 Zero Accounting Software Dashboard Overview. Get ready to be an office hero with zero. 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 then 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. Here we are in our personal zero homepage. We set up in a prior presentation. The first thing I want to note is that we are on an online accounting software functioning on a website. Oftentimes with websites we have the ability to zoom in and out which we can do by holding down control and scrolling up or down on our scroll wheel. I am currently at 175 percent scrolled in. If I scroll back down, I'm at 150. Right tool that's good for our eyes so we can zoom in quickly on the website. However, there are some drawbacks. Note that most modern websites will alter the look and feel of the website based on the size of the screen and how zoomed in you are within it. So as we scroll in and out the headers for example of the website might change. That means that when you're looking at a presentation and you're working on your own computer, it could have slightly different formats of say the headers depending on your screen size and how scrolled in you are within it. So that's just something we want to keep in mind as we're working within the software. Also note that the software will probably work optimally when we're doing data input at the 100 percent zoom rate because that's the design of the website, the ideal size of the website generally. So if you go to things like drop downs, for example, it might have a little bit different look and feel on the drop down at 100 percent versus like 175 percent. So something doesn't quite scale correctly as you zoom in. You might want to zoom back down to 100 percent and take a look at it at that frame. That also is important when we get into the data input, putting things in like invoices. The invoices will also scale and if they don't scale properly, you could scroll back down when doing the data input. So this is basically our homepage. We're not actually in a company file at this point in time. So we've got our companies, if we had multiple companies we would be working with, they would be down here. If we have just one company that would be down here and we can go into the company from here. Even if you only have one company, this is great to be in this kind of homepage scenario because you could also get to the demo file from here quite easily. And that's a really useful tool. So we talked about last time that from this point, if you were just to start your own file, the next point would be to add an organization. When you add the organization, you might be able to get access to the free 30 day trial at that point. And you would think that would be logical because of course, zero would expect once you start entering your own personal data that you're more likely to complete the 30 day trial and continue on using the software at that point in time. But what we want to do at the first half of the course is use the demo file. So the demo file, you can get to a couple of different ways. You can go to the drop down and go to the demo file here. Or you could just go to try the demo file here. I'm currently in the US version. You can change your country, which is quite nice. And I might go in and adjust it. So and one of the benefits of say zero, for example, versus other software such as a QuickBooks is that QuickBooks might be more geared towards the United States. And zero might be geared towards other locations, which could be useful. So I might adjust this, but I'm going to keep it in United States at this point. But you can kind of go back and forth, which again is a great tool for practice with if you're thinking about accounting in different areas. So I'm going to close this back out, and then I'm going to say, okay, you also have the option down here, addition, business addition and agriculture, which could be quite different in terms of the types of business that we'll be dealing with. So I'm going to close that back out. Also note that if you go into the demo file and you start doing stuff with it, you start practicing, you start entering data and whatnot, then it'll actually keep that data in the system, which again, that's great. Because now you can possibly log back out and go back into it, and it's not like the demo file is going to refresh to its original area automatically. And that allows you to practice over time and enter data and see what happens with it. And then if you want to refresh the data, you can just select the refresh button, and it'll actually take out the changes that you put in place so that you're back to the original data and you can play with it in another format. So I really like that, that's nice. So then we're going to go to the, we can go to the demo by going to the drop down, or we could just hit the demo here. Let's go into the actual demo file, which is what we will be working with as we practice the navigation in the first half of the course. So again, I can scroll in, hold and control down and scroll in a bit. So I'm at like 150%. This thing up here, get to know zero, explore your demo company to learn how it works. The data is fictional, so you can test out features without worrying about making mistakes, that's great. I'm going to hide this now, we don't need that any longer. And there is our information. So the first default place that we get to is going to be the dashboard. The dashboard has some kind of interesting information in it. But it's probably not the place where you're going to be doing most of your work. It's kind of, it's a little strange, it's a little kind of ironic in the fact that the major part of the screen that we first go into is not where we usually are going to start kind of just doing stuff, right? Because, and the reason for that is that the middle part of the screen is usually the display part of the screen. So if I have a report open, the report's going to be in the middle part of the screen and so on. And therefore the stuff up top, the drop downs up top are going to be the areas where we're usually going to be going to actually do stuff. Now the stuff that we're doing is of course accounting, which is the activity of entering transactions into the system that will be used to make the major financial statements of balance sheet and income statement, otherwise known as a profit and loss. So the first thing I usually do is open up the major reports that are kind of like the end result. So let's take a look at that first. I'm going to go into the accounting drop down and then we can go into the reports up top. I'm going to go into the reports and just to focus in on our major two reports. Notice I'm scrolling in again, holding control and scrolling down. The major two reports are the balance sheet and the income statement. Now oftentimes I like to open these in a different tab so that I can have a tab to be working in and then see the effect on, say, these reports. So to do that within a Windows-based system, you could create another open Windows, which is very nice. Again, it's one of those things that has kind of its pros and cons. You got to get used to possibly having multiple Windows open, which will practice as we go. But then sometimes you have to refresh those Windows and so on from time to time. But what I'm going to do then is I'm going to go up top. I'm going to right click on the tab up top. And I'm going to duplicate the tab, right click and duplicate. So now I've got two tabs, both of them running zero. On the new tab I have opened, I'm going to open up my balance sheet, the major financial statement report that we will be creating. And so we'll talk more about the balance sheet, how it's formatted in the future. I'm going to close this item out on this side and close this out and this out. And so now we've got as of December 31st. And we'll talk more about the balance sheet later, but you can see again the balance sheet is being displayed in the middle of the format. We're not really clicking on anything in here until we're zooming down on the data. And then we've got our drop downs up top. I'm going to do that one more time. I'm going to go to the first tab. Well, let's go to the second tab. I'm going to right click on it and duplicate it. So this idea of having multiple tabs up top can be useful. It can save time. I'm going to go to the accounting drop down and then go to the reports. And then this time I'm going to go into the income statement. Sometimes it's called the profit and loss. If you worked with QuickBooks, they call it the profit and loss. Oftentimes it's called the income statement. So it's going the income statement. So we have here, let's make it for the, I updated it to January. So I just changed the date to January to December. And so there's the income statement. So we'll dive more into the income statement later, but just note the thing I want to focus in on here is now we've got a couple windows open, which is a nice tool. We can even pull this window and see it separately so I can have it on a different screen or something like that. As I do the data input, that can be quite nice. You can also possibly even try to open things in different browsers if that could be useful from time to time, although that gets a little bit more tricky. But let's go back to the first tab now. So if I go back to the first tab, we can go back to the dashboard. When we actually enter the financial data, one way we can see that is by hitting the plus icon here. And that'll give us the major forms that we use. To make the financial statements, we enter financial transactions. The financial transactions will be designed so that we enter these forms, which then enter the financial transactions. That should be an easier process if we do the underlying foundational setup stuff correctly because these forms should be easy enough for us to teach someone how to just do the data input and then the forms themselves should take care of the double entry accounting system, making the financial transactions, reporting these items properly to the financial statements and subsidiary reports, and allowing us to continue the flow of, say, the collection of invoices, the payment of bills, and so on. So we'll dive more into that in future presentations. Just a quick recap of the rest of the dropdowns. You've got the dashboard up top. You've got your business overview stuff. You've got the short-term cash flow analysis. This is going to give you, it's a nice little tool, possibly not the thing that you're going to be using all the time, but view your future bank balances based on invoices and bills. View your projected bank balance based on invoices being paid and paying your bills. So it's going to try to help you to have a cash flow tool in the future. If you're on an accrual-based system and you're invoicing people, then your revenue is going to be recorded when you enter the invoice or expense when you enter the bill, and you might want to try to project then your cash flow based on that information. So then we've got the business as a snapshot. Nice little tool. Again, you can adjust this by the dropdown over here, and it gives you some nice charts and what's not some fancy stuff. But it's probably not where you're going to be spending most of your time. It's kind of a quick recap, possibly a tool for, like, budgeting type of tools. And then you've got your invoices. So this will give you the invoices I would think of as part of your sales cycle or your revenue cycle or your accounts receivable. These are your customers, in other words, customer cycle. And so if you're invoicing people, that means you're doing the work first, sending out an invoice that you're going to collect on. So that's an accrual process that we'll go through, and you've got to be tracking your outstanding invoices. So this is kind of the area where you can do that. Now you can create an invoice by hitting the dropdown here and create the invoice. But then when you're tracking the invoices to see the ones that you've made, the drafts, the ones awaiting approval, awaiting payment, the ones that have been repaid and the repeating and so on, we'll go into here. We'll talk more about that in the future. You've got your quotes, which you might call estimates, you know, other software might call it like an estimate, not something that every company uses. But if you're creating estimates before like a job cost system, then you might have the estimates here. And then business dropdown, we've got the sales overview information. So this gives you a more recap on, you know, your sales information. Oftentimes, when we're looking at our sales information, we might be going directly, of course, to the reports, starting with, say, the income statement. But this gives us some recap, and we can also go to the statements here as well. Business will talk more about that possibly in the future. On the payment side of things, we've got the bills to be paid. So when the money is going out, then when you're paying for goods and services, you can do that by just writing checks or electronic transfers, or you might be entering bills. The bills are more of an accrual component. So we'll have to deal with tracking the outstanding bills that need to be paid. And this is the area we can go for that. So this would be like the accounts payable area. If you are working in a larger office, you might have people that are tracking the receivables invoices, people that are tracking the payables, the bills, and so on. And then you've got the purchase orders. These are going to be only there if you're dealing with inventory. So we'll, and we'd have to track the request for inventory. We'll talk about that in the future. Purchase overview, expense claims, products and services. The products and services are going to be kind of the foundational things that we're going to set up that will help us to drive the creation of invoices and whatnot, the forms that are going to help us to facilitate the sales transactions. So then we've got the accounting here. We've got the bank accounts, which are kind of part of the general ledger. The bank accounts have their own place because they're going to have a special account. They're kind of like the lifeblood of the company. You might connect to bank feeds with them. We'll talk about bank feeds hopefully in their own section at a later point. You've got your reports, which we talked about in a little bit, just with the balance sheet and the income statement being the main two. You've got your favorite accounting reports, which we chose with a nice little star. If I go into the reports, for example, you've got these stars giving them the favorites. So we picked our favorites so that we can get to them a bit more quickly in this dropdown. And then you've got your advanced item, the chart of accounts. This is a fundamental underlying thing, your accounts that need to be set up so that everything else can kind of lie on top of it, meaning whenever we enter a financial transaction invoice bill and so on, it's going to have an impact on the chart of accounts, which will then be pulled over to create the financial statements. So we'll get into some of that more in the future. The projects would only be used if you're in a specialized area such as a job cost type of system. And then you've got your contacts, all contacts, your customers, your suppliers, your contractors, and so on. The plus button, as we saw, is the quickest go to spot to do the normal data input forms. And then you've got your icon over here, find and connect apps. So if you have some specialty areas that you want to connect an app related to it for, you can go here and then you've got your more information on your account on this item here. So that's going to be the general overview. And just note that I sometimes like to compare this to a flowchart that looks like this. This is from the QuickBooks desktop version and the online version doesn't have the same flowchart either on the QuickBooks and neither does zero. They don't use that middle part of the screen. Oftentimes, it seems for the online type software, even on the dashboard instead of putting a flowchart, they often put this kind of recap stuff. I think it just looks kind of fancier. I think the flowchart is going to be a useful tool to be able to see the flow of each cycle. So what we want to start doing is breaking down the flow of the transactions and to think about the data input forms by cycle. So I'm going to refer to a flowchart like this, even though the forms might have a slightly different name and zero, the flow will be basically the same. The forms will in essence be the same as well. Once the form, you know, a bill form, an invoice form are going to be much the same. But what you want to do is start to visualize the flow of the whole process, which I think a flowchart will help with. Once you have that in your mind, you don't need the flowchart anymore, and you can just go right to the drop down plus button and choose whatever is the next step with whatever we are doing. So we're going to dive into basically each of these flow cycles and analyze the process of the vendor cycle or the payment cycle, the expense cycle, customer cycle or revenue cycle or receivable cycle, and then the employee cycle to the extent that we can. We'll do that in future presentations.