 QuickBooks Online 2024. Navigation overview and company settings. Get ready and some coffee because we're diving into it. We're into it. QuickBooks Online 2024. Here we are online in our Get Great Guitars 2024 QuickBooks Online sample company file that we set up in a prior presentation. Remembering that when we are in our actual company file represented by this company file here it might still be useful to have open at the same time the QuickBooks Online test file so that we can use it as a sandbox testing out transactions in it before we put them into our actual company file. That leads to the question then how can I open the QuickBooks Online test drive file at the same time that we have open our actual company file. The first thought that would come to mind would be well I'll just add a new tab here and then we'll search for the QuickBooks Online test drive. However sometimes QuickBooks could have a problem with that because then we would have two company files that are open in the same browser possibly using the same account. So an easier way to go might be then to either open another browser we're currently in or I am in. First a word from our sponsor. Yeah actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers they don't want to be seen with us but but that's okay whatever because our merchandise is is better than their stupid stuff anyways like this CPA thinking cap for example CPA thinking CAP you see what we did with like with the letters and this CPA thinking cap is not just for CPAs either anyone can and should have at least one possibly multiple CPA thinking caps. Why? 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If you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com the google chrome so we could open something like firefox or we can open up the incognito window so the incognito window in google chrome can be found with the three dots up top most other browsers have some form of incognito window that you can find as well and then we can open a new incognito window and you can see here that it says incognito and then we can type in our quickbooks online test drive so this is the easiest way i think to find it searching for quickbooks online test drive looking for the result that has into it.com in the url into it being the owner of quickbooks here's the test drive and then we can go into the united states version of it and verify that we're not a robot and so i'm going to continue i'm going to close up this first tab and by doing that i can actually have these two things open at the same time here's the sample company file representing our actual file here's the test drive file also a sample company file but this is the craig designs and landscaping this file already has stuff in it it already has reports generated it already has a chart of accounts that is inactive and is being used whereas this file has just been created from scratch doesn't have anything in it so if you're imagining that you're actually using your company file and you have transactions that you're not fully comfortable with you might have this one open test out the transaction over here before you actually put it into your company file noting that if you try to open this up in the same browser then again you could have problems with it the the idea of the incognito or separate browser would be you don't have the cookies in it already so quickbooks is not going to try to open it with your actual account it's going to be opened with the default basically account and hopefully not cause you any problems to have both windows open at the same time so for now i'm going to put that in another screen that's just a tool that you want to be aware of all the time last time we set up this company file from scratch so there's nothing in it we haven't done any data input we haven't adjusted the chart of accounts as of yet we haven't entered any items inventory or service items customers or vendors or any beginning balances when you first set up the file quickbooks will often give you this checklist here which can be useful but over time this home page that you first open is one of the most changeable things that quickbooks online has meaning uh quickbooks online because it's a web-based software will vary the look and feel of the page a lot a lot more than quickbooks desktop which can be good because in theory they're trying to maximize the look and feel of the website interface for users however in practice i think most likely you have different developers that basically are even if you have the optimal output or the optimal website they would still change it because that's what developers do so the website is probably going to be changing all the time however the use of the software will be in essence the same because it's simply the double entry accounting system so we're not going to spend a whole lot of time going through the checklist here we're just going to go through basically the setup process which which would probably be the same no matter what kind of the the checklist that they give you so let's just do a quick look at these those so here's the basic business information you covered all your basics this helps you you get through there get ready to invoice so this is going to be your invoicing process they're probably going to try to upsell you on uh using the quickbooks checking so you can you can pay through the checking which we have another course or section on you will recall that we had some of these items in the setup process as we went through the interview process in essence with the setup get paid online so this is one of those things where they're trying to have you use uh possibly the the quickbooks payments again to get paid faster but it might be an upsell type of situation we have another course or section on that if you want to look at it in more detail organize expenses start tracking your expenses link business accounts so this is the bank feeds we'll talk about the bank feeds we have a whole course or section on that payroll has its own area to set up so we'll talk about that a little bit here in future presentations with this practice problem we have whole other course or sections in payroll because it's its own it's its own animal it's got its own stuff which is quite detailed uh get the free mobile app and so this is their mobile app to snap and scan receipts that we also saw through the interview process so we can get into those items here we can also get into these items through other areas as well so if you don't use this checklist that's okay we can get to all we could turn on the bank feeds by going to the banking section and we can do all these things from other locations as well now the other big thing that has changed over time is that they've been changing this ribbon on the left hand side and uh classically it's looked like this is kind of similar to what it started with at the beginning and then some developers I think we're thinking it would be nice to move away from the idea of formal accounting language and try to appeal to people possibly that are small businesses that that that want a more casual kind of interface on the left hand side I think there's pros and cons to that however because it sounds it starts to sound a little bit like uh like accountants that use the formal language might not like that meaning they might feel like they're not very appreciated that you're kind of using very you know the casual terms so I think they actually left that because most of the people using QuickBooks are probably accountants and bookkeepers who have learned these professional terms right so what I mean is if we go to this cog up top we have to switch to the business view down here now if I switch to this business view and I look at this this screen on the left switching to the business view we no longer have a huge difference between the business view and the accountant view before they changed things like like the sales area here which I might call a customer center or something like that they changed it to get paid or something like that and they they they change this one to pay out or or pay someone out or something and so they changed these terms to really casual terms they had a pretty interesting interface over here once you went into those windows but I think those those terms they did an ab testing they had the two these two formats and it looks to me like the more traditional format one out between their ab testing so now even though they have both the switching still between the accountant view and the business view there's not a big difference between the two and it looks to me like now they've gone back to the accountant view being the default so that's what we're going to use we're going to assume that's going to be what they're going to do going forward because it looks like that's that that's where they are going that's why we update the the course from time to time because that's one of the things that will change they'll change the look and feel of the website the other view was fine you can find all the same stuff was in it they just they just formatted it a little differently and tried to make it you know casual language which might actually make it more difficult in some ways you would think because the formal language often has a reason that it's formal because it's it's trying to really identify what exactly you're doing but in any case so we're going to be in the accountant view we're not going to be switching back to the business view too much because it looks like the accountant view is basically the default that they're going back to at this point in time now quick review on the basic screen formatting you have the center of the screen here which is this display screen so the first time we open the quickbooks this display screen will be the dashboard oftentimes and it's kind of funny because the dashboard is like the least used thing oftentimes you're probably not going to use maybe the dashboard to go to a lot of places in part because they keep changing the dashboard so so we don't really know what's going to pop up here it's kind of a mystery it's kind of like a surprise every time you open up quickbooks to see what their dashboard is going to look like so what you typically will use for navigations are going to be the new button up top the navigation that are side drops what you might call them the bar on the left hand side and then this icon up top for the cog and possibly your icon over here but mainly the cog item and then the thing that you go into will be displayed in the middle now because this is an online software we can also adjust the screen by zooming in if I'm on I'm on a windows machine here the easiest way to do it here is to go hold down control scroll up on your mouse wheel and you can see that the size of the screen changes so this is 200 percent of the screen so that is great because if you want to get larger text or anything like that you can easily zoom into the screen because it's a web-based software however it also causes problems this screen being dynamic like this changing as you zoom in because that means the icons will actually change you can see this icons have changed up top because now I have zoomed in therefore if you're working on a on a non-standard size screen then it's likely that your icons will be slightly different due to the web page trying to maximize the screen size for for optimal use given your interface right so so if you don't see all the icons that I see you might scroll out of the screen to see if you can see it so for example all web-based softwares are designed to work on tablets now and phones tablets and phones are going to have a different size screen and therefore the layout of the screen is going to look a little bit different and you can and you can fix that or you can possibly find what is there by zooming in and out of the screen which will typically give you less options when you zoom in there's going to be less things up top and more in like a drop-down format and then when you zoom out it's going to give you more options in terms of the headers up top is the general idea also note that if you're zooming into a form if you open like an invoice and you zoom into the form it works pretty pretty well there's different formats of the invoice now and we'll talk about that more as well but if you zoom into the invoice then then that's nice because because it gives you more detail but when you start to populate the invoice and then add it sometimes being too zoomed in could have a problem or or cause issues with the data input therefore if that happens you just zoom back out zoom back out again to a hundred percent and then do the data input again quickbooks has gotten a lot better at that so if you are entering a data input form while zoomed in it usually works pretty well right now but if for whatever reason it glitches up it might be because you're zoomed in too far and that caused an issue with the with the website so just stop it cancel possibly go back in and then enter it at 100 percent the next thing to note is that you might want to have multiple windows open such as the reports you might want to have your reports we will do this every time we'll open up the balance sheet in the income statement not until we actually have something in them but once we start to build the balance sheet in the income statement we will open them up every time in another tab so that we can have three things open we can look at the data input we can see the reports there's a couple ways that you can open new tabs what you can do is you could actually right click oftentimes on the link you want to open and then open link in a new tab like this that's great because and then you can see it populating in the new tab up top or you can right click on the tab up top and duplicate the tab i'm not going to add a new tab i'm going to duplicate the tab and then possibly look for whatever you want to open within it such as the reports on the left hand side and then the profit and loss in this case otherwise known as the income statement now so that can take a little bit getting used to it if you're used to web-based software i'm sorry desktop software like a quickbooks desktop and part of the thing that needs to be getting used to is that you'd have to make sure you refresh or run the report every time you do data input because although this is on one website if you do the data input over here invoices checks and so on then this side of the screen this other tab might not pick it up until you actually run the report against you have to remember every time you go from from one time to the other run the report and if that doesn't work you refresh the entire screen up top but typically if you're looking at reports which is usually what we use this for you can just refresh the report and it will work and you don't have to refresh the entire page here let's go back to the first tab now when we when we do the actual data input then the general layout is going to be if i'm working on something that is a data data transaction meaning these are things that happen on a cyclical cyclical basis their normal transactions normally they will be up here in the plus button the accounting system is cyclical right it repeats typically on a month by month basis and within this accounting cycle there are smaller cycles or different timing cycles that repeat such and we can break them down into the customer or you can call it sales cycle revenue cycle accounts receivable cycle vendor cycle otherwise known as expense cycle purchases cycles you can call it or a payable cycle and then employee cycle otherwise known as like the payroll cycle and these three cycles will be more or less complex depending on the type of industry you are in the industry often requiring more advanced or less advanced things such as an accrual basis on the customer side invoices and bills versus a cash basis being on the customer side you would have the sales receipts or possibly using a deposit form versus on the vendor side you would be a cash base using expense or check forms and payroll is an accrual thing if you're running it within quickbooks if you have payroll outside of quickbooks by a third party vendor you might be able to use more of a cash based system we'll talk more about that in a future presentation so that's the general idea there now once you do the data input of these forms then you also have to track your communication with the people we're doing business with as a bookkeeper meaning customers vendors and employees how do we do that we go into what I would call the centers over here like the sales center is what I used to be called in the old version the customer center and we can manage and track our customer information for example and so we'd have our customers over here on the expenses on our vendor side expenses which I might call the vendor center I still call it that because that's there we have our vendors and then on the payroll side we have what I call our employee or payroll center over here and then we can process our payroll if we're doing payroll within the system so that's the general navigation process now when we're setting up the company file we have to then do that one time setup process that needs to be the foundation like if you're making a building if you're building like a building or something like that an office building or a house the first thing you need to do is put down the foundation before you can have the cyclical things that would go on in the house the day to day to day living or whatever right so how do you do that well you'd have to then that's usually in the cog so within the cog we have our lists which are going to be the found fundamental kind of things that we need to set up and we'll go over those in our setup process with our new company file the main ones being the chart of accounts that we'll take a look at in more detail later and then the products and services those are the main two lists that we would have to take a look at and then you could the other ones are important but they're not like the foundational things the payment methods the terms attachments tags if you're using them custom fields if you if you need the custom fields and the recurring transactions but the big ones chart of accounts products and services those are the lists that once they're set up you're not going to be looking at them all the time i'll go back to the desktop although you look at them occasionally but but those are the foundational items you need to set up first when you start a new company file so those are in the cog up top also in the cog are our company information account settings and whatnot and then manage users and that kind of stuff these are the these are the foundational type of items so we'll talk more about the lists and these foundational items in future presentations right now i just want to look at the account and settings so let's go into this one because this was set up when we when we did the interview kind of process so we have the company information up top the company name and so on and so forth if i go into this you could add a logo i'll just add a quick logo here i can add this and then add a logo this logo might be something that you can use to populate on your invoices and stuff for example so i'll just add this guy as a logo and obviously you might want to look to see how you can optimize you know the size of the logo and make sure you have your professional logo company name showing on sales form and purchase orders connected to the business network i'm going to say that's the same as the company name and then the e in number notice that you're that you this is got uh one two three four five six seven eight nine a nine digit number now if you're sole proprietor you might not have a company number if you don't have any employees the e in number is called an employer identification number in the united states if you don't have any employees you might ask why do i need an employer identification number you may not but if you're working with other businesses like many small businesses do then they're going to want to issue you a 1099 and if you don't have an e in number they're going to want your social security number which one isn't secure because now you have to give them your personal number and two doesn't look as professional so if you don't have an e in number you might want to get one even if you're a sole proprietorship with no employees pretty easy to do go into the iris website and you can do it basically online at this point in time i'm pretty so you can check that out if you want to so company type so we set this up in the setup process we said we were a sole proprietorship versus a partnership limited liability company small business so on we talked a little bit about the differences between these items at that time so i won't go over it in detail here we put our industry in place so notice this is something that you can change if you didn't have it proper in the first setup process noting that because you can change it you can see that it doesn't really have an impact on the chart of accounts which you would think would be the main impact when you first set up the company file and then you've got the company email the email might be important because you that might be on the forms that we're going to be putting in place such as the invoice form customer facing email we're going to say it's the same if you want a different one you can uncheck that the company phone number i'm going to say nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine so that might be important because it might be on the forms as well and this show on the sales form so we might say this is website dot com so right whatever our website name maybe it should be get great let's just put ggg.com no that doesn't work for some reason let's say website dot com so we'll save that that might be on the forms the address so here's the address address where your company is based this could be important because if you do billing information it might be necessary if you have shipping information then that might be the default and with sales tax the the state that you're in and locale might be important as you set up your sales tax which we'll take a look at later so we set that up when we did our setup process uh company address what you entered yes i'm going to say dude and then customer facing address notice this is the same so i'm going to say yep keep it as the same legal address i'm going to keep that as the same if it were different then of course you can change it there so you have a different billing address possibly for the payments that you're making to quickbooks versus your company address you can change those which might change things like what the sales tax is going to be calculated based on and what's going to be on the invoices communications with uh into it down here uh you have your options on this side as well so that's the general setup process that's what has been put in place in essence when we set up the company file you can see a lot of this stuff was in basically that interview process i'm going to close this back out i'm going to say do you want to leave without saving i'll say i'll say do i want to leave without saving i think i saved it so i'll save it and i'll say yes and so that's the setup process that we have thus far so going forward then what we will do is we'll go back into this cog and we'll take a look at some more detail of some of the items in here like the users for example and and then we'll take a look at some of the lists and set those up we'll set up our our products and we'll set up our chart of accounts and then we'll enter our beginning balances that'll be the first part of the course that we'll need to lay out and then we can get into constructing our transactions using the forms and we'll do that from scratch so as we do that we'll see the creation of the financial statements balance sheet income statement and related reports as they're built from the base up from nothing on up and we'll see that process and then we'll do you know bank reconciliations and we'll do period end adjusting entries and we'll also track this information in the center's customer center or sales area vendor center expense center and the payroll centers to see how we might manage the communication with our our business affiliates the vendors customers employees as we go through our standard accounting cycle