 QuickBooks Desktop 2023, Preferences for Jobs and Estimates, Multiple Currencies, Payments, and Payroll. 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. 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. Here we are in QuickBooks Desktop. If you've been following along, we set up our Get Great Guitars practice file and prior presentations. If you're looking at another company file as you follow along, that's okay for now because we're looking at the preferences which can be found in the edit, drop down, and preferences noting that it is useful to take a look at a fresh company, a new company, so you can see what the default settings are and which settings might need to be changed as you set up a new company file depending on that company's needs. Going into the preferences, we left off last time at the items and inventory. This time we're going then to the jobs and estimates. We'll take a look at the multiple currencies and we'll take a look at the payments and the payroll. So we've got a few to get through this time. So we've got the jobs and estimates. So if I go to the company preferences, that then is going to be this item where we can see indicated here that we're going to have estimates. We could turn the estimates off if we so choose. So if I say I'm not going to make estimates and okay, then I'm going to say okay. Then I'm going to have to open up the company home page again. And the preferences have been turned off, no estimates then at the beginning. Now note it will depend on the kind of industry you're in as to whether you would have preferences if you're in a job cost type of system, which could be something like a construction company or it could be a job cost system for a service company, such as possibly an accounting or law firm or something like that, then you might have clients that are asking how much something would cost. And one way to do that is to be running the estimate first. The estimate does not have any impact on the actual financial statements, but can be linked to the invoice. We'll talk a little bit more about estimates when we run through the practice problem. I believe we'll touch in on the estimates, but we're not going to be running a job cost system. We won't be using them too much in the practice problem, but we will turn them on. Also note that you might not even be invoicing clients. You might be just creating sales receipts or you might be in a type of business where you're just using bank recs or bank feeds to record transactions as they clear the bank. If you're using like gig work or something like that, in which case, once again, you wouldn't really need the estimates. So I'm going to turn them back on. Edit drop down preferences. Also note that we can find those preferences here right there. And when we saw in the desktop view up top and the company preferences, you could see the estimates here are now off. And if I jump to that item, there it is. And if I turn it back on, then that item and that icon reappears. I got to close it, open up the homepage again, maximize the homepage. And there it is. So there's the estimates. Okay, edit preferences and company preferences, job estimates. Now the default for the job is if you have a job cost type of system, you're not only have inventory, but now you're going to have the raw material that you're purchasing that you then convert into the finished goods. And so you got raw materials, work in process, and finished goods. So we then have the defaults of pending, awarded, in progress, closed, and not awarded. These are kind of specific to a job cost system. We have a whole nother course that goes into kind of job cost system. That's a specialty area, which could be a great for some people. If you're doing bookkeeping, you want to start to think about what kind of industry that you want to specialize in. And that's one area that has its own specialized needs, which could give you a niche in that. Or if you're doing your own company file, then the question is, are you in a job cost system or not where you have to track that kind of information, such as a construction company or possibly service companies could have a job cost structure as well. We turn the estimates on. Do you do progress invoicing? So that's another kind of specialty area. So the default is no. We're not going to be doing progress invoicing here, but you may have to use that. Notice that if you have long term jobs, then you might have to use different kind of revenue recognition principles, like percentage of completion, completed job, and so on. Again, specialized areas for those kind of industries that have projects that go on for an extended period of time. So close estimate after converting to an invoice. So I'm going to keep that off as the default warn about duplicate estimate numbers. That's a typical kind of internal control, which typically would be good to have on by default. Then we're going to go to the multiple currencies in the my preferences. Nothing there. We're in the company preferences for multiple currencies. So track multiple currencies in this company file. Now typically the default is going to be no, because we're going to be tracking in whatever currency that we are in. In this case, that currency is going to be the US dollar. But if you have other currencies that you're going to be doing transactions in, then you could turn on the multiple currencies kind of transaction, and that could help out with the exchanges between the multiple currencies. So it's a useful tool, but we're not going to turn it on for our practice problem here. We do have a whole course, I believe, on these multiple currency stuff. So if you want to experiment with it, you can note that if you do turn it on, it's something that cannot be easily turned off. So you might be stuck with it on if you turned it on. So you want to be making sure that if you wanted on to know that what's going to happen when you turn it on and then turn it on. If you want to practice it, you might start up a company file in and of itself. One of the beauties of having QuickBooks desktop, allowing you to have multiple company files, you could turn on the multiple currencies and look at those kind of transactions. So for example, if I was to get paid at a future point in my accounts receivables going to be paid in some other currency, like a peso or something like that, then you've got this currency exchange problems that take place that we have to account for within the system and the changes and the differences in the exchanges between the currencies. From the point in time that we made the sale to the point in time that we receive the money in a foreign currency and so on and so forth. So again, we have a whole course that gets into that and you could check that out if you so choose. It's an interesting topic. And then we're going into the payments section. So we got my preferences and then we've got the company preferences. Nothing's in my preferences. We're in the company preferences. So the payments are going to be then when this is like the payment receive payment. So this form. So we have an invoice and then the receive payments. So that's kind of what we have in mind. Receive payments automatically apply payments. So that means when we receive the payment, it's going to basically do an automatic kind of process. So when I enter an invoice that increases the accounts receivable for a particular customer. When I type in the customer to the receive payment form, then it'll apply it'll automatically apply out what would think to be the invoice that's outstanding for that particular customer, which is usually a nice way to go. So we'll keep that on by default. Adam automatically calculate the payment. Again, usually it's pretty straightforward because if I enter a invoice and then I make a receive payment for it. It's because I received a full payment on the invoice. And so it'll kind of calculate that automatically and tie it out, which is usually good. But if we're in a system where it's not typically the case where we get a full payment and that automatic process is not the standard, maybe you would want to take that off use undeposited funds as a default deposit to account. So to see that I'm going to close this out for now. And then if I open up by receive payments, notice that if I was to I would add a customer here and then an invoice would show up down here that would tie out to what is owed to us. And then this form by its nature will be going into some kind of cash account. And the other side will be decreasing the accounts receivable. But by default, it doesn't go into the checking account because you could have an issue with the grouping of the receipts that you have and how many are going to deposit at one time into the checking account. So by default, it goes into undeposited funds and you have no other recourse it forcing you to put it into undeposited funds. So if I close this out, that's going to be a clearing account. So the idea of the undeposited funds is that if I got multiple cash payments, for example, and then I deposit them as one lump sum, I want to be able to group those cash payments together as one lump sum. That's why it's the default. That's why we have it there. That allows us to match our records to what's on the bank statement and make the reconciliation process easier. But maybe you've received checks or electronic payments and they always are individualized in the same fashion as they will appear on the bank statement. And you just want to use the receive payment form and create sales receipt, which has a similar kind of setup up top. It doesn't tell you where it's going to deposit to. This is where you make a sale and you receive the money at the same time. It's going to go into undeposited funds. Now, if I'm going to turn this on edit preferences and then go to the payments, I'm in the payment section and uncheck this, giving us the option to assign where we want to deposit it to not with a deposit form, but with those two payment forms. So I'm going to say company homepage, open that back up and let's check it out. So now if I go into receive payments, it gives me the option of undeposited funds or our checking account. So I could deposit directly into the checking account. If you don't see that and you want to deposit directly into the checking account, you got to turn that on or uncheck that box. Same with the create sales receipt. Now we've got the capacity to go to undeposited funds or the checking account. So by default, that is off. If you want that in there, you got to go to the preferences. Okay, preferences again. So I'm going to keep that there, set a payment receipt template. So we're going to use the Intuit standard payment template. So if you set up a different template, for example, then you could choose the default template here. And so I think we have a section on templates and so on, but we'll keep that for now. And especially for this form, because this is usually an internal form. So the template's not as big a deal because it's not going to someone else. But in any case, your customer can pay you online using credit card and bank transfer. So you could set up those options. So you got, you got to look into the process for accepting credit cards to be able to do that. So if I click on this, it says you need to enable online payment to use this feature. Would you like to continue? I'm going to say no bank transfer. You need to enable online payment to use this feature. So you got to basically coincide that information with your credit card company, your financial institutions. Now note that you might get paid with a wire transfer. They might pay you kind of electronically in some way, shape, or form. And then when it hits your bank, you might then be using the bank. The bank feeds is another way that you can kind of deal with these basically electronic payments, right? Because then they'll come through with a bank feed and you can record them at that point of time as a deposit. We'll talk more, I mean, we have a whole section or a course on bank feeds. So we're not really diving into that either at this point in time. So tip to make payment methods active or inactive go to the lists menu, click customer and vendor profile lists and then click payment method list. So let's check that out. So if we go, we're going to go to the list menu, click customer and vendor and payment method lists. So we've got lists menu. We've got the customers and vendors and then you've got your, your payment method list right here. These are the defaults, cash, check, American Express, discover, and so forth. The formats that basically they can pay you, which would be on the receive payment kind of forms here. So it got cash, check, credit card, and so on and so forth. So you can add items to the list, which could oftentimes be just for kind of informational purposes, helping you to track and possibly sort your data more easily. Edit dropdown, preferences, and then the payment options again. So do you, do you want to send payment reminders? So typically you, you'd think possibly yes on that with the default. So we'll keep that on because obviously the, the, the idea would be that we're invoicing people, we're invoicing the customers. We want to be receiving the payments and we might have to send out statements from time to time in order to, you know, collect on, on them. So we're going to have to send out, you know, reminder, hey, you haven't paid us. We got the accounts receivable out there. Check this one off. If QuickBooks desktop is open, prompt me at, it's going to give you a reminder and then how frequently, daily, weekly, monthly, depending on your needs. I guess I'll just keep that for now as the default. Probably should turn it off because it's not going to be useful in our practice problem, but we'll keep it here. Note if QuickBooks isn't open, you'll see the prompt whenever you open it next. So again, reminders aren't going to, aren't going to help us too much because we're not basically working in real time here in the practice problem. But in any case, we're going to go to the payroll and employees. Now on the my preferences tab, nothing here, company preferences. Now remember the payroll is something that is an add on component for QuickBooks desktop. You got to pay more for payroll. Remember that when you're thinking of payroll, if it wasn't for taxes and human resources, HR kind of laws related to employees, it would just basically be a vendor transaction. We would just be paying people for services that they provided us and we can just write them a check. But we got to do all the withholdings, federal income tax, social security, Medicare. That's a lot that can become a lot. And we have to do the reporting requirements on the pay stubs, telling them how much we took out on a pay by paycheck by paycheck, as well as a year to date amount. And we've got to do the reporting to the government in terms of quarterly reporting, 941, yearly reporting, 940, W2s, W3. That's the general routine. So there's two options for payroll that you really want to think about if you have employees. If you don't have employees, not as big a problem. If you're a bookkeeper, you want to think, do I want to be taken on clients and doing the payroll? How am I going to set up the payroll? Possibly I want to take up clients and try to work with a third party payroll provider, which is one of your options. In that case, you don't turn on payroll, but rather have the third party provider do the payroll, issue the checks, do the 941s, the 940, and the W2s, W3s. And then you just enter their data to make the financial statements correct and be able to reconcile the bank accounts, instead of having to deal with all the HR and stuff related to the payroll, with hopefully you can outsource. If you do it within QuickBooks, you typically want to pay for payroll because you don't want to mess up payroll. Because payroll is one of those things you typically want to use the adage of measure twice cut once, instead of tinkering until you figure something out, because the tinkering requires you to fix problems and that's going to be causing more problems. It's one of those kind of things that you typically want to get right the first time. So that's, and the actual pain for payroll then will allow you to get it right the first time because it has some more checks to it. However, for a practice problem, the manual payroll could be quite useful because it allows us to see the payroll process actually makes us calculate some of the payroll, which is done automatically if you turn the payroll on. So it's great for practice purposes. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to turn down the manual payroll. But remember, in practice, you would want to either pay for payroll or work with a third party and think about how you're going to do that, do it right up front. I think it'll save you time. So notice down here, if I don't have any payroll on, it doesn't have any payroll button, it doesn't have any arrow, doesn't have any flow down here. Once I turn the payroll on, that should change. So I'm going to just turn on the manual payroll. It says, before continuing with manual payroll, did you know that QuickBooks payroll services helps with the hard work with QuickBooks payroll services get payroll done in minutes and rest easy. And knowing your paychecks are right, automatic tax calculations, direct deposit, free expert payroll support, click to learn more to explore payroll options. So if you check that out, let's just let QuickBooks give us a sales pitch here. So now we've got the options for payroll, worry free payroll for taxes, agency guarantee, free online chat, run payroll, and then you've got how much the payroll is going to be costing. Down here, easy, accurate payroll, choose the best plan for you. And so you've got your different payroll options. So remember, there's going to be different tiers in terms of, you know, how much you want to be paying for payroll. And I would think the recommended area being recommended is probably the best place to be because, again, it does take a little, it does, you do want to have some added support. Typically, of a payroll option, when you're actually processing payroll, because it's easy to do a data input error, if you're calculating the payroll manually, there's caps on the payroll that it's easy to go past, like for federal unemployment tax and social security. So, but we're going to do the manual payroll for the practice problem, because I don't want anyone to have to pay more for payroll. So once again, we'll just turn on the manual payroll, say next. And so with manual payroll, only wage items will automatically calculate all required payroll data for your paychecks need to be manually entered, which is kind of actually good for practice problem purposes, because it allows us to get some idea of the calculations. Add QuickBooks payroll services to access automatic tax calculation, direct deposit, and expert support. So I'm just going to go ahead and activate. And manual payroll has been activated. You must now calculate and enter your paycheck amounts manually. If you currently have an active QuickBooks payroll service subscription or want to subscribe, please disable manual payroll and select turn on payroll from home screen. So I'm going to say OK. And then let's just say OK. And then we've got the payroll down here. Now we will run a little basic payroll calculations in this, but payroll is a whole course in and of itself. I believe we have courses on payroll. If you want to kind of dive into the to the a little bit more nuance and payroll, payroll can be a huge topic because it can differ from state to state. If you get into state payroll, federal payroll and different, you know, obviously you can have different payroll setups, different kind of benefits that might be offered to employees so it could go on and it could go on. But in any case, there it is. We got so now we got it set up because we could see the arrow down here. We got the pay employees. If you see the arrows down here, that means some kind of payroll has been set up. If there are no arrows, then they haven't turned on payroll at all. If you're looking at a new QuickBooks file or someone else's QuickBooks file. So we got the manual payroll edit dropdown preferences. It's great to have that, by the way, to practice with really nice. So no payroll, online payroll, pay stub voucher printing. So here we have the options here. Now, when you pay the payroll, we're going to be taking out from the employees with holdings, social security, Medicare, federal income tax and then any state stuff as well as benefits. We have to tell the employee that that's part of the human resources kind of component to the payroll. So we have to account for it. And we also have our obligations to inform the employee as well as our so this pay stub helps us do that. Even if we give them an electronic payment, we still have to tell them what they earned, what we took from them, what the net pay is. OK, so we got the employee address. We'll keep that on company address, pay period in the check memo. So we'll keep all these on as the default generally on paycheck voucher and pay stub print. You got the vacation used and vacation available. So they have that information in place. You got the sick used and sick available. So we might have, you know, different pay for the capacity for vacation and sick stuff. And we won't get into that too much detail in this practice problem. Legal company name, federal employer identification number. So if you want that on, you can add that. You got doing business as company name. So you might have a different company name and doing business as for the legal name versus the doing business as name, company phone number. If you wanted to add that non taxable company items. So meaning that there could be stuff that the company pays that is taxable and not subject to tax in terms of the payroll taxes. So we've got the employee social security number. If you want that or pot or not want that on there could be for different security reasons and what you need to have for the law. Only the last four digits of the social security number and bank account numbers, hours for salaried employees, standard font size, large font size, print into it logo. So, okay. So I'm going to say, okay. And then sick and vacation, accrual method, beginning of the year, hours accrued. So this would help you to set up your, you know, your six time and whatnot. We're going to get into the sick pay too much here. Some of that will have to do with some human resources and laws that might be surrounding that as well as your personal company, you know, strategies. So there's kind of an interplay with payroll, meaning you can have some leeway on how you're going to pay people hourly, salary, weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly. But vacation pay, non-vacation pay, how you can set up the vacation, what kind of benefits you're going to have. But then, of course, there's also legal stuff that comes into play, meaning it's going to be more difficult to pay them every week and a half or something like that, right? That doesn't, because that doesn't fall into the normal kind of structure. Sick pay, vacation pay could have laws around those kind of things as well. So copy earning detail from previous check. That's going to be off by the default. So I'm going to keep that off by default. Now, if everything was the same from pay period to pay period, that may make it easier to process the payroll to have that automatically populate. But I'm going to keep it off by default because you might have different hours, for example, from period to period. And if it was a salaried employee, then you would think it would be the same anyways, because the salary is pretty much standard. So recall quantity field on paycheck. So I'm going to keep that on as a default. Might help it make it easier to enter the payroll. Recall our field on the paycheck. So that might make it easier to pull in the hours that are going to be required for hourly employees as we process the payroll. Job costing and items tracking for paycheck expenses. So we're going to keep that on as the default. We might not have any job costing in our particular item too much. But we might experiment with it a little bit, because that would be specific to a job cost type of system, such as construction or job cost system in a service area, possibly a law firm or CPA firm, accounting firm, for example. So changing the employee name display preference will cause all QuickBooks desktop windows to close. Please finish paying your employee before you do. So you could have the first name, last name. So how are you going to basically display the name? Employee defaults. So you could set up basically the defaults in terms of the earnings. With the payroll schedule, how frequently are you going to pay them? Bi-weekly, daily, semi-monthly, monthly, and so on. We're going to get into more of this in future presentations. And then we've got the taxes and so on with the default settings for this taxes and the sick pay. We're going to do it like manually on an employee by employee person and we'll set up the items that will be related to the payroll when we get into that component of the course and we'll set those up as we set up each employee. Mark new employees as sales reps. If that would be applicable, display employee social security number and headers on reports, which might be useful, but there could be more problems with regards to, of course, security purposes with sensitive information. So that's generally the payroll items. In future presentations, we'll get into some more of the company preferences.