary of all the stuff that's outstanding. And then down here, you've got your estimates and and email me a copy so you could have them email you a copy and then and then there's that. So let's go to the reminders, default email message for invoice reminders, automatic invoice reminders. So now when you go through the accounts receivable process, if you're sending out invoices and that would only be the case if you're on an accrual system for the sales area, because you might get paid at the same point in time you do the work or you might get paid through gig work or something like that. But if you have to do the work first and invoice clients, like a law firm, like a bookkeeping firm, like a landscaping firm, then you also have to follow up on the billing for any invoices that are unpaid. You could try to automate that and try to try to say that it's going to make the automatic reminders so that it'll follow up hopefully allowing you to collect more on the receivables and do less of the constant managing of the receivables. Because you can give them reminders automatically. So online delivery, email options for all sale forms, show short summary in the email, show full details in the email, and then you've got the attached the PDF attachment. So these are your options, additional email options for invoices. So you've got the online invoice, the HTML and the plain text. And so then let's look at the statements. These are the things that you're sending out periodically again to follow up on the outstanding invoices. So you can list each transaction as a single line, list each transaction, including all detail lines. So notice that you've got fairly short invoices, meaning you don't have a lot of line items on the invoice. Then you might just list each transaction, including all the details because there's not a whole lot going on. But if you have these really long invoices, then when you send out the reminder, maybe you don't want all the added detail on the invoice because the invoice is really long. So maybe you end the statements, you list each transaction as a single line because it's like a summary. And then show aging table at the bottom of the statement. This is like a little table that'll show up at the bottom showing how past do it is. It looks kind of nice. It's on by default. I would keep it on by the default. All right. So those are the settings we're going to be rolling forward with with our practice problem will continue on with the rest of the settings in a future presentation and closing this out. I don't think we did. We went anywhere really different between the business view and the accountant view so because the cog is in the same location up top under both views.