 QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Homepage Overview Let's do it within 2-its, QuickBooks Desktop 2023 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. This 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. In prior presentations, we downloaded and installed QuickBooks Desktop. We then set up the sample file, which we've located here on the desktop. So I'm going to open that up just so we can see that file. I put that into the data files. So there we have it. There's the actual data file in our analogy to Microsoft Words. This is the actual program similar to Microsoft Word program in our analogy. This would be similar to the Word document it being our data file. We could open up this file by double clicking on it, similar as to what we would do with a Word document possibly. But usually in QuickBooks, we first open up the program. So I'm going to double click on the program and then open up the data file within it. Now, if the data file was the last file I had open, it might open directly to the data file. If not, it might go to this screen showing us the files that we had recently opened. Most of the time, the easiest thing to do is just open the last file, which is right here, which is usually the file that we will be working on, especially if we're only working on one file all the time, our company file. But if for whatever reason it does not show up over here, then we could open it this way. We can go to the open or restore down here, or I can find that same thing by going to the file dropdown, open or restore or here. I'm going to open or restore this time. I'm just going to open not restore because this is not a backup file. It's the actual company file. So I'm going to say next and then I would locate it with our dropdown. So there it is. There's our sample file. I'm just going to open that up and open the sample file here. Here we are in the sample rock castle construction. Just a couple of reminders that they have some custom coloring up here that might look a little bit different than your company file. That's just some customization in the sample file. Also, we increased the size of the icons to make it a little bit easier to see. We did that by going to the windows settings here on the actual computer and we went into the display settings and we increased the scale. So if yours are looking a little bit smaller, you might not want them as large as I have them here. But I'm trying to make them large so that you can see them as clearly as possible in a presentation format. Now, usually it's going to open to the prior things that we had open. So the home page opens by default typically. And then if we had any other forms, they're going to open on the right. This screen on the left is going to give us some options to help us to navigate from. And the screens up top, these dropdowns are going to give us some items that can help us to navigate with. The items in the middle are the things that are going to be displayed where we're usually going to be working with the data input screens and reviewing the reports. So you can imagine this place in the middle being where you're going to have like multiple windows that you might want to be toggling between. And then what you're going to be doing within those windows driven by in part the dropdowns up top and the items on the left hand side. Usually every time I open things up, I want to see the open items, which will help me to toggle between the windows on the right. I want to have that on the left hand side. So we'll go over some of this stuff here later. Usually every time I open this, I'll go to the view dropdown and say, I want to see the open windows. That's just going to be automatic for me going forward. Here's the open windows list where we currently have the homepage and the profit and loss. I'm going to close the profit and loss. And after every presentation, I'm most likely going to close everything up. Or if I don't close everything up when we start each new presentation, I will try to have everything closed up other than the homepage so that we can work with it. Now, noticing this gray area in the middle, you can see that I have this window. So this window I can kind of move around as you can see in other windows programs outside of the system by grabbing the top format of it here. And oftentimes I have these three icons, which are similar to what we see in the windows program. I can close it out. I can maximize the screen. I can minimize it. Now we don't want to get these options confused with the options of the QuickBooks itself. The whole QuickBooks program, which has these options, I can hit this window, for example, and then move the whole QuickBooks program in a similar fashion. I'm going to maximize the QuickBooks program. This is now maximizing within the gray area of the QuickBooks program. So typically you're going to want to maximize this because I'm not going to toggle around between the screens with this. Usually I'm going to use the open windows over here to toggle between the different reports, like say we have different reports open. Now the other thing that will usually open, I'm just going to be kind of routine. We'll talk about reports later, but the two main financial statement reports that are going to be impacted every time we do something are the balance sheet and the profit and loss, otherwise known as the income statement. So usually we're going to go in here and go to the reports dropdown every time they're in the company and financials. We got the profit and loss, the P and L, otherwise known as the income statement, which we'll talk more about later. And there it is. I'll typically change the date range for like a year. So I'm going to say 010124. That's January 1st, 2024. The easiest way to type it in there is like 123124, just like that without any dashes or anything like that. And that's usually the easiest way I hit tab to toggle through. We'll talk more about that later. But there's one of our major financial statements. The other one being the balance sheet reports dropdown company and financial and the balance sheet, which is right here. These are the two major reports. And I'm going to change the date up here, 123124. So we're working in the future as to when I'm making the recording, which is 2022. This is often the case with the sample files. I believe because they want to make the sample files sufficiently into the future so they can last a few years without basically having to update them every year would be the general idea. So now you have the toggling in the open windows on the left hand side. So we could minimize this and toggle this way, right? And then see the different reports. But usually I'd like to maximize everything and then use the open windows to toggle between the balance sheet, the profit and loss and the homepage. So you can see this middle area then is kind of where we're working in the display area. And then when we're trying to toggle around or do something within it, we are going to use the options on the left and the dropdowns up top. Now this homepage is going to be something that's quite useful from a visual perspective, especially when you're first starting out. I still use it even now after I've been working with QuickBooks for a long time for certain things because it just gets you that nice visual of the flow chart. This is the way you kind of want to visualize things in your mind is to have this kind of flow chart in your mind and breaking out what's going to happen within QuickBooks by the flow of activities. The vendor cycle, the customer cycle, the employee cycle. We might call those different things. You might call this like the payment cycle, the bills cycle, the vendor cycle, the accounts payable cycle. You might call this the revenue cycle, the customer cycle or the accounts receivable cycle, the payroll cycle, then down here. But this is a great way to kind of visualize how things are going to be happening. Once you have the activities within the homepage visualized, it might be easier to use the dropdowns up top to find certain areas. So you can go up to the dropdown up top and find many of the same items. This dropdown setup being similar to if you remember way back before like Microsoft Office had the ribbon up top. They had basically these dropdowns, same kind of format here. And this is a pretty easy way to navigate. Once you understand things, you're probably going to use the dropdowns more and more rather than the homepage because you have to toggle to the homepage in order to see the homepage. But again, great tool to have that being the homepage. Within the homepage, we have the major cycles, the vendors, the customers, the employees. We want to be imprinting these cycles in our minds. This is how we want to be visualizing the processes. And then within each of these cycles, we have the major forms, these forms being the tools that are typically used to enter the actual financial transactions that are then used to create the major financial statements and the related reports that being the balance sheet and the profit and loss. So in future presentations, we're going to go through each of these cycles and look at each of these forms within each of these cycles and consider the impact as we enter these forms on the financial statements, the main financial statements being the balance sheet and the profit and loss or the income statement. As we do this, remember that there's terminology differences that we have to keep in mind. If you were to take financial accounting in college, for example, you're going to learn standard financial accounting, double entry accounting terminology. When you move to QuickBooks, we still have that terminology that we're going to be using, but we also have some terminology specific to the software of QuickBooks. So for example, when we start looking at these forms, then the names of these forms are going to could be specific to QuickBooks. The fact that these are going to be forms, when we're thinking about QuickBooks, that means basically a data input form. The forms are going to be the things that actually drive the entering of the transactions. From a financial standpoint, that would be the journal entries, the double entry accounting, which is the impact on the major financial statements, the profit and loss and the balance sheet. We can also just see it clearly here where we have the profit and loss, which standard financial accounting terms in the US usually would be called an income statement. So we have some differences in terms of that terminology. We want to keep that in mind because when we're talking to different people, that becomes important. If you talk to an accountant who has never worked with QuickBooks, they just work in other fields of auditing or something like that, then they might not know the accounting terms within QuickBooks as much. They just know the accounting general accounting terms. And if you talk to bookkeepers, then they're generally going to assume that you know the bookkeeping terminology. And you got to keep those two things straight because it can get a little confusing. We'll try to point those out as we go. So in future presentations, we'll take a look at each of these forms and we'll kind of deconstruct what is happening from these forms into the financial statements as we construct the financial statements. Remembering that the process of bookkeeping is taking financial transactions and entering them into the system to create and build financial statements, balance sheet and income statement or profit and loss, which are constructed from past financial history. That's basically the goal. We do that from a financial accounting standpoint by entering double entry accounting system. That's journal entries. In QuickBooks, the journal entries will be facilitated by the data input forms, which should make the data input easier. That's the point. We want to make the data input as easy as possible so that we can have people doing the data input fairly easily without possibly knowing exactly what is happening from a double entry accounting system point of view. But we want to understand what's happening as best we can with double entry accounting so we can set up the system properly and we can analyze if there's any problems with what is going on and we can basically step in there and fix the process. So that's what we'll go into going forward. Also note that you might be thinking that, hey, why don't I just attach this to the bank account and enter the bank feeds. We will talk about bank feeds in a future presentation. We'll have a whole section in and of itself about bank feeds. And I know that the name of QuickBooks, for example, gives the implication that you can just kind of connect to the banks and everything will be quick. It's QuickBooks. But it's still not going to remedy the fact that you have to have some understanding of the forms. The bank feeds are still going to be utilizing the forms as they do the data input. And you're really going to understand this. You have to basically understand the forms even when using the bank feeds properly. We'll talk more about that in future presentations. But also just realize some companies, it might be a little bit easier to use a bank feed process than other companies. It'll be dependent upon, you know, how complicated or different complications. Do you use inventory? Do you have to track accounts receivable? Do you have to create a cruel type of accounts like accounts receivable, accounts payable? Again, we'll talk more about that in future presentations. The end.