 QuickBooks Online 2024, Bank Feed Center Navigation. Get ready and some coffee because we're going to get the books on key with QuickBooks Online 2024. First, a word from our sponsor. Actually, we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't want to be seen with us. But that's okay whatever because our merchandise is better than their stupid stuff anyways. Like our, trust me, I'm an accountant product line. It's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep complex and nuanced questions. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online Bank Feed Practice file. We set up in a prior presentation after studying up the QuickBooks Online file. We went to the Transaction tab on the left to the Chart of Accounts tab and then reduced many of the accounts making them inactive including many of the expense accounts so that as we add the information from the bank feeds from what I call Bank Feed Limbo into the promised land creating the financial statements with them, we can include the key ingredient needed that being the account building our chart of accounts as we do the data input from the bank feeds. We also added a checking account and then we imported data which is similar to connecting to the bank resulting in the same end result of having data from the bank in what we have over here our Bank Transactions tab and this is what I would call the Bank Feed Limbo because the information in here is not yet being used to populate our financial statements the major financial statements being the balance sheet and the income statement. So now let's just give now that we have the data actually in our system we can go over and just review the general layout of the bank feeds. So the bank feeds if I open the hamburger note that currently they're in the Transactions tab. Now QuickBooks is a web based program so they often kind of move things around and sometimes there's multiple locations where you can find one thing but notice there's generally going to be a tab in here currently under the Transactions tab for of course the bank feeds. Once you're within the bank feeds tab then you have your bank feeds which have been connected or which you have uploaded data for in these little cards. So the cards are nice because they give you kind of a recap and if you have multiple cards then you have multiple accounts that you are connected to. You might have for example a check-in account, a savings account you might have a PayPal account, you might have a credit card account for example and if you have personal finances you might even be able to connect to some of your brokerage type of accounts where you have investments for say stocks and bonds. It used to be that these cards were a lot longer I really like that QuickBooks has shortened the cards so they're not taking up as much space. One thing I don't like as much is that there's all this blank space because of these cards which are kind of taking up room but you can scroll down and they've gotten better than when they first imported the QuickBooks system for the bank feeds. You've got your drop-down, this is another place where you can toggle between the different cards if you had multiple cards we will be adding more bank feed connections including possibly like a PayPal and possibly like a credit card so that we can see what it will look like when we have multiple cards up top. This is a suggested thing up top so I'm going to close this out for now. So then we have our links so if I select the drop-down we can upload from a file so if we wanted to upload more bank transactions which we will do in future presentations we could go here, we've got the managing of the connections so if I needed to manage the connections then I can go here if there's a problem with it or if I need to set up the connections order checks and we can order the checks which would be something like that you'd be paying for and then you've got the explorer so this little icon here is QuickBooks trying to do like a little helpful thing kind of like an AI type of thing to help you to categorize possibly your accounts possibly giving you information to help you categorize the accounts so it says automate bookkeeping with QuickBooks AI open a transactions to see your recommendations in this panel so check this space for suggestions that can save you time by accurately automating bookkeeping so obviously you know with all the AI and what not that is out there the question is how could we further automate what has already been automated in QuickBooks note that the data down below has pulled in that's great that process is somewhat connected and automated or very connected and automated however we still need at least the account to be adding which we talked about will have problems depending on the type of transaction that are coming through but if they're electronic transfers then you would think you would have the description so as a bookkeeper the question here often is well if you give me the information in the description I still need to figure out what those people actually do like if you went to a restaurant that's just I don't know the name of the restaurant then I would have to go to Google often times and search and say well what is this name oh it's a restaurant well what do they do with the restaurant right we would have to go from there now you would think that AI might be better and better at basically doing kind of like that Google search and what not from the description that's one area of improvement there's certain apps that might be better at that as well however I don't think that's going to be perfect at this point in time no matter what you're doing you're going to have to do some research for new transactions if you're doing your own books that's usually pretty easy to do because you can say oh yeah that's a restaurant I went to that restaurant I remember that but if you're doing multiple books for other people especially if they're not located in the same area you are doing online bookkeeping then it becomes much more difficult to say take a description information and then assign it to a particular account when it's not obvious which account it's going to go to and often times we use the good old Google search looking for a name which is something that you might be able to automate with things possibly like chat GTP might be a better place to plug that and do that kind of thing so in any case then up top we've got the review for review this is where the limbo system is that's where they originally go when you first upload the transactions to QuickBooks from the bank feeds they're basically all going to be in for review because QuickBooks doesn't have the necessary information to complete the transactions the minimum information being the account to assign it to and what we would also typically want to add is the contact information being vendors for outflows customers for inflows once we add that information then we can have them move over to the categorized tab which there are none in at this point in time because none of them has yet been categorized note that the categorized tab is just going to be for the current session generally that you're working in QuickBooks you can't have the categorized tab for life in here otherwise it would be huge it would just keep on going up and up and up so if you log out of the bank feeds or out of the QuickBooks system and log back in the stuff that was in the categorized tab might not be in there anymore and then the excluded these are going to be items that you said came through the bank feeds which you basically are trying to delete you're saying hey look that came through the bank feeds I don't want it in the system I want to delete it now normally you don't want to do that because if it came through the bank that means that it's part of your system you're going to need to include it because you're going to need to do it for the bank feeds the bank is not typically wrong in that however there are some instances where you might want to exclude it the most common one of course being if for whatever reason duplicate transactions came through with the bank feeds so it put duplicate transactions often happening when you first set up the bank feeds because you might have some transactions that are already in the system due to an overlap of the dates and then sometimes there could be glitches where they have duplicate information but they're pretty good at this point so you shouldn't be deleting data and again if you had excluded items and you log out and log back into QuickBooks they might be removed from the excluded items you've got your tutorial on the right hand side if you want to take a look at that you can also go to the register with this link so if I click on that link it'll take us to the bank register so I'm going to go back to my accounts that's where you can enter data kind of manually into the register so you could as you're entering data into this system it might be useful to go to the register because the register gives you that quick I'm going to close this out, give you that quick look of what has happened in a register format in the checking account the other way to get to the register is to go to the chart of accounts and the top accounts will typically be the checking accounts and then go into this register which will give you a list of the transactions and then if I go back to the chart of accounts you can see I'm in this tab up top which the banking tab is housed over here so those are some navigations to the register alright so then the date ranges so if I select the date ranges you could select all dates which is quite common to use and I'll get into that in a second but you might want to limit the date range sometimes so a lot of times it might be useful for the first bank reconciliations you do maybe to do one month at a time so that you can enter the data for that first month and be very rigorous about it and then you can apply rules that will then apply to the rest of the period however other times like if you're a bookkeeper and someone comes in and says hey I need to have a whole year's worth of data because I need to do my taxes then the easiest thing to do is to show all the dates and then try to sort the information by the description so if I sort by description then I have the multiple transactions connected to each other which might make it easier for me to create a rule and see that it applies to multiple transactions so often times that's a useful tool so I'm going to go back on over here and the next one here we can filter we can filter by all transactions sometimes you might want to look at these two are the most common filters meaning I want to look at the transactions by just the increases so I can go just the increases now I've just got the increases then I might want to filter by description and now I've got my connection on just the increases which is kind of nice I can remove the filters thusly exiting them out and then of course you have the money out the decreases the checks and other outflows and then I can see the description format possibly and see all them together so my mind is just thinking outflows now the other side typically being expense accounts and then I can close that back out we have other filters for the recognized transactions we don't have any recognized because we haven't done any rules or done any data for QuickBooks to be able to recognize them yet suggested matches meaning QuickBooks is going to give us some ideas of the accounts that might work we don't have any possibly because we deleted a lot of the expense accounts so QuickBooks doesn't even have really anywhere to suggest where they would go because we want to make the expense accounts as we go transfers so these would be transactions that are going between accounts it's guessing that the stripe accounts are transfers because it has it in the description I would assume and then we have the rules applied the rules are going to be the things that we're going to put together as we do the data input the rules are really important because once we apply the rules then we can automate the system so we really want to be rigorous about the rules on the first couple months of data input because after that then we can let it roll typically but there are no rules applied yet obviously missing payee and customer so note that who's it from is not generally here you might know who it's from because it's in the description but QuickBooks can't make a customer or vendor based on what is in the description automatically because there might be other jargon in the description now it can make a guess and but again you don't typically want to have it just automate who the vendor or customer is going to be because you might end up with multiple vendors and customers and repetitive information so we're going to have to add that as we go alright and then closing this out so then we have the missing and unassigned so obviously everything I'm sorry we have the unassigned items that have not yet been assigned a category alright let's close this back out now we can search for transactions here we can also search for whatever's in here so cash and then it gives me a nice search field that is nice if I have a long list of things I'm looking for we have the printing option we have the export to excel these are things you would think not often used but maybe you want to export it to excel you might be able to do some more advanced kind of filtering options and whatnot in excel that could be useful but typically you got everything you need in here so exporting to excel doesn't do a whole lot for you I would think and then in the cog before I go into the cog note that you could sort this way right I can sort by date which is the default but often times you might want to sort by description and then you could sort by any of these you could sort by from or the amount or assigned most common date and then by description so then you can select all of them here so I can select everything 10 money out transactions 10 money in transactions I can confirm them all confirming means this was good to go pull it into the to the financials I won't be able to do it you would think because I don't have the information at this point and then we can edit them and exclude them exclude would mean pulling it over to here so I can batch transactions I have the confirm button on the right hand side and the review button here that I can review them with let's hit the drop down for and and by the way be careful on that confirm because notice that this confirm it assigned a category which is totally wrong right these are these are categories that have been assigned trying to do it automatically but they're totally incorrect past partly because we don't have expense accounts for it to assign it to because we wanted to create the expense accounts as we add them so so be very careful on their guesses quick books guesses will not always be correct alright so then let's go into the cog drop down now if there were checks we can add the check number if you're not writing checks if you're doing electronic transfers which would be the easiest thing to do to use the bank feeds most effectively then we don't need the check area from and to I think that's a really important field because although as you can see you don't need the who is from or to customers and vendors if you don't add the customers and vendors you're losing a big variant on the detail meaning I can still create the financial statements by just adding one variable one more variable is all I need the account that the increases are going to income going to income accounts expenses going to expense accounts however I might want to sort my data by who I paid the vendor or who I got the money from the customer so so some people just don't do that and you don't have to but you will lose a lot of data in in there so we want to have the two from turn on grouping if I group it notice it's grouping it by year I mean by month I don't find that to be as helpful because I can filter by year or month so and I'd rather sort by description across years I mean and and months right so I usually keep that off by default I believe that is the default to not have it on add new vendors so we add common vendors to your transactions and vendor list this is only applies to future transactions so you can add you know it's trying to help you to add the vendors which is part of the two from area which is one of the things that might be able to guess from the description it says show amounts in one column so notice all the amounts are in one column if you uncheck this some people like to see two columns the amount received separate from the amount spent I like it in one column because it's a lot thinner of the information in one column than in two and I think the negative numbers are easier for me to see I would almost rather they make the negatives red and or bracketed that would really make them stand out better to me but rather than two columns but in the case I show tags field so if you have tags that you're that you're using which is another way to sort and filter data primarily on the income statement then we have a whole another course or section that goes over tags then you can add tags that you can add to transactions editable date now notice if I go into a transaction typically you can't edit the date because QuickBooks would say why would you edit the date that the date is what the date is that's what it that's when it cleared the bank but maybe you want to edit the date so then you can turn on the edit date field and you can edit the date so by default you probably want it off because you don't want to it'll be a little bit faster not to tab through the date field as you're entering your information copy bank detail to the memo that's on by default meaning this information here is in the bank detail information and it's automatically putting it into the memo line now note that when you look at this whole field I just want to point out that that when I add a transaction that is an increase if it's on the normal category transaction the form that will be created would be a deposit form in other words if I hit the plus button the form that's being created is basically a deposit form the deposit form looks different if I right click on this and duplicate the tab let's just take a look at a deposit form and I go into the plus button and make a deposit form then it looks like this right so it's a big form but this is like the shorthand kind of like a check register format that's going to be the deposit form but when you actually drill down on the data it's going to show this type of deposit form now the increase is you can also match them meaning we'll talk more about that later but that would mean that you're matching it to a transaction you already entered in the system on your end meaning the bank feeds are helping you reconcile not actually creating a transaction and then you've got the record as a transfer which would mean the bank feed the transfer between two checking accounts or a checking account and a credit card account if you look at the expense side of things money's going out then the normal category field up top is going to create an expense type of form typically so the expense form is going to be under the plus button that's going to be like a check form without the check number because it's an electronic transfer so this would be the actual form that is being created by this shorthand form which is kind of like again like a check register entry it's a shorter entry you could still match it meaning if we entered the transaction on our side then it's going to try to match it to whatever transaction we entered we can record a transfer because the transfer could be an increase or decrease between two financial accounts connected typically to bank feeds to credit card accounts to bank accounts, credit card and a bank account and then you can record as a credit card payment which is kind of like another form of transfer so we'll talk about those more as we go for now you just want to be thinking increases are basically deposits and the decreases are basically going to be expense type of forms which are like check forms decreasing the checking account but without check number so if I select this one again and I go down and say ok so now let's take a look at copy bank so it's copying the bank detail to the memo so if I'm going to create a check I'll have a memo that's going to give me that information and it's like why not? that's going to give me more information that's going to be useful to have so I would keep that on so show suggested rules now so it's trying to give us like some suggestions on the accounts right here so if I turn off the rules then it's not going to kind of bug us with their suggested rules sometimes the rules are useful to turn on I mean like if you record things a few times it's going to say do you want to create a rule for that transaction but so if you don't want to create a rule that will be annoying but often times you're going to create the rule anyways and so we're going to create a rule whenever we can whenever we have a new transaction show bank details now this one I think is important because you'll note that the description here didn't pull in all the information all the time sometimes it's trying to truncate the information there's no numbers after these ones here so that it's trying to help us with like the AI that could possibly help us to get just the information needed to populate the from to form which is the contact or the customer or the vendor but I think that added detail could be useful so I always want to see the bank detail and you can see now it's added some more information see it didn't have all these numbers now it does that's useful because you can still copy just this information to create the customer and vendor and I want to be the one that decides which stuff is irrelevant and which stuff is not relevant and not relevant because sometimes the numbers might actually be helpful often times when you're making bank rules if you're trying to distinguish one rule from another rule then the numbering system might be able to help you to do some more advanced rule settings so I think that that should be checked off by default personally and I would go through and check that off so enable suggested categorization so now it's giving us our suggestions on the categories over here so I'll keep that on by default although I think we're going to do our own categorization you can see there's a lot of errors in the categorization it's not really fair we're not being fair to QuickBooks because we deleted a lot of the expense accounts but still be very careful with their default categorization now this is the page size 5075 I like to see as many as I can on like one page so I'd like to keep scrolling down instead of having to tab to the right so I usually max that out personally but that is going to be that one so that's the general that's the general overview here and so next time we'll go through and we'll start adding adding these so that and as we do we'll create we'll show how they will build the bank the reports on the left hand side they will show as we construct our balance sheet which is great because we can see we can see from scratch the creation through the bank feeds that then create the forms deposit and expenses which then construct the financial statements primarily being balance sheet income statement or profit and loss reports same thing as well as the subsidiary reports