 QuickBooks Online 2024. Customer Accounts Receivable or Revenue Cycle. Get ready and clear your mind because we don't overanalyze. We Intuit with Intuits. QuickBooks Online. Okay, sometimes I might overanalyze. But whatever, let's do it. Here we are online in our browser searching for QuickBooks Online Test Drive looking for the result that has Intuit.com and the URL Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks selecting the United States version and verifying that we're not a robot. We're going to open our major financial statement reports and new tabs by going to the reports on the left hand side in the favorites section. We're going to right click on the balance sheet and open in a new tab. Right click on the profit and loss open in a new tab. Double check in that going to the tabs to the right and closing up the hamburger. There is our balance sheet tapping to the right closing the hamburger. There is our profit and loss. That's the set of process we do every time data input on the first tab. We're going to see the result of that data input on the financial statements in the balance sheet income statement in the tabs to the right selecting the drop down with the plus button in the prior section. We looked at the vendor cycle. Now we're looking at the customer cycle. So we want to kind of imagine the whole accounting cycle happening possibly in a monthly cyclical process within that cycle. We have other cycles happening. The vendor cycle money ultimately leaving us typically for the purchase of goods and services and then the customer cycle ultimately money coming into the business for the goods and services that we provide. So just like with the vendor side of things with the customer side of things we have to remember which side of the table that we're on which is usually a little bit easier clicks a little bit more in people's mind because we think of our customers that's use on our mind as business owners all the time the customer. But of course we are customers as well when you think of it just in terms of business terms because we are the customers of our vendors but from the accounting side or the bookkeeping side of things for QuickBooks customers of course means that the people that we are doing what we do we provide goods and services to the customer and at the end of the customer cycle we would hope that money would be flowing in for those goods and services that we provide. All the data input forms down below like with the vendor cycle are typically forms that will result in journal entries that will be prepared and we want to make sure that as we do the data input we're doing the proper forms rather than just thinking of it in terms of journal entries because the forms give us that tracking ability from a bookkeeping standpoint so we can track for example who owes us the money and try to collect on it. So let's look at these forms in a flowchart basis first I'm going to go over here to this flowchart it looks more like a desktop flowchart but we're just looking at the forms which are basically the same for any kind of accounting process and this is just a nice flowchart to work with. So we're in the customer cycle now you could call the customer cycle the vendors I mean the accounts receivable cycle which would typically be the case if you deal with accounts receivable that means you're on an accrual basis you could call it the sales cycle sales being revenue or you could call it the revenue or income cycle. Now let's go from the easiest cycle to the most complex cycle noting the easiest cycle is going to be a cashed based system and even easier or even further to the easy side than a cashed based system one in which we can basically record our transactions that are electronic transactions from like a gig work kind of system a platform pays us for example so we can record revenue with simply the deposit form as it comes through the bank feeds that would be the easiest thing to do however you don't just have the choice as to whether you can do the easiest thing because it will depend on the industry you're in if you're in an industry if you're a bookkeeper if you're a lawyer if you're a landscaper or something like that you're probably gonna have to do the work first invoice the client you're gonna have to put in some kind of job cost system you can't just say well i'm just going to do the the easiest thing because it's you just can't do it because it's dependent on the industry that you're in if you're working in a store and you have a cash register then you're probably going to have to collect the cash in whatever format that the customers like so you can get the transactions coming and then you could so you can't just do the easiest thing which would be to wait till something clears the bank and then record something with the bank feeds so it will be dependent on the industry the industry that would be the easiest to do would be something like gig work you do work somebody pays you and when they pay you you just wait till it clears the bank and then when it clears the bank you're going to record the transaction as a deposit form but going to an income account at that point in time now note that when you do that you're not doing a full service accounting system really because normally what would happen is when you do the work you would put the information in if it was a cash based system using a sales receipt and then you would match it to what the bank did the bank then being a double check rather than recording the transaction directly from the bank however the easy thing to do if you're able to do that is and you feel secure about the transactions is simply to record the transactions after they clear the bank and because there's not a big timing difference because there's not checks involved and we're feeling more and more confident with these electronic transfers that could be the easiest thing if you're in like a gig work type of situation in a platform is paying you we also lose some information because the invoice and the sales receipt forms are usually the forms used to record revenue not the deposit form so you might lose some information from reports like running a report for sales by customer or sales by item but again that might be well worth it if you're just able to do it nice and easily by recording the deposit form as it clears the bank the second most complex one would still be a cash based system but one in which you have a cash register you're working in a store or something like that in that case you might be getting paid multiple different ways you might be getting cash you might be getting credit card payments and electronic transfers and so on and what you want to do then is be able to record the transactions at the point of sale you're not going to deposit them directly into the bank at that point in time but you typically want to have a record of the transactions and therefore you're not typically going to wait till those transactions clear the bank right and then record them instead you're going to take the cash transactions at the end of the day and go deposit them into the bank you're going to take the credit card transactions