 QuickBooks Online 2024 Navigation overview. Get ready and some coffee because we're diving into it with Intuit's QuickBooks Online. Here we are online in our browser searching for QuickBooks Online Test Drive, the primary resource we will be using for the first part of the course this time finding that tool and what I think is the easiest and fastest way just searching for it. We then have the results we're looking for a result that has Intuit.com, the owner of QuickBooks in the URL making us feel fairly secure that we have a legitimate resource here we're going into the Test Drive QuickBooks Online we're going to be using the United States version. First a word from our sponsor. 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 because based on our scientific survey of five people all of whom directly profit from the sale of these CPA thinking caps wearing this CPA thinking cap without a doubt according to the survey increases accounting productivity tenfold yeah at least apparently the hat actually channels like accounting energy from the quantum field ether directly in your head allowing you to navigate spreadsheets faster it's kind of like how in like the matrix when Neo learns kung fu or at least that's what the scientific survey saying so get one because the scientific survey participants could really use some extra cash if you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com it will then ask us if we're a robot and we're gonna confirm that we are not a robot and then once we're in here we're in craig's design and landscaping I'm gonna hold down control scroll up a little bit and I'm gonna be at the 125 which I think is a fairly good size to be able to see within a screen recording now I'm gonna open up some reports which is something that I want to get in the habit of doing every time that being the balance sheet in the income statement so I'm gonna go up top I'm gonna right click on the tab as we saw in a prior presentation how to do duplicate that tab as that's thinking I'm gonna right click on the tab again and duplicate it again and this is the process I do basically every time I go into quick books right I'm gonna go into the middle tab now I'm gonna go down to the reports on the left hand side and open up our major two financial statement reports which will most likely be in the favorites over here it'll almost always be in the favorites if these two reports are not somebody's favorites they don't know what they're doing or because these are the primary two reports so then let's go to the right hand side and then go down to the reports on the left hand side and then open up the profit and loss sometimes called the income statement sometimes called the P and L report we'll dive into these reports in more detail later but I just want to show that process that we're gonna open those up mainly every time because this is the end result this is what we're trying to create if you're using quick books for your taxes even you're gonna need the income statement that's what you're trying to build so you can use it to make your taxes so that's what the whole process is end resulting towards and then I'll have the first tab open which is where the tab that I will typically use for navigation purposes okay let's get into the navigation then remember that the navigation components are going to be on the left hand side or up top typically in a web design a web based type of software the middle part is where the display screen is so whatever you select will then display something in this middle area now this middle area when you first go into it will typically be defaulting on the dashboard on the left hand side so now we have in essence the dashboard open at this point in time and this middle part of the dashboard will change depending on what QuickBooks Online is doing so this is one of this is it's kind of strange that that's the place you go to first all the time and it's also the page that that will be changing the most often and it's actually the page that you're not going to be using as much usually because once you're into the system you're going to use these drop downs or side drops on the left hand side and up top to be navigating where you want to go but when so that's going to be this middle part now the way we navigate then is when we're trying to do our settings when we're trying to do something that's the underlying components of the software such such as our settings sometimes some of our lists like the chart of accounts can be found here for example then we would go up to the cog up top so if we go up to the cog up top we have your company information this is where the account and settings are we'll take a look at more of these in detail in future presentations but managed users who is using the software customized forms chart of accounts you could find the chart of accounts in other locations which would probably be what most people would do but you have it here too as well get the desktop app additional info and then you have your lists all lists lists being a specific term not maybe so much in accounting per se as for quickbooks in general when we learn terminology it's important to note that there's accounting terminology and then there's quickbooks terminology which is grounded in accounting terminology but some of times it's different so for example lists used to be a drop down that we had in the desktop version and so now a lot of the stuff that was housed in that drop down we often call lists products and services recurring transactions attachments custom fields tags tags are a special feature we might talk about later and then rules tools order checks import data import desktop export data reconcile budgeting audit log smart look and then you've got your profile and so on so these are things again that aren't your day-to-day types of transactions these are the underlying things that you do to set up the company file uh or they're basically your your account information for the day-to-day types of transactions that's the stuff that's on the left now you could get to those these items usually in multiple different ways you've got all of these windows down below we'll take a look at them shortly but if you're just doing day-to-day transactions the place you might go most often is this drop down the new drop down now over time they've moved where this button is they've have they've called it a plus only they've called it new only i think and now they've got it as a plus and a new so this is going to be the drop down you'll typically find all the day-to-day types of transactions that you'll normally be putting in place before i get into that in detail let me also just point out that quickbooks for sometimes the online program had been really testing out i would call it ab testing two pretty different web page styles that being the accounting view and the business view so if i go to this cog drop down up top you could see that you have to switch down here to the business view so if i switch to the business view you can kind of see some change on this left hand panel so if i click on this then you've got some change over here now that change is not anywhere near as extreme as it has been before because i think they were experimenting with using less accounting style language and more kind of just just casual very casual type of language was the idea and they used more symbol symbols and whatnot but it looks to me like the account view is winning on the ab testing because that seems to be the default view and they've kind of removed a lot of the the look that they were doing with the business view which i think is is probably the best way because because you know that you were using standard accounting terminology more often it looks a little bit more professional and and whatnot but in any case that seems to be what their current decision is and we know that with QuickBooks Online they're going to change stuff and we just roll with it that's why we update the course often so that we have the latest look and feel on it so you can see what's actually what's what's happening in the current time frame all right so then if i'm doing the day-to-day input it's going to be this information now if you have an accounting background you might be used to thinking about everything in terms of journal entries everything's debits and credits to build the financial statements if you don't have have a formal accounting background then you might not see it that way you might just see everything with the data input forms but in either case remember that with QuickBooks all recurring transactions those transactions that happen on a day-to-day basis we want to have a form for typically the form is the thing that will record the transaction the journal entry and that's really important because the forms will do more than just record the journal entry they'll also make the bookkeeping process the flow of the forms flow more smoothly in the system so everything that has a normal cycle will have these forms attached to it and most of them will be in this drop-down and they'll be categorized with the customers which i would call accounts receivable or revenue cycle vendors expenses cycle payable cycles employees payroll cycle and then the other stuff that doesn't fit in a particular type of cycle we'll get into this in a lot more detail later but for now let me just emphasize this point because it's really important to understand the navigation we can be a little bit overwhelmed with all the different things this is a flow chart this is on the desktop version we're using the online version but note that the flow of the forms is basically the same for any type of accounting system and the desktop version has this nice flow chart so let's take a look at what i'm talking about here so if we have the customer cycle or the sales cycle uh when we have a sale if it was a sale for and we didn't get paid yet then we're going to use an invoice right that's going to be the form that we will typically put in place to record the journal entry and then the invoice will be connected to what we call a payment or receive payment type of form when we actually get paid on the invoice decreasing the accounts uh receivable and recording the cash possibly in in the checking account or maybe into an undeposited funds account or funds to be deposited and then we can actually make the deposit so these because these are normal transactions invoices receive payments we have a form specifically designed for them and we want to make sure to use those forms if we make a sale at a cash register we have like a sales receipt type of form that is going to record the receipt of the of the payment and the revenue at the same point in time on the vendor side we have checks that we can enter or expense forms for the QuickBooks online when we pay for things uh that are going to be normal types of transactions for the cash outflow and then if we have a cruel type of systems we have bills which are going to be increasing the accounts payable the point is that any normal transaction uh is going to have a bill normal meaning it happen i have a bill will have a form to it meaning any transaction that happens quite often will have a form uh that's going to be connected to it some transactions aren't happening all the time such as the purchase of equipment that we fully finance for example we take out a loan to finance a new piece of equipment that doesn't happen all the time so we don't have a form that's designated to that particular transaction so you can see the same categories here so if i look at here we have the customers and then we have the forms that are related to the customers invoices a receipt payment estimate credit memo sales receipt we'll talk about each of these forms and more detail later and then the vendor cycle you can think about this is ultimately a cash outflow we're paying for stuff for the business expense forms checks forms bills pay bills and so on employee e-cycle this will be dependent upon whether or not you're doing your payroll or have payroll if you do have payroll are you doing it within quickbooks or do you have a third-party provider helping you with it employees single time active and then other these are things that don't fit neatly into any of the other cycles such as deposits which you would think fits pretty neatly under the revenue cycle or customers but we could have deposits from other things so they kind of put it over here transfers money transfers from from accounts like a checking account to a savings account journal entry this is the form that you don't want to use for all of these normal transactions you want to use the form and then if there is no form to use such as that purchase of equipment for for a loan then maybe you go to the journal entry but it should be the last last thing to to be using in a normal system and then statements inventory quantity and we'll talk more about the rest of those later now the bookmarks up top this is where you can put some of your saved items you got your little pencil here so this is a newer kind of feature and you can select any of the things that you go to often and add them into your bookmarked area so that could be a great tool if you want to get to certain things faster i'm not going to use it because i think their layout one is pretty good and two i want to use the universal layout so that people understand where we're going one of the problems by the way of having a really customized layout is that it works great for you but if you're trying to explain to someone else what you're doing you can't really do it because their layout is going to look totally different than your layout because you've totally customized your layout so there's kind of pros and cons to to getting over the top with these but if you use if you use some things that are a little bit hard to find i think that could be a really useful tool you also have the ability to customize the menu here as well so then on the left hand side if you remember with the desktop version i'll just i'll just remind you if anybody with the desktop version we used to have the the the cycles that would have centers in them so on the customers you have the customer center and then on the vendor you have the vendor center and then on the payroll you had the employees center so we have similar concepts over here so if you try to group that in your mind you're like how am i going to figure out all these things on the left hand side well if you think well i've got i could think about it this way by cycle right i have the revenue cycle or customer cycle the vendor cycle the employees cycle so those i can think of as centers on the left hand side so the sales center is kind of like the revenue cycle or customer cycle so if i go into the sales center you can see i have the overview and all the stuff in it here but if i just click on it then all those options are up top in the tabs so now you've got the overview we've got the all sales these are the transactions that happen for the sales side we've got invoices these are the things that we when we build the client the major tool that we're going to be using we can create invoices from here as well as from here so we can create invoices from multiple places if i'm in the customer center or sales center estimates which are going to be tracking if we have an estimate for a job before we actually invoice the job we have our customers so this is us tracking the people that we do business with that are going to hopefully pay us so of course if we have accounts payable that we're tracking we do the work we send out invoices they haven't paid us yet then this is going to be a very important area so that we can try to track who owes us the money and then we've got the products and services these are the things that we use to populate the invoices such as the things we do the the things that we sell goods and services and then on the expenses side we have the expenses over here this is going to be the expense center same thing if you hit the drop down this is kind of like where the vendor side of things is so a lot of these forms could be found also in the expense center if i look at the expenses tab this is going to be the transactions we can sort the transactions here we'll get into this later with relation to the expenses or ultimately money going out bills represent things that we have entered a bill for but have not yet paid for the vendors for our purposes vendors means people that we are going to be paying for right you might think of the vendors as a confusing term because we might think of ourselves as a vendor because we sell stuff and we are a vendor if we sell stuff but for quickbooks you gotta remember which side of the table you're on when quickbooks says customers we mean our customers which is for me a little bit easier to click in my mind when i hear vendor i kind of like i'm a vendor well it's like i'm also a customer because i buy stuff from other people but when i'm looking at quickbooks i gotta these these terms could be used in common language on either side of the table but for quickbooks you gotta know which side of the table they're talking about if you're the vendors are the people that we buy stuff from money's going out ultimately and so then we have the people that we're buying stuff from down here of the list and then the contractors and then the mileage if we're tracking mileage possibly for tax purposes that's kind of a special area we might have a little section on that to get in that in more detail if you want to and then you have the employees so that cycle is over here in the payroll so the payroll cycle so remember that we'll we'll talk about payroll a little bit more later but payroll is a special area in and of itself and you have a primary question being do you want to do payroll within quickbooks or do you want to do payroll outside of quickbooks using a third-party provider like an adp or a paychecks so that's a big question that you want to make sure you think about if you have to deal with payroll because it's it's a pain to change payroll right you'd like to get it done the done correctly the first time if possible contractors you have a question as to whether someone's a contractor or an employee with contractors we have to deal with getting their information possibly to send out in the united states to send out 1099 forms and then workers comp again an issue with which is related to the payroll so those are the primary centers here now the other big center that you'll be dealing with all the time is going to be the banking information cash the cash flowing in and out so that's going to be in your transactions over here note that most people when you use quickbooks you you might you could probably want to connect to the bank feeds and we will do that we'll talk about connecting to the bank feeds but the first practice problem we work through we're going to do it without connecting to the bank feeds so that you can see the cycle of the process because when you connect to the bank feeds they it's kind of advertised and people often feel like everything's going to be automated really easily to connect to the bank feeds and some companies it is really easy but other companies it's not as easy and once you connect to the bank feed all of this information is going to pull in here to what i call bank feed limbo and you're going to have to know what to do to pull it from here into your financial statements how do you know what to do to pull it from here into the financial statements you have to understand the normal accounting cycle and how the bank feeds fit in it so that's why the first part of the course we're going to just do a normal accounting without the bank feed the whole process and then we'll think about how the bank feeds can fit in depending on the type of business that we have but for for many companies obviously this would be another common area that we would be working in a lot of the times we'd be in the transactions these are the bank transactions here's the different accounts that you could have connected checking accounts savings accounts credit card accounts are the common transactions we also have app transactions we might have a special course that looks at or a special part or special section that looks at this in a little bit more detail if you use Shopify or ebay or amazon then you have some options in terms of how you're going to get the information pulled in from those online resources and they have these resources here for that which is nice and you've got this app transactions which is a specialized area for those types of things and then your receipts you can upload your receipts here and possibly attach receipts for example to certain forms which can help you with your audit trail and then your reconcile information is here bank reconciliations being the primary thing to reconcile those are going to be really important and we do those basically on a monthly monthly baseness you've got rules these are rules related to the bank the bank so we'll bank feeds we'll talk about them later and then you have your chart of accounts note we saw the chart of accounts up top here in the cog as well but this is probably where you're going to go more often to find your chart of accounts also note that they've moved this chart of accounts around you can possibly find it in multiple areas and they keep on kind of putting it in different places so so uh so once you find it these are the underlying accounts uh that will be that will be set up we'll talk more about it later all right let's just go from top to bottom now if i go into the dashboard you got the get things done so these are the tasks that they put up top they sometimes put this flowchart in place which is nice but it's not as static as the flowchart in the desktop version has been over time but that can help guide you you've got the business overview this gives you some nice quick a quick look at a few things like the profit loss the expenses some nice charts however it's probably not your primary place that you're going to go at least it's not for me because i opened the reports to look at most of the stuff in more detail you've got a planner up top this is going to help this could help with cash flow we might look at this a little bit more it's an interesting kind of tool that can try to project what your cash flow is going to be out into the future possibly taking into account the things that QuickBooks knows such as your banking uh information when you're connected to the bank feeds and your accounts receivable and your accounts payable possibly when you're expected to get you know get paid on that as well as invoices possibly that maybe you have reoccurring invoices that are going to happen in the future that you expect to be paid on that it might be able to pick up that information and give you a an automatic kind of cash flow and we went to the transactions we already took a look at the transactions we already took a look at the sales side we looked at the expenses side we've got the customer leads says we can curious how strong your customer relationships are connect your email to get a personal report on the health of your customer relationships with actionable recommendations for improvement so maybe we'll take a look at this a little bit more in a section it's got your customers up top the customers that are also in your sales tab your customer and then your marketing a new way to do research customers QuickBooks and MailChimp are teaming up now MailChimp is a is an app that you might be able to connect to QuickBooks possibly here and then and then that's usually helping you to send out your newsletters and and do your email marketing so it's less manual work faster communication start marketing no design skills make conversions relevant so that's interesting we'll might take a look at that more later you've got your reports now we opened up our primary reports from here balance sheet and the income statement the reports are another area that people get often very overwhelmed with because there's a whole lot of them but with the reports the general idea is that you've got two primary financial statement reports balance sheet income statement or profit and loss mainly all other reports are simply giving more detail expanding upon one or multiple items in the primary financial reports balance sheet and the income statement you've got your custom well so we'll talk more about that later you've got your custom reports so we can make custom reports and save them here we'll talk about that later you've got your management reports we'll talk more about them later as well we looked at the payroll you've got your time information so you got supercharge your time get ready to track time manage products and so much more with QuickBooks time so when you when you get into the tracking of the time there's a couple different reasons you might need to track the time obviously you've got your payroll that you might be dealing with time tracking for and then you've got if you're in a job cost type of system and you're trying to build based on time so this is a another tool we I think we might have a section on this just to look at it in a little bit more detail where it views your team's location manage time for projects and track time from any device and then you've got your time entries over here over here and then you've got your budgets note that we saw the budgets had a drop down you could find them up top and the drop down budgeting here but it says plan better with budgets now budgets aren't really there the accountant will be involved in budgets but budgets isn't what you normally think of as the primary first thing that the accountant does because the accountant is doing usually the financial statements creation from past transactions the reason budgeting is a little bit different is that it does still use the accounting format but you need more input from the owner of the business from management so you can forecast what the budget will be so the accountant can make budgets based on past information but to really get a budget that's really trying to target something the accountant needs to be working with management to create a budget and so and and and the if we data input that information into QuickBooks then we can get these nice reports that will then compare the actual information versus budget information as time passes taxes has to do with sales tax and 1099 sales tax is is going to be like a usage tax in the united states and it's uh it's QuickBooks has a pretty good system to be able to set it up at this point which helps you to notify where your location is and what taxes you might be subject to so that's a great tool we'll set up the sales tax and future presentations my accountant so an accountant team can be your best business partner so you can invite your accountant now of course many small in many business small you know small businesses mid-sized business any business is going to need to deal with their accountant at least four taxes so you can invite your accountant to get access to your financial statements for easy transfer of data so that they have the financial statements and possibly more to then do what they need to do at the end of the year possibly taxes possibly financial reports banking so this is like QuickBooks marketing we we partner with lenders so if you needed a loan future funding through QuickBooks capital so funding information commerce seamlessly connect your sales channels so again you might have if you're in the specialized area of ebay amazon or Shopify and you sell stuff inventory on them then that's a whole kind of separate world of how can i get that information into QuickBooks how much information should i be pulling into QuickBooks what should i not be pulling into QuickBooks we might have a section that will specialize on that in more detail and then you have your apps down below that if you have any kind of add-on apps you can search for them in this area be careful on the add-on apps there's a lot of great stuff out there but you want to make sure that you're you're picking what you want and the add-on in the add-on apps so you can search for the apps here and so that's that so that's the general overview we'll dive into more of these in more detail in future presentations