 QuickBooks Online. Increase screen size, duplicate tabs and open multiple browsers. Get ready to 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 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 will be working in the free QuickBooks Online test drive. The easiest way to find it and open it in my opinion is to search in your favorite browser such as Google for QuickBooks Online test drive. So I'm going to do that right now. Within the results I'm looking for a URL that has Intuit.com within it because Intuit is the owner of QuickBooks. That's a good indication that you're in the right spot. Now if you want to go to the Intuit website directly because you feel a little bit more secure going to the source you can do so. You can go to the Intuit website at intuit.com but it's a little bit more buried here. You might have to search around for a bit. Right now if I go into the Intuit and then I'm going to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. I'm looking at the products. I'm going to go into the QuickBooks Online and then I'm not looking at the 30 day free trial. Remember we're looking at the other free option the test drive which currently is kind of like in the middle of the page. So somewhat buried and again this is the part of the page. They change a lot so they could change over time. But here it is. There's the test drive so that's another option to kind of search around. And you might feel a little bit more secure going into their website to find it rather than the URL. But closing that out the URL is intuit.com so that looks good. And then I'm going to say that I want the United States version of it. That's what we will be working with. Opening that up we will verify that we're not a robot and then continue. Now if you have any problems getting into this is going to be Craig's design and landscaping the free or sample company file. One reason might be that you've logged in recently to your own QuickBooks account and then it tries to log you in. And basically the sample company is kind of like another login so it can mess things up. If you want to be logged in and have the sample company open which can be a great tool to compare and contrast your data to the sample data and then you might want to open the sample data in another browser or you can open it in the incognito mode. So let me just show you that's the first thing we want to keep in mind and that's a great tool because you could have multiple companies open or in a similar situation or you could have like your file open and then the sample file open in another browser or in the incognito mode to help you to practice in this file while working in your file. So one way to do that I can go to the three dots up here. This is in Google Chrome other kind of browsers will have their own incognito mode. Most of them have one and if I open in that mode this is the one that's supposed to not have any cookies in it and whatnot. So then I can search I can search within here for the quick books online test drive and then I can look for the one with the into it that looks good and open it in here and I shouldn't have a problem then that I have another quick books file open in the browser. I typically use. So that's one kind of option that you could use. I'm going to continue on and we have it open there. And notice now I can have this other window that I can pull into a second screen. I can see them side by side here and that could be a great tool. So the other way you can do that is have a whole nother browser that doesn't see you know the other the other browser right which is like I'm using Google Chrome. So you could use Microsoft Edge or whatever and then search in here for quick books online test drive and then you have the same kind of option. So now you can be in a different browser and possibly be working in a different account than what your company file is in because it's not getting messed up with the same login for two different things. OK, so I'm going to close that out. That's the first thing that want to get a handle on if there's any problems logging into this company file and how to address those kind of problems. So once in the sample file, we just want to talk about some navigation tools before we really get into the navigation of the quick books itself just in terms of how we can navigate like the windows within the system. For those who have experience working with the QuickBooks desktop version, moving to QuickBooks online can be quite overwhelming because the look and feel and the way we navigate through QuickBooks online is quite different than the QuickBooks desktop. But after you get used to it, it's not that bad. We're going to be doing some comparisons between the navigation for the online version and the desktop version. Even if you don't have experience with the desktop version and you've only used the online version, I still think it's a good exercise to look at some of the differences because we're basically looking at differences between a web based type of application and an application that's actually on your computer. In other words, QuickBooks online is basically a website, so we're going to be navigating around it in a similar fashion as we would with a website. Whereas when we look at the QuickBooks desktop, which looks like this, this is actually on the computer. So we have some different kind of navigation options. So the first thing I want to look at is zooming in. So if I go back into the website here, the web based applications are quite nice because we can often zoom in if the screen is too small. And we can do that on a Windows computer. You can hold down control and then scroll up on the scroll bar on your mouse. You also have this plus button right here. I'm at 175% zoom in 150% zoom in at this time. Now that's a great tool because it allows us to easily better see the page if we have a small page and focus in on a particular item. However, there are pros and cons with it as well. Notice that if you're looking at a website, most websites these days will adjust to look and feel of their headers and whatnot. The design of the website, the format of the website as you're zooming in. If it didn't do that, then things would get out of sync in essence, right? So that's the website is getting smarter and smarter, adjusting the icons on the website to fit within a bigger zoom or smaller screen. So if you were to open a website on a phone, for example, it would have a much different look than if you were to open it on a computer and it's trying to optimize the look and feel. That is great. However, it also means that when you're following along in a course, if I have a different zoom or different screen size than what you are working with, then you might have a different layout in terms of where things are found on the screen. So that's something that just keep in mind how zoomed in. Am I how zoomed in? Are you what kind of shape or your screen are you using? You might have to look around a little bit more in order to find a particular item based on those differences. So in the web based, I mean, in the desktop version, it's pretty much static. So you can't really zoom in and out too easily, although you could change the look of your format of your computer. So if I wanted to increase the size of these icons on the desktop version, I used to go into here or I still do. And I go into the settings on my Windows computer display and increase the size of the screen so I can increase the size of the icons. A bit more tedious to do that on the desktop. So I think that's a benefit of the web based program right there that we have the ability to zoom in. Now the next thing has to do with working with multiple screens at the same time. So on the desktop, you might be used to, for example, having this open windows, which is in the views dropdown open windows. So if I wanted to work on multiple things, I can toggle. How can I toggle between different things? For example, if I open the reports, which we'll do every time in the desktop version here. We'll do it on the online version later, of course, reports, accounting, balance sheet in the income statement. They show up in my open windows. So and then I toggle between the open windows. I can also have a have a windows based system like this so I can move them around this way. But usually I maximize them and I toggle between them and open windows. That is quite useful. I've gotten quite used to that over the years in the online version. It's not the same because we don't have that same kind of open windows capability in the online web based version. What we can do instead is we can open multiple tabs and this, of course, will be applicable for most web based type of applications. I can go to the tab up top, right click on it and duplicate the tab. I'm going to do that again. And this is what we will do every time we open the application. We'll put our major financial statement reports into tabs that we're going to duplicate right click and duplicate the tab again. Go to the tab in the middle. I'm going to open up a report here and we'll talk about how to open reports more later. But right now it's in the reports on the left hand side and we'll talk about the different views. You also might be in the business view, which is right here. So we'll talk about that in a second here, but I'm in the account view right now. And I'm going to open up the balance sheet tab to the right. And then I'm going to go to the reports and open up the profit and loss or income statement. So there it is. And then we can, this is called a hamburger on the left hand side. I can collapse it quite easily here. I can collapse it quite easily here. A little bit more easily than collapsing it on the desktop version where I have to go to the view and hide the windows. Not too bad if I want to collapse it that way. So there it is. So now I've got my reports, the end result, the things that we're trying to produce open. And I can zoom in and out of the reports as I go into them. And I have a tab on the left where I can do my data input, which is great. I can also even take these items on the right and left click on them and move them. So now I can have them on two different screens so I can basically look at my balance sheet, for example, and then do my data input at the same time if there's something on the balance sheet that I want to be pulling from. And then I can put my cursor, I don't want to put my cursor over here to try to put it back. What I want to do is put my cursor on the little tab. If I grab that, then I can put it back right there. So now they're all on the same thing up top. If I go to the left hand side, now when I do data input, it takes a little bit more time for the reports to refresh. I got to make sure I refresh stuff. So when I do data input, I'll hit the plus button. These are the forms we'll talk more about later to do data input. When we do the data input, there's going to be an impact on the end product, the financial statements, the balance sheet, the income statement, and related reports. So typically I want to do the data input and then go to the balance sheet and the income statement to see what happened. But I have to make sure to refresh these reports because it's a web-based software. I've got to run the report to make sure that it's updated and has the new information that I pulled in with the data input. That's a little bit of an extra step than the desktop version. On the desktop version, if I was to do data input here and go to the reports, that's typically pretty much automatic. Quite a fast transfer. On the online version, you got to take kind of like that extra step, which isn't too bad to just make sure that you have refreshed the screen and everything is up to date on the reports. So going back to the first tab, those are the major things we want to look at here. Just a quick look and feel in terms of, notice on a web-based program, you still got kind of like their dropdowns. And I'm in the accounting view right now. We'll take a look at the other view shortly. I'll try to toggle back and forth between them. But you still got kind of like your dropdowns or side drop windows or else you're going to have the dropdown kind of thing up top if you have a lot of options that you're trying to go to as, of course, a software program is going to have. So we've got our dropdowns up top and our side kind of format panels on the left hand side. The middle part is where we're going to display things, which will be such as the reports or such as the forms, opening invoices and that kind of stuff. Similar layout as with the desktop version, where we're going to have the old kind of fashion. You might remember Microsoft Office products like Microsoft Word before they had the ribbon. They had the dropdowns up top. It works quite well. So it's still a good system to have. And so the other thing to remember on the online version is because it's web-based, they're going to be trying to change it a lot to optimize the user ability. So for example, the biggest example we have here of this is this is kind of like the older version, the accounting version with these side panel looking like this. And they've tested the cog dropdown to switch the view to a different view that looks like this. It's kind of a fancier view on the left hand side, which the argument is would be more user friendly on the left hand side. But I also think they're trying to be kind of trendy in the terminology. Less stuffy, less professional with the term, not so usually like cool terms or trendy terms over on the business view. And the look and feel of the button has changed over the years and so on and so forth. And it will continue to change in the future because they're going to be constantly A-B testing. And I think that's a good thing because that means that they're hopefully improving the website to the point where people really like it. The problem is that even if they get it to the optimal point, in my opinion, they probably will never stop changing things because the web designers are getting paid to change things. So I would think that even if they got the optimal point, they're like, it's the best it could possibly be. They'd still want to change things because they're getting paid to change things. So in any case, that's one of the downsides that you just have to be okay with. You've got to be okay with the fact, okay, I went in here and the new button looks different now. I know my forms are still going to be in there. They're not changing the accounting. The double entry accounting system is the same, right? The basic form, you can call the expense form whatever you want. You know, you could do it. You know, make it a hip name on the expense form, money, cash, give me cash, pay, I'll pay you cash kind of thing, whatever. It's still going to do the same thing. It's just a matter of, you know, what's the look and feel? How do I get to the same stuff? And usually, hopefully they're making it easier or at least not harder. And if they do make something harder that people don't like, they will probably hear about it and they'll have to change it back. But that ever-evolving nature is something that we certainly do not have with the desktop version, which has been quite the same for a long time. And it's worked quite well for a long time. We haven't really needed, you know, any changes because they've got something that works, I think, and it is what it is. Everybody knows how to use it. I mean, you can look at instructional videos on the desktop version from way back and there's still going to be differences in them and functionality and whatnot. But the basic layout in terms of the look and feel will be pretty much the same. There's not much changing. And so for a lot of people that have worked in a static kind of application situation to move to an online application where there's a lot of movement or could be a lot of changes over times as they're trying to improve can be also intimidating, something that we just have to basically accept, be okay with and just realize that they're not really changing accounting. They didn't change the double entry accounting system. The packaging is just messing with the packaging. So we'll get into more of that in future presentations.