 Zero Accounting Software 2023. Delete Access General Ledger Accounts. Get ready to become an Accountant Hero with Zero 2023. Here we first a word from our sponsor. Well, actually these are just items that we picked from the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, but that's actually good for you because these aren't things that we're just given to us from some large corporation which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you. These are things that we actually researched, purchased and use ourselves. Here we have a Western Digital WD elements 20 terabyte USB 3.0 desktop external hard drive. We use as part of our backup system noting that if you lower the number of terabytes of storage the price will lower dramatically as well. When you're thinking about a backup system you usually think about an online system or an external hard drive system like this or ideally some combination between the two giving you some redundancy. You can also work directly from an external hard drive like this but there are some drawbacks to doing that. One being if you use this as your primary drive you're working from it's no longer a backup drive and you're gonna need a backup system possibly another external hard drive and or some kind of cloud backup system and if you're working on something that takes up a lot of short-term memory a lot of RAM as you're working on it such as video editing the external hard drive can slow up the system so you might want to come up with some kind of system where you download the project you're working on to your computer to your C drive or possibly to a solid state drive which is a much more expensive external hard drive as you do the work once the work is done then save the project to an external hard drive such as this. If you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accounting instruction.thinkific.com where we have many different courses you can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model given you access to all the courses courses which are well organized have other resources like Excel files and PDF files to download and no commercials we are in our custom zero homepage we set up in a prior presentation going into the new company file we set up using the 30 day free trial that being the bank feed file now all we did last time was set up the company file we haven't connected to the bank or uploaded any bank feed information however the company file has been provided from zero with some information that being the list of accounts the chart of accounts which are used to be the foundational items on which we construct our data input using the financial transactions to be able to build our financial statements balance sheet income statement and related reports now just a quick recap on the navigation or quick look at the navigation within zero notice the part in the middle here that's where we have our display screen so when we're on the home page we could be navigating from this display screen but more often what I will typically do is be navigating from the drop down screens up top so we have our major drop down screens we've got our bank feed file this will take us back to our home page if we choose to go back to the home page and we have some other settings and options in this drop down this is our dashboard which is basically like our home page so we can always go back to the home page if we would like to be navigating from the home page the business drop down has the short term cash flow the business snapshots the invoices when we're navigating and tracking our invoices to be collecting on the accounts receivable quotes if we're giving quotes or estimates we have our bills to be paid for sorting our payables if we're entering bills tracking accounts payable and purchase orders those have to do with ordering inventory which we may or may not be using depending on our accounting system and the accounting drop down we have our bank accounts that's going to be one of the primary places we will go this time as we're working with the bank feeds we have our reports we have advanced settings here and then we have some other reports that have been memorized down below and then we have our contacts that includes customers suppliers and all of them together and then the easiest way to be navigating between actual forms that we're going to be doing data input with is with the plus button where we have our invoices our bills our contact our quotes and so on now what we're going to do is we're going to try to do most of the data input with the bank feeds but the bank feeds will still in essence be creating these types of forms as we do the data input with the bank feeds and we'll take a look at some items when we step away from the bank feeds and we have to use a cruel type forms as opposed to cashed based type forms such as invoices and so on here now what we want to look at this time is the chart of accounts that has been provided when we make the balance sheet and the income statement those reports are made from the accounts in the chart of accounts and what we're doing when we post transactions using these forms is to put these transactions basically on top of the chart of accounts to be posting to the financial statements therefore the chart of accounts is a foundational item often a complex item that people if they weren't provided a chart of accounts might be overwhelmed to build on them you know by themselves so we can find the chart of accounts down here under the accounting chart of accounts down below now zero it's got a pretty neat system up top where they have all the accounts and then they also break down the accounts by account categories assets liabilities equity expense accounts revenue accounts and archive accounts so that's a great tool because then you don't have to kind of scroll down through the entire chart of accounts every time if you wanted to kind of adjust things like we're going to do here so notice the order of the chart of accounts is ordered by the codes which are account numbers you might call them and but the account numbers that you create we have to be quite careful that we don't put them kind of out of order in alignment with the type of accounts that are involved in other words we should be putting the numbers in place that tie out to the type of account so current assets are up top we would have a cash account up top the bank account that will add later with the bank feeds then we've got the inventory which has its own account category because it has to track inventory units even though it's a current asset type of account from financial statement reporting fixed assets type of account furniture and fixture or I should say property plants and equipment pp&e and then we have the liabilities here accounts payable it's the first liability these are current liabilities and then if we had long-term liabilities we would have long-term then equity and then sales revenue and expenses cost a good sold and then expenses alright so so what we want to do then is think about is this chart of accounts appropriate for our business now the general rule I would usually say would be what you would like to do is create is let zero give you this chart of accounts it's not too bloated it hasn't doesn't have too much stuff in it it's much more reasonably length than some other software like QuickBooks online which I think one of the defaults with it is that it provides you this massive chart of accounts which has way too many accounts generally even no matter what industry you choose right this one I don't think is too too unwieldy it's not too long so the general rule would be once you start doing the data input see if this chart of accounts is appropriate if there's an account as you do the data input in here that suits your needs then use it if there's not an account that you like specifically and you just don't like the naming of the account for example instead of creating a new account go into this chart of accounts and actually just change the name of it so you don't end up with two accounts which have similar names like utilities and then an electric expense account where you might actually post to both of them when you're just doing data input and then you then you're not being consistent in your posting that's what you want to avoid and then if you're not if you don't have any accounts in here then you can add the account at that time only at that time and then after like a month or two months of data input you can go into your chart of accounts find the accounts which you don't think are useful to you because you're not using them and make and delete them or make them inactive so that when you do your data input in the future you don't have to sort through this long list of a chart of accounts it would be faster it's easier it's cleaner if you only have a chart of accounts of accounts that you're actually using and anything you're not using you make them inactive so that when you hit the drop-down to choose an account again you don't have that long massive list of accounts now usually the accounts that we're going to post to when we do the normal data input we're going to be entering bank feed transactions and usually when money comes out of our bank which is the major which what normally happens with the bank feeds money comes in that's revenue that's one account usually money comes out or goes out then it's going to be the expense accounts that's where the most of the categories are at because we pay for all kinds of different things and that's where most of the account you know types are so that's where you have the most flexibility to decide which accounts do you want to post to you do you want to have a whole lot of different accounts or do you want to have less accounts if you have a whole lot of accounts that means you have a lot more detail in your reporting however it also means that you're you're going to have a very long income statement for example if you have too few accounts you have a very short income statement easy to read but not giving you the detail that possibly you would like to have to make better decisions going forward or even to do what you need to do with it like properly report your financial statements or your taxes or something like that so what I would like to do is actually go through here and kind of clean out and remove a lot of the accounts so that we can build and create these accounts as we do the data input so you can see how we can actually create our financial statements as we do the data input from the bank feeds so I'm going to clean out everything that I think I can basically to get down to the bare bones and then add the accounts as we do the data input now you'll also note here when we're in here you can see that when it has a lock next to it that's zero saying hey look I'm not going to let you delete this account because I need to have zero space this is me interpreting zero with zero is saying you have to have an accounts receivable account that is kind of special if you're not going to use it then don't use it but we need it to have a special function of a sub ledger that will will track the accounts receivable by customers so they're going to lock that one so you can see some of the same with the accounts payable unpaid expense claims it's locked in that because it has special uses for these particular accounts so we won't be able to delete those I'm going to try to delete most everything else that I can so if I go to the let's go to the assets and look at these look at these one by one so I'm going to go to the assets tab assets tab and then if I scroll down we're not going to delete the accounts receivable prepayments that's kind of a generic account I would rather remove it and when I make prepayments I'll do it myself employee advances if we don't have employees we wouldn't be using that vendor deposits that would only be the case if you had certain industries that you would need that inventory assets I'll keep that because we might be dealing with inventory and it's got a special it's its own category computer and office equipment that's a fixed asset type of account I'm going to remove it because I might want to put my own categories of equipment versus furniture and equipment versus or furniture and fixture versus equipment according to the amortization schedule so we'll do those as we go so I'm going to remove the vehicles to I'll just clean all these out and as we add that information I will I will populate them as we go I know this is deviating a little bit from the part from the best practice I talked about before which is used the chart of accounts as it's there and then change the names as necessary but again I want to kind of show as we do the data input how we can basically build the chart of accounts from the bank feeds that's my objective here alright so I'm going to go ahead and delete these and says delete accounts you have seven accounts these accounts will be removed I'm going to say okay cool and then let's do the same for the liabilities let's see if we can clean out the liabilities accounts payable we have to keep that gift card liability that would only be there for certain places unpaid expense claims they won't let us delete that fine payroll wages payable we don't need that if we don't have employees and even if we did again we might want to customize those and if you turned on gusto which is the payroll within zero then then you would want to you know set up your accounts with that but we're not going into that now so I'm just going to remove all of these a line of credit would only be there for certain companies I'm going to say let's get rid of that suspense account would only be there for certain companies they won't let us delete the historical rounding tracking that's fine let's delete those items boom so now we're got as clean as we can be clean as me can be just like if we when we when we get out of the shower or something because we're clean as we can be at that point hopefully I don't know it's anyways so here's the equity side so we've got the owner's capital account we now it won't the only one the one that won't let us delete is retained earnings here because that's the account that's going to be used when we close out the temporary or income statement accounts to the balance sheet accounts notice that all of these other accounts are our accounts that might be dependent on the type of industry that we are in so owner's capital account is the is an account for owners like a sole proprietorship like an owner's equity would use an owner's capital account the thing that's kind of funny here and the thing that's a little bit tricky with these accounts is the retained earnings account is a corporation type of a name meaning you call it retained earnings if you're a corporation if it was a sole proprietorship you might name this account like owner's capital account but the issue with the retained earnings is that it's going to show on the balance sheet and this is the account that kind of automatically the stuff rolls into that's neat and useful but you might have to do some adjustments to it depending on the on the type of business you have you might just rename this account to owner's capital account but if you're a partnership it causes problems because zero like all online software many of them shows the net income on the balance sheet that's the thing that's kind of weird and so you have to and so that kind of messes things up a little bit when you're trying to allocate to like different partners capital accounts but in any case these are owner's capital account this is an investment account which would be like a sole proprietor type of account when you put money into the business and this would be a draws account when you take money out these would be particular to a sole proprietorship type of account if it was a corporation these would be called dividends for the outflow and the investments would be the capital or the common stock but we'll actually make these as we go so I'm just going to delete I'm going to delete these for now and we'll keep the retained earnings because that's what's going to be rolled into and we'll talk about how we might name those accounts as we do the data input from the bank feeds again so I'm going to say let's get rid of those and then the expense account the big category over here so cost of goods sold let's keep that one because we might be dealing with inventory purchase discount I'm going to remove that one we would only need that if we have a purchase discount we got subcontractors I'm going to remove that one we've got the and notice these are direct costs because they're like part of the cost of goods sold possibly we've got advertising that might be something that we use oftentimes but again I'm going to remove all of them and create the bank accounts as we go bank service charges I'll create them as we go automobile expenses business license that's a common expense account dues and subscriptions equipment rental not all companies will have that past meals and entertainment insurance and professional fees reimbursed expense wages payroll mileage reimbursement which we would only have for certain areas debt bad debt we would only have if we're tracking accounts receivable depreciation will possibly need to deal with that with an adjusting entry miscellaneous and then other expenses these two seem somewhat redundant to me but not too unwieldy of a list of expenses so if you just started with those and you wanted to keep those and start this for less of them I believe then like a quick books online which gives you this massively long list of expenses that it's clearly you know trying to cover all the bases in one chart of accounts but even this if we customize it ourselves and make these accounts as we do the bank feeds then sometimes that could be an easier way to go and I think it's a good kind of learning experience as we do as we as we do the bank feeds to see how the first data input will differ from one month to the next month of data input all right and then the revenue let's do the same for the revenue one more time and we're going to say we have sales discount received I'll remove that and merchandise I'll remove that I'm just going to have sales for the merchandise we sell and service for everything else service items that we provide markup I'm going to remove shipping and handling cash discrepancies uncategorized income other income vendor refunds I'll remove all those and we just have the two income accounts to start off with boom and so that's pretty clean so now if I go back to all the accounts and we see them in order assets liabilities uh equity we just have our assets just the accounts receivable inventory liability accounts payable unpaid expenses sales tax historical adjustments rounding tracking those items they wouldn't let us delete equity we just have retained earnings sales sales or revenue we have sales which are the inventory sales service which is going to be a non-inventory services we provide and then cost of goods sold for inventory expenses and then we deleted all other expenses except except uh and then we have that the bank revaluations unrealized currency gains and so on uh that we won't won't let us delete on the expenses so we have the bare bones of a general ledger and we will construct our general ledger as we do the bank feeds in future presentations