 QuickBooks Online 2023 Navigation overview and company settings Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online 2023 Here we are in our GitGridGuitar's practice file we set up in a prior presentation using the free 30-day trial. I'm also going to be opening up the free QuickBooks Online test drive to show that we can have those two things open at the same time. 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. If we use an incognito window or have a different browser that we open the two items in I'm currently using Google Chrome if we were to open the QuickBooks Online test drive using some other browser such as Firefox for example or we open an incognito window which we can do by going to the three dots if you're using Chrome and go to the new incognito window. Most other browsers have some other option or location to do a similar thing and then I'm going to type in QuickBooks Online test drive like so and then search for the test drive I think this is the easiest way to get there look for the option that has Intuit.com in the URL because Intuit is the owner of QuickBooks that gives us a bit more verification that this is indeed the right location. I'm going to go to the United States version of the software and then verify that we're not a robot and continue. So then I'm going to close the prior tab and now I can have these two things open at the same time. If I tried to open this test drive in another window on the right then it's going to get a little bit messed up possibly because you're logged into the QuickBooks software. This can be useful for multiple reasons you can practice things on this side on the sample company file so it doesn't actually impact your data file as we enter new data into the system simulating what we would do in practice and it's also useful because you can change the views so this view I can switch to say the business view and possibly have the other one in the accountant view so we can see where things are located in these two views which we'll talk about now. So if I go back on over when we first set up our QuickBooks file they give us this little this little checklist that could help us to set up our information. So we got the basic information set up get ready to invoice so they've got some invoicing information personalize templates add your customers so we could make our our invoices more personalized right now they're going to be the default template which are good for the data input but we might want to add information so that we can give it to external users. We'll get into that possibly more later you can watch a little presentation about that if you so choose get paid online they're trying to give us the options which might require us to kind of set up an account with QuickBooks to have different payment options so we'll talk more about that possibly later and then you've got the payroll so we set up payroll but now you got to do the setup process we'll talk about how payroll is going to be working in a future presentation and get the free mobile app so they've got information on their mobile app. I'm going to go ahead and close this I'm going to hit the three dots up top and say close the checklist those are all things we can do you know by at any time basically so done setting up why so I'm going to say close the checklist and so there we have it then usually you have in this middle screen this worksheet flowchart. This flowchart is good but QuickBooks online changes the flowchart quite often it's not as static as say the desktop version of the flowchart but it should give you some idea of of the general flows oftentimes when I talk about the flows I'll go into a screenshot of the desktop version because I think this has been more static over time and so we'll we'll jump over to that from time to time so now I just want to look at some basic navigation items note that you could zoom into the screen because we're basically in a web-based format so usually I can hold down control and scroll up on the scroll wheel and that will zoom into the screen so currently I'm at the 125% on the zoom in that's a great tool but also remember as we work through the practice problem when you're zooming in and out it actually changes the format of the screen you can see the icons up here will change so that means that if you're looking at a screen that has a different kind of layout than what I'm looking at the most extreme example would be like a phone for example then the location of the items will be a little bit different due to the fact that QuickBooks is trying to optimize where icons are depending on how zoomed in to the screen we are so that's the first thing I just want to keep in mind because I will be zooming in and out of the screen to try to focus in on the current things that we're working on also note that when you're doing data input forms if I hit the plus button these are where the forms are at if you were to go into an invoice for example and you're and you're too zoomed in to the invoice sometimes and QuickBooks is getting way much better at this but sometimes the data input can get a little bit messed up and it's not it's not populating properly so whenever that's the case you're gonna have to close out the invoice zoom back out to a hundred percent and then go back into the invoice and repopulate and that usually fixes the problem that's not as big as an issue because I think QuickBooks is getting better and better at being able to zoom into these forms and not have it cause the data input problem but if you run into that issue then just note that you can do that the other thing to note anytime you have a web-based type of software is that if you want multiple tabs open at one time then you can open the multiple tabs with the plus button but what I really want is a multiple tab that's open with the current information in it so you can duplicate the tab so to duplicate the tab we go to the tab up top right click on it and duplicate it and that gets us a duplication now once we start getting data into the system our standard work mode my standard work mode will be that I'm going to open up I'm going to go to the business overview on the right my reports which is going to be my balance sheet and my income statement and have those open on the right hand side and then do my data input on the left there's nothing in the balance sheet I'll open one up because we haven't done any data input but as we do data input we'll see the balance sheet be populated and we'll be going back and forth from this tab which is where we'll do the data input most of which will be with the plus button and then as we do that data input we'll see the impact on the tab to the right and I'll open another one up with the with the income statement or profit and loss which will see how the balance sheet and income statement are constructed step by step the balance sheet and income statement being the end result what we're trying to do from a reporting standpoint as we enter the data okay let's go back to the first tab so just the layout of the way things are going to work here is that the data input is typically going to be done with the plus button these are the typical forms and then we can navigate with these items on the left hand side we can close this hamburger and we can close the hamburger we call it a hamburger here to give us more space to optimize the space and then up top the major thing up top is the cog the cog up top has information for our company information lists these are major like underlying type of things like the chart of accounts and the products and services tools and the profile so these are kind of the foundational things that you need to set up to get your accounts set up right and everything and some of the fundamental things to get the underlying process set up which we can then do the data input on as easily as possible now also note that there's this difference between this layout on the left hand side between a business view and the accountant view so the traditional view is actually the accountant view which if i switch on over if you've used QuickBooks for a long time online you might be more used to this layout which has a little bit more options on the left it doesn't have as fancy of of the icons over here but that's kind of that's what most people are more useful for too and if you open that up then it gives you kind of your sub accounts so it's your sub categories and this breaks it out more by by what i would call cycle and then you've got the business view if i hit the cog drop down and i go to the business view then you've got some kind of fancier icons on the left hand side so when i open QuickBooks a new QuickBooks file it defaults to this business view so this one i think they're trying to market more to small business owners possibly than accountants by using you know neat icons and also using terminology that's not exactly professional terminology so we'll talk more about terminology when we when we dive into this the practice problem but just realize you've got accounting terminology and then you've got software terminology that can differ from an accounting terminology and then you've got terminology that's kind of specific to QuickBooks and now QuickBooks is using kind of like slang terminology as you can see here it's not the home page it's it's the get things done page but it's got a home next to it it's it's the business overview banking this one you got get paid and paid those are very informal kind of terms kind of kind of trendy kind of terms i would think as opposed to like a customer center and the sales center you've got your customer leads and bookkeeping down here which is a different term than is then is used into the accounting is possible less you know most of these terms are less kind of formal if i go to the cob drop down and switch to the accountant view you can see you've got kind of a more formal type of terminology where you've got the dashboard for your home page and then you've got your bank and you've got sales which is kind of like revenue your customer center and then you've got the expenses which is kind of your your vendor cycle your projects your payroll so this is what this is the view that i'm actually used to more the accountant view but i'll try to toggle back and forth between the accountant view and the business view so we could see where stuff is located in each of them they're they're the same stuff should be in both view it's just where they where they have housed them and that's also where it's kind of useful to have two windows open with the sample company and you're actually company file and you and that way you can kind of see if you could find the same location for stuff under these two views so i'm going to try to toggle back and forth between them as we do the data input now just a quick recap of the objective of the business remember if i hit the the the plus button here the objective of the businesses in general is revenue generation our objective as the accounting department or the bookkeepers are to enter the financial transactions in such a way that it is as easy as possible to create the end result from a financial perspective balance sheet income statement with in related reports which will be used for whatever goal they need to be used for at the end of the period typically and that's going to be taxes and the creation of the financial statements for internal and and external use for planning as well as as providing them to like a bank or whatever needs to be done in order to get financing or something like that and then our other goal is to facilitate our transactions in such a way that is as easy as possible to communicate with those financial transactions who we're doing business with the customers the vendors and the employees the way we're going to do that is first we set up the company file as we have done we set up the foundational stuff many of which is in the cog like the lists the chart of accounts that we'll take a look at in more depth in a future presentation and then the products and services and so on and this is the underlying foundational stuff that needs to happen so that the day to day data input is as easy as possible the day to day in data input will be done with these forms typically which most of them can be found in the new button invoices credit memos expense forms check forms bill forms processing the payroll this is all the stuff that you do basically in a day to day process and then in order to facilitate our discussion with the people we do business with customers vendors employees that's when we often go into what I would call the centers on the left hand side such as the sales would be kind of like the center for our customers so we've got our information related to the customers here's your list of customers and if I was to communicate with them I would go into here we don't have any customers yet but there it is expenses this is what I would call the purchasing cycle or the expense cycle we can go into our vendors and then of course we have the payroll so so there are those items there and so we'll talk more about navigating around there in future presentations okay so now I'm going to go into the cog drop down and just note that our setup process is over here in the company area so whenever we're dealing with our our settings in our accounts we got under the company area account settings manage users customize your styles and so on we're going to go into the account and setting right now most most of this stuff a lot of it has been set up when we started the company file but let's just first look at the company information up top and then we'll go into some of more of these items in future presentations so the company name notice you got the pencil over here if you click on it then you can make adjustments to it you might have a logo that you would add now I haven't optimized the size or anything but I just picked up a logo so there's the you know just to show that you can have a picture you can you can get into the optimization to make sure that you're you're picking up the size and shape that will be most appropriate the logo is going to possibly appear on the types of forms if you were to customize them that you give to clients major forms being the invoice form or estimate forms and then your company name showing on sales forms and purchase orders so I'm just going to type in get great guitars and so this would be the the name that you want to be showing up because that's going to be important on those types of forms that you're going to be providing to customers so it shows on the sales forms invoices sales receipts purchase forms like a bill so legal name if it's the same it would be here or you can uncheck that if it's not the EIN number represents your tax identification number even if you're a sole proprietorship then you typically want to have oftentimes an EIN still even if you don't have any employees because that's the number that you might have to provide to people if they need your business number say if you do contracting for another company they're going to need your number and you would rather not give them your social security number some kind of EIN number so we'll just say nine five nine five dash is usually kind of like the format of the EIN so obviously I just kind of made that up but that's the that's the idea so I'm going to save that and then we've got the company type so it's going to be a sole proprietorship this is something that we set up when we set up the company file notice that you can change it out here sole proprietorship partnership corporation not for profit and so on you would think this would have that an impact on the on the chart of accounts but you could see that it didn't really have a big impact on the chart of accounts as we changed it when QuickBooks made the chart of accounts so we'll take a look at that later and then we've got the industry so we pick the industry when we set up the company file and then down here we've got the contact information which includes the email address address same as the company email you might have a the phone number that you would want to add here so I'm going to say five five five five five five five and that could show up on some forms so we'll do that and then the website again which is showing on the sales forms so if you want your website you know www.getgreatguitars.com or something like that that will show up on your sales forms that will be external users you can populate that so I'm going to say save it then we've got the company address notice I just picked up an address I searched for a house in Beverly Hills that sells for like multiple million dollars or something if you're in the market and I'm just going to use that as my location so you can use that if you want a 7-1 Beverly Hills California 90210 address where your company is based this address is used to calculate applicable taxes for your QBO subscriptions and is your default company address meaning it's important because if you have shipping information it'll be important there but also if you have sales tax that you have to deal with then the sales tax in the United States is not a federal tax but based on state and local information and then it's going to be necessary to have a an address for QuickBooks to populate that and then you've got your address you've got your customer facing address I'm going to say that's the same you might have a different address for example you could you could have a different address if you need to there and then the address the legal address typically I'm going to say the same I'm going to say the same here again you could change it if you had a different address that you wanted to be populated there and then communicate with into it and if you go here to link you basically to your account with into it so that's the general overview for these settings we'll go into more of these items in a future presentation I'm going to close this back out for now and now if I was to populate say an invoice for example just to show you some of that information pulling in on the invoice note that the data input screen doesn't show what the invoice looks like it has the data input you can then go into the print preview here print or preview the invoice it needs some data so I'm going to add just a customer AAA I'm going to add a customer just for this just to show it and then I'll also add an item so I'm going to add an item I'll just call it services and we'll say for I'm not going to actually record this I just wanted to go to the print preview and print preview and so now we can see here what the kind of invoice looks like so the logo is not there because I didn't add the logo yet but just note that you've got your you know your date and your company website on the default invoice and then you can customize your invoice from there this being one of the major forms that you would be giving say to a client or a customer as you're as you're doing business and billing them we'll talk more about that later again I'm going to close this I'm not going to record it I'm just going to close it out we're not going to enter any data yet we'll start doing that later I'm just going to switch now from the from the cog uptrop and go to the business view just to note where stuff is located on the business view I'll try to toggle back and forth between the two views and so the cog is still up top the major changes are on the left so here's your your get things done page you've got your business overview that's where your reports are going to be located over here and then you've got your get paid and paid area and that's where that's where your your major cycles would be which I would call them like your your your customer center and your vendor center so here's your customer information up top and here's your vendor information on down below so we'll we'll dive into that more in future presentations