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Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks that's at the urlintuit.com intuit.com intuit.com Intuit owns multiple different softwares including the TurboTax, the Credit Karma, QuickBooks, MailChimp. I think it's easiest to go to the Intuit website however rather than directly to the sub website of the QuickBooks website because sometimes the QuickBooks websites will change whereas the parent website of the Intuit website usually looks the same over the years although the images might change down below but you have then the options to go into the software you want up top. So then I'm going to go into QuickBooks up top remembering that QuickBooks has many different types and variants of the software including the two main variants QuickBooks desktop versus the QuickBooks online and then different purchasing options within those two major splits. So I like to go all the way down to the bottom of the page because this page you don't know exactly what they're going to be putting on it because we haven't really decided exactly what QuickBooks product we're looking for so I go to the products at the bottom this bottom part has basically been the same for a long period of time and then I want to be looking for the QuickBooks online not the QuickBooks desktop so we're going to go into the QuickBooks online and then this page might change from time to time but you'll usually see the free 30 day trial up here try it free for 30 days and then this little toggle component has been pretty much the same format for a long time if you see the options to purchase without the toggle then there's probably another webpage that does have the toggle you're probably just in the wrong webpage because this is the toggle to allow you to be picking up the free 30 day trial versus the purchasing of the software if you cannot find this page from the Intuit website as we did here you might just search in your google search or whatever your favorite browser is for QuickBooks online 30 day trial and sometimes that's the easiest way to get there now remember that this 30 day trial is different than the the test drive which you can also find down here usually in the same area take take a test drive the test drive will already have data within it whereas if you start a free 30 day trial company to test out the software that way there will be nothing in it so it's useful to have both of those tools so you might want to open in another browser to have the test drive open as well as possibly testing out the free 30 day trial or as you're working in your company file i would recommend doing that if you're going to do that by opening another browser so if you're in google chrome for example you might open firefox or something like that or possibly better whatever browser you have go into the incognito window most of them have them in google chrome it's under the three dots new incognito window i think the easiest way to find the third the free 30 day i'm sorry the test drive is to type in QuickBooks online test drive right and then search in your browser looking for the one that has into it dot com in it so this looks like a test drive it's got into it there i'm going to say that's the one and then i'll select the united states version and then i'm going to verify that i'm not a robot so that's one practice tool this tool already having data in it but i want i might want to have it open at the same time i i have my other practice tool or my other data file that's why we're in the incognito window so i'm going to put this in another window for now and then we have the 30 day trial we would like to get access to a sandbox that has nothing in it so that we're not messing up our own file so that we don't already have information in it with the sample company and so that the company file doesn't reset because we want to work through a very long kind of practice problem here so we're going to see the 30 day trial might be something that you can look into for that or possibly a student availability of the software which might give you more than 30 days remember that if you only have 30 days to work through the practice problem you want to spend a significant amount of time on the practice problem because we'll be doing a long a long problem but if you don't have access to that you could follow along with the sample company as well to get an idea of what we're doing from step to step now the we have the different options down here the the simple start the essentials the plus the advanced these are basically not different softwares they're basically the same online software they just have level up in terms of tools which you can see down below we're going to be working with the one that they most recommend which is already highlighted here the plus the major difference between the plus and the essentials that we want to practice with is the inventory so if you don't have inventory then you might be able to drop down to like the essentials for example would be the general idea but we're going to be working in the plus that's the main thing and then it's and then you can you can look into the options on the advance when you might need the advanced as well possibly if you're a larger company you have inventory needs or more people are using the software but we're going to go with the kind of default the standard the plus setting here now when we toggle on to the free 30 day trial it's going to scare you jumping the price up so if you get the free 30 day trials then they're going to charge you $90 a month you don't want to be paying $90 a month for the software so if you're practicing with the 30 day trials notice what you don't really want to do is try to say well i'm going to switch everything to quickbooks during the 30 day trial and then after 30 days i have no option other than to continue with that company file that's that's not really what you would want to do what you want to do is possibly run it parallel to your other company file so that you have two accounting systems at least for 30 days so you're not locked into it if you were using your actual data or you can practice with it possibly with test data so that at the end of the 30 days you don't need to continue the current company file you're in but possibly start a new company file looking for the best price at that point in time once you're committed to thinking i'm going to make the change i'm going to run with the quickbooks so we we're going to go so if you're going to go to the toggle it's going to keep scaring you but i'm going to keep it on the 30 days then i'm going to choose the plus option while the toggle is on and we're going to say okay then we have the payroll information so you've got the core payroll versus the payroll premium and the payroll elite the payroll premium once again is the one selected you have hr support center you've got the 24 seven expert product support expert review and time tracking same day direct deposit are the differentiating factors that they're typically putting in bold here payroll is an area in and of itself which is a specialty you probably don't want to be doing payroll without any assistance by either software or another party you could do payroll as we'll discuss in our practice problem either if you don't have payroll then you don't have to deal with it but if you have payroll how are you going to deal with it well you could deal with it by using some format of the software upselling you it's upselling you here to sell you the added payroll component or you can possibly work with an outside payroll professional the big ones are like adp or paychecks i'm not advertising for them i'm not affiliated with them but those are just the big ones and we'll talk more about those options going forward this is not a payroll specific course we'll touch on the concept of payroll but we have other courses or sections on payroll in and of itself because that's a whole world in and of itself that has its own unique issues related to it and it's also one of the things that are most distinct from location to location particularly country to country because payroll is the thing that makes it difficult is the influence of the tax law and human resource law and what not on the payroll otherwise it would be an easy thing and within the united states it'll still differ from state to state uh to some degree as well so other areas of bookkeeping by the way are just using the double entry accounting system and they're pretty much the same uh anywhere except that the currencies you know will be different from place to place okay so we'll add this one and see if we can add that to our free 30 day trial so there we have it so we've got the free 30 day trial the the plus and the payroll 170 that's way too much because again we're trying to do the free 30 day but it gives us the 30 day so it's at zero at this point in time so if you do not have an account with uh quickbooks then you can you can basically set up a new account if you do have an account then you still might be able to sign in and do this process because when you purchase quickbooks you're basically purchasing on a company by company basis right so even though you already have a company file you might be able to use your same account to practice with a new company you know to with a new company file with the intention possibly of purchasing you know a second company file because you purchased them one company file at a time so i'll go through this process now obviously if you're forced to put in payment information you want to make sure that if you're using it for 30 days for practice that you cancel it before the end of the 30 days if that's what you want to do i'm going to put the company information here which i'm just picking a home for sale in beaverly hills 90210 for our practice company file the address could be important within your company file because that might be used as basically the default address if you're going to be computing things like sales tax which we will touch in on as we go through the practice problem so we'll subscribe and then it says plans for every kind of business now with live assistance so we were here we have the checkout so it says payroll is going to be the 85 a month but we have the free 30 day trial so we want to continue with the trial so notice sometimes when you go through this purchasing process it's a little bit tricky when you're looking for the free 30 day trial because it keeps trying to steer you to the purchasing options up top and you want to make sure that you're looking down here for the button which might not be the most highlighted button that says no i want to i want to continue with the trial the trial period so we'll go to the trial and there we have it okay so now we just need to give some basic information to the system in order to set up the account now you would think that a lot of this information might be used by quickbooks to give you like a default chart of accounts for example and whatnot but oftentimes i think a lot of this information is actually so solely for internal purposes because unlike with the desktop version the online version doesn't seem to customize basically the chart of accounts based on this information that you provide so and also most of this information you can kind of change once you're already in the quickbooks file for those items that do have an impact on your company file so you don't need to like worry too much about it so any case welcome we're glad you're here here's what you'll do together right now tell us what you need to help with we'll ask a few questions we'll get started on what what you're here for okay so we're going to say next so what do you call your business i'm going to call it get great guitars great guitars and i'll i'll give it a number let's call it a number one uh well let's give it a year uh 2024 for our practice problem get great guitars 2024 i'm going to say next and then have uh how have you been managing your finances no matter where you're coming from we're here to help well that's great nothing i'm just getting started so notice this is probably internal kind of information to so say uh sage 50 spreadsheets uh uh quickbooks desktop other bookkeeping software or other uh so this also if you put another software such as quickbooks desktop or something like that then it's possible that they're going to recommend how you might import that data from something like the quickbooks desktop or other software now note that if if you're starting a new company file and we were pulling data in from a prior company file then we have a few questions and options of how we want to do that one option would be i would like to pull in all my past data into the current system so that has some pros and cons because then you can run comparative reports which is one of the pros and you can look at past data which is already in the system on the cons side of things that means that you're going to have to have everything set up the way it was before it might have some problems with it and then kind of fix it going forwards and if you have a lot of data in the file then you might be bogging down your system unnecessarily the other option would be that you want to start a new at start fresh with the new company file how do you do that you pull in just the beginning balances into the new company file you pull in what you need such as the items the customers the vendors the chart of accounts but you don't try to go back in time and add all the data that was in place from the prior year you're going to start fresh from this point going forward the idea being if there's a question about a prior period you look at the prior system and if there's a question about this period going forward you'll have the data in the current system and that often helps you to kind of give a new a new look in terms of how you're going to how you're going to manage your accounting going forward because a lot of times there's problems in the accounting system in the past possibly you'd like to you'd like to fix it going forward and you have to draw the line and say the old accounting system was done as of this date and we're going to start with a new thing going forward also note that if you if you do that kind of system you would like to have an entire year and one accounting system so that when you do your tax taxes you have an entire year that you can print from one accounting system as opposed to having half the year in the prior system half the year in the current system what if you are changing in the middle of the year how could you do that well then you probably want to run parallel systems so if you're starting your new accounting system in march then you might want to run parallel systems with your old accounting system in a prior software and your new accounting system for the three months from january through march right and so that so you have some crossover between the two and then hopefully if everything goes well the new accounting system will be what you will be using going forward from that point so if i'm going to if i said nothing it would say next if i was over here then it might give me a different options to see how we can pull that information in i'm going to say nothing next uh is get great guitars your main source of income we'll use this information to get you started probably they don't need that information to get us started it's probably internal data that they're gathering about us so i'm just going to say okay yes and then how do you request and take payments so this again probably isn't going to impact the actual report you know our actual setup but it's probably what they're trying to gather for internal use so we're going to say we're going to invoice share links with emails maybe it will you know share links by email text maybe bank transfers yeah how do you request to take payments possibly checks cash recurring bills maybe online card payments okay card reader i'm not going to do the card reader okay and then how long has get great guitars been in business so in years let's say uh we'll say one to two and again this information probably has nothing to do with setting up the company file they're just trying to gather data about us and then we're going to say next what kind of business is this tell us uh how your business is set up we use this to help organize your transactions is it an LLC i'm going to say no now when you now know it again you would think how are they going to use this information to help up help set up our system well you would think it would have an impact on the chart of accounts but i i believe last the last one i set up and i keep thinking every time i do this they're going to have a better chart of accounts process set up but every time i do it they haven't right the quickbooks basically is using in essence the same chart of accounts no matter what you put in in terms of your industry that you're in and the type of company that you have so again it kind of looks to me like this information is solely for internal kind of record keeping purposes on their side what would they change to the chart of accounts well if you were a different entity the equity section might change for example would be one of the major places so in other words in the united states and the the types of entities would typically be a sole proprietor meaning you're the sole owner of the business you would file a tax return with a schedule c as opposed to a separate corporate tax return and in the equity section you wouldn't be using the term retained earnings you would be using the term something like owner's equity account or a capital account if you were a partnership in the united states that means you're kind of like a sole proprietor but now you have multiple people partners that are sharing the equity or revenue distribution of the business in some kind of partnership agreement and that would mean from an accounting standpoint that in the equity section you once again wouldn't have a retained earnings account you would have multiple capital accounts which is kind of an issue with quickbooks online or any most online accounting systems because it becomes a little bit of a problem to distribute the income to the multiple capital accounts but we'll talk more about that later and then if you were a corporation which could include a c corporation and then an s corporation these are different types of corporations that have different tax implications but if you are a corporation you would think that that the equity section of your of your chart of accounts would then it would have retained earnings that would be the the the the name of the thing in there and you might have common stock that would be issued as well if you are not for profit organization you would think that they might change even the whole format of your chart of accounts and the and the names of the of the accounts to correspond with not for profits because not for profits they're they still obviously are tracking money and they're all about money but they try to pretend that they're not so they use different words you know like this isn't it's not retained earnings it's net profit or whatever it's the same thing don't don't try to pretend like you're not trying to make money over there not for profits not that there aren't good not for I'm just saying you know you gotta you gotta pick the not for profits well over here but but but again I don't that doesn't and then not sure and then an LLC would mean that for taxes it's like you could be an LLC is a limited liability company that usually acts kind of like a partnership but it has liability protection but it could act kind of like a corporation as well depending on what your election is so we're just going to say no we're going to go sole proprietor for our purposes but I don't think it'll have an impact much on on our actual chart of accounts what's what's your industry so once again the industry is the other thing that you would think would have a big impact on the chart of accounts but as far as I can see it doesn't really have a big impact let's pick one though I'm going to pick one with inventory in it so I'm going to pick all other miscellaneous store retailers except tobacco stores and the reason I'm picking that is because I want to make sure I pick something that has inventory within it because we want to practice the tracking of inventory but again I don't think it actually has an impact on the chart of accounts the way things are set up what would you think would it would do to the chart of accounts if you didn't have inventory if you were a service business like a bookkeeper or something then you would think the chart of accounts would not include things like inventory and cost of good sold for example if you picked a chart of accounts that clearly has the tracking of inventory you would think it would include things like inventory and cost to good sold for example let's go next and then it says what's your main rule so we we customize quickbooks based on your answer so again I don't think they really do they might do some customization with the intro screen to give you some walkthrough in terms of how you should start the intro screen but it doesn't customize the way you would think based on like this information I mean I'm what would it do differently based on this information right wouldn't what is it going to change the chart of accounts is it going to change the the you know the the way that the system is going to be I don't think it's going to change most of the way the system is going to be set up I think it's mostly internal information they're looking for but owner or partner employee other bookkeeper or accountant let's go with bookkeeper or accountant next who works at your business helps help us understand who's on your team why why do you need to know that quickbooks internal information probably not going to help us to set up our bookkeeping at all so probably doesn't have an impact to us at all they're probably just gathering data so only who's good so who's going to work at the business only the owner customers we plan to hire in the future employees a few partners let's go employees owner and so on how many employees work there let's go from let's say two to five two to five and so we'll say next so what apps do you use for your business now when we think about apps there's a lot of depends on what kind of industry we're in so if you have like a Shopify store or an ebay or amazon or something you might have apps related to that if you're integrating with paypal paypal it's kind of interesting because you could add it as basically a bank feed or it has its own its own like paypal app which acts a little bit differently but it's kind of the same thing we don't we're not going to add any apps right now quickbooks is a standalone software we do have sections that get into more in depth on bank feeds sections or courses in the future that we'll look at and I think we have a section or course on e stores like a Shopify ebay and amazon if you want to look at them in more detail in the future you don't have to worry too much if you skip this one because you can always add an app later so we're just going to skip that right here and then link your account and see everything in one place securely link your bank or credit card select the accounts you'd like to bring in see what your cash flow looks like so this would be the bank feeds so bank feeds are integral many people are of course are making the bank feeds attached at this point in time bank feeds can save a lot of time we do have a whole course and section on bank feeds however it's first best oftentimes to think about the accounting without the bank feeds why because if you just turn on the bank feeds and you just start adding the bank feeds and you don't know what the software is doing at all then what's going to happen is you're going to end up with all this information in what I call bank feed limbo it'll just be stuck there because the bank feeds don't have quite enough information to actually pull the information into the financials to create the financial statements and if you don't know that added information you need to put in the system you're not going to be able to to process forward so and also the relevance or ability to create your books directly from bank feeds will be dependent upon the industry you are in some industries will be easier than others if you're just getting deposits from a gig work or something like that then it's then you might be able to use bank feeds pretty much to just create your books but if you have to invoice clients if you're to have to track the accounts payable if you're tracking inventory if you're doing anything with a cruel if you have payroll on then the bank feeds are not that simple at least for parts of the accounting cycles so we're going to first think about it without bank feeds although we'll mention the bank feeds and then we'll have a whole course in section on bank feeds where you can think about how they would fit into your specific accounting system and how to maximize that system to automate your process as easy as you can all right so i'm going to skip it for now you can always turn it on later so this is another one that's not like a must do at this time how do you track your receipts today saving receipts is an important part of running your business you'll need them for tax time and for good record keeping the reason quickbooks i believe this is my thought but the reason quick books emphasizes the receipt tracking a lot is because they have this phone app that they made a couple years ago that they can take pictures of the receipts and everything and they're really proud of that and that was a big marketing thing at that point in time these days a lot of times a lot of times you have an audit trail already because you're going to be using electronic transfers so the receipts become really important expect like for small businesses that are making purchases with cash because if you make person with cash you don't have any audit trail of it other than a receipt but these days a lot of people are making purchases online with credit cards and whatnot so the receipts might still be useful but possibly not as important to create your tax returns as they once were given the fact that you already have the audit trail because you contract the payment that you made with an electronic payment okay but any case i save paper receipts i save my receipts digitally i save paper and digital i don't save let's go i save digitally boom and then save receipts faster with an app get the free quick books mobile app with your subscription so here we go so now they're trying to give you the app so that you can save the receipts which is pretty cool because you could take a picture of the receipt and then possibly attach it to the bill that you put into the system and whatnot but it's not the it's not the biggest thing like the the miracle thing like it kind of was advertised at one time seemed like to me but you can you can download the app i'm not going to get into that now i think we have another course or section that dives into that a little bit more detail uh elsewhere so what do you want to do in quick books we suggest these features based on what we know about your business your selections help us create your setup checklist but all features are available so we can send and track invoices we want to do that again this is probably more for internal purposes because i don't think they're really going to change anything to the function notice that everything is available already so they're probably just tracking this internally mainly but get business banking so here's where they're trying to sell you the the banking uh services alone you know they're trying to get some money from the interest create estimates or quotes we'll do that manage inventory okay manage sales tax yeah see workers comp i won't do that accept payments possibly manage and pay bills yeah track my team's time yeah track sales track mileage yeah well we probably won't do that here we have another course or section on that uh specifically if you want to look at that explore plans for employee benefits so that's might be another kind of kind of upsell type of thing for employee benefits they might be able to help you assist you with right so any case if you don't check some of these off or if you do check one that you don't use i don't think it's going to have an impact really on your setup process is the point so we'll just do that what should we do first so here are a few options that will help you get started we can we recommend you start with the suggested feature get get ready to invoice uh setup payroll so i'm not going to set up the payroll uh now because uh we're going to we could set up the payroll later as well so you don't really need to do it through the setup process let's go ahead and get ready to invoice let's make it easy for people to pay you okay so get paid with invoices set up online payments to let customers pay you on the spot so give your invoice template to personal touch send yourself a sample invoice to see so when we think about the invoices invoices are things that we sent out in order for them to to be able to pay us now there's a couple things with the invoices just in terms of the record keeping of the system the default invoice does fine because it creates the journal entry but you might want to customize the invoice giving it your logo and whatnot because that will make it a little bit more personizable personalable i can't talk i don't know what that would but anyways uh because you're giving it to a client and the other thing that you could do is try to set up payments so that they can they can pay you through quickbooks through the through the invoice with a link but to do that you have to have like a quickbooks account to set up which i think we have another course or section on if you want to look into that in more detail so that would be nice but that's another that's another thing that you would be using the financing tool within quickbooks so we're not going to do that in our practice problem uh well but we i think we have another course or section if you want to dig into that and see your see your options in that in more detail so we're not going to set up the invoices here remember that you could do this of course later so it's not required to do at this point in time they're just trying to do the little upsell as we're doing the setup process all right let's get it done let's go and so there we have it it and it's thinking so get great guitars 2024 now most of the stuff that we said in the setup process i'm going to close this they might put a little checklist here so when they say hey we're going to really customize your your experience based on the information they give you the well yeah they give you a checklist okay so that might have customized your experience over here they might have changed the shortcuts but usually this screen is not the screen you're usually going to be using as you navigate through the software the things that it didn't doesn't let's check out the chart of accounts if i go to my transaction detail over here and i go into my chart of accounts this is the thing that you would think they would customize based on the type of industry sole proprietorship partnership corporation and i'm sorry the type of industry we said inventory versus non inventory and the type of entity sole proprietor partnership corporation but you could see they have a whole lot of accounts here so cash to do we've got we've got in the fixed assets we have all of these fixed asset accounts this seems like an overkill uh to me the horse has been dead and they're beating it they're beating that dead horse that's the same in the united states if you're not in the they're beating the dead horse but and then so if we go down here in the equity section again look at how many equity accounts they have that seems so this seems a little excessive to me so so they've got opening balance that's okay the draws draws would be for sole proprietorship investments would be for a sole proprietorship personal expenses that is would only be used if you if you're using it in a particular way so we'll talk more about that lady later lady and then we got the personal health care again that's kind of a a weird you know equity depending on how you're going to use the equity and then you've got the retained earnings retained earnings being the term typically used for a corporation not a sole proprietorship so that's why i think that retained earnings would have been used no matter whether i checked off if it was a sole proprietor partnership or a corporation and then state estimated taxes so and so on and then the income line items billable refund sales you would think the term sales would be used if you had like a a uh a retail store which we did pick but they also have the service items here so i think they're going to include sales and services as our income accounts no matter what you picked in terms of industry we did pick one industry that had cost of goods sold inventory but i think if you picked a service company they still would have had the cost of goods sold account in here right so it doesn't look to me like the quickbooks desktop used to have really really kind of tailored uh gl accounts that would be used depending on the industry that you picked and possibly also on the type of entity that you picked and i don't think i don't think the online does that yet it looks like to me they're not looking to do that for whatever reason right they just want to run with this default chart of accounts so going forward then then what we're going to what we want to do then is say once this is set up the question is going to be do i want to run with their chart of accounts or do i want to just basically make them all inactive and start my own chart of accounts from there are some of the questions that we'll dig into later or as we go forward but the bottom line is we have a fresh uh quickbooks file no matter what your setup process was you're pretty much in the same spot because your chart of accounts basically the same uh no matter what the input data you put into the to the setup process is for the most part and then we can basically move forward from here setting up our our thinking about our chart of accounts adding our beginning balances then we'll enter two months of of data input we'll do adjusting entries at the end of that period we'll even do budget information and uh it's going to be great