 QuickBooks Desktop 2023 benefits HR company preferences, bills, calendar and checking preferences. 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 have another company file that's okay for now because we're basically just looking at the preferences in the edit dropdown and in the preferences. The thing that's nice about having a new company file however to look at the preferences is that you can see what the default preferences are and when you might need to be changing from the default preferences depending on your personal needs. So we're going to go to the edit dropdown down to the preferences here in a prior presentation we were looking at the accounting preferences. Now we're going to be moving on to the benefits in HR, the bills, the calendar and then down to the checking starting with the benefits and HR to tabs up top my preferences and company preferences. Now note that the benefits in HR are kind of related to the payroll and when we think about payroll we'll talk about the payroll later. So we got the payroll down here and there's different formats that you could turn the payroll on with. You might use QuickBooks to process your payroll if you have employees. If you don't have any employees then of course you don't have to worry so much about payroll or HR human resources related to the employees. If you do have employees you've got two major categories that you have to think about. Do you want to do payroll within QuickBooks or do you want to do payroll with a third party payroll provider? Noting payroll can be quite complex and I'm going to close this out for a second just to recap this. I'm going to maximize my screen on the right hand side and remember I always have the open windows so my default is always going to be view dropdown hide icon bar open windows open on the left hand side. Now with payroll if you didn't have any kind of tax law and HR kind of stuff payroll would be kind of like a vendor up top. We would be paying the payroll money going out at the end of the cycle for goods and services provided because there are taxes. A lot of kind of tax things that we have to report and reporting needs and then possibly over and above HR needs human resources kind of tied into the payroll. Payroll has become more and more of a specialty therefore we got to pay more for payroll so we can track all of that information either within QuickBooks or we can hire a third party to basically do that. We'll talk more about that when we get to the payroll section we will turn on manual payroll for the practice problem. But typically if you're going to be running payroll in real time you want to typically pay for payroll to have another double check from the at least the computer that you're processing payroll correctly. So that's the general concept I'm going to go back to the edit dropdown preferences and then HR benefits and HR so in the company preferences you've got you need to have active payroll subscription to use these futures. And then you got the workers compensation which is something that could be applicable depending on your your circumstances as an employer track workers compensation display message to assign codes explode exclude overtime. And then we've got income and employment verification include automated income and employment verification service powered by the work number from Equifax. So then we've got the bills item so the bills item will be there for pretty much all types of companies noting we're in basically the vendor area and considering the items in the vendor area here. If you're paying your vendors in the easiest way possible say with a check or say with the bank feeds that after they've cleared because they're automatic transactions then you don't really need to enter bills because you're not going to be tracking the accounts payable. When you're entering bills you're on more of an accrual basis and then you've got you've got the bills that of course you have to deal with in the accounts payable. So the bills bills are due 10 days after receipt so we can have that basically as the default that we enter the bills and we've got 10 days after the receipt. So if I enter a bill like a utility bill or whatever we get the bill then you've got the date of the bill and then the due date you can see the difference here we've got a 10 day difference and the due date is when we're going to be tracking the bills. Now obviously when we enter the bills we might have to actually physically look at the bill to determine when the due date is and put that in place so we can kind of sort our bills but that's the default. So and you can change it clearly so warn about duplicate bill number from the same vendor so that's going to be on by checking by default and that's usually a good practice and then we got paying bills automatically use credits. So if there's credits available to pay the bill they'll automatically in essence be assigned to the bill. So that would be on the pay bill side. So if I if I was to pay the bill on this side we enter about bill increases the accounts payable and then we pay the bill which typically would be lowering the checking account with a check type of form to pay the bill. But then we might have some other items that would be applicable such as credits which I'm going to keep it as the default to assign those credits out if there was a situation such as that automatically use discounts. If we turn on the discounts default discount assigned so we might have you know a discount that would be you know put in place by default and then you've got to assign the default discount account in that instance. In other words for example if you had a bill front that you're going to be paying to the supplier they might give you some kind of discount if you pay it within a certain time period. So they might say like they want the bill to be paid in 30 days but if you pay it in 10 days will will give you a discount. And so if we enter the bill in at the full price of the bill and then we get the discount for it. We'd have to assign the discount to the account like a cash discount for early payment or something like that possibly. So I'm going to take that off of here which is the default setting. Set a bill payment stubs template for and this is going to be the into its standard bill payment. So that's kind of a stub when you make the payment here. And so we'll keep that we're going to go then to the calendar. You got the my preferences tab up top. So the calendar view remind last or remember the last view that you had in it by default or you can put it always by default going into weekly monthly view for example. The weekly view is a five seven versus five days seven days or work week or non work week for example show all transactions versus to do transactions do and so on and so forth. And then you've got the display the display hide show only data exists upcoming date and past due date. So we can set the upcoming date so that we can you know prepare ourselves to whatever we think would be the best kind of cushion time and then the past the past due date data. So upcoming data past due data. So if I close this back out the calendar then would be this item here so we can open up the calendar. Obviously you can use the calendar as a calendar but you can also use it to kind of track if you have you know automatic transactions that you're going to be putting in place and that kind of stuff in reminders within the system. Then more and more you might start to use the calendar depending on how how much you use those kind of automatic transactions. We're not going to use it too much in the practice problem here do in part to the fact that clearly we're not working in real time because we're entering data into basically a practice file. So if you were to memorize transactions and try to remind yourself of transactions and stuff then the calendar can be more and more important and those kind of reminder settings could could be useful for you. So I'm going to go to the edit dropdown preferences again. We're going to go into the checking account. Now in the checking account when the my preferences we've got open write checks. Now it needs to assign an account to do this we don't have any checking account set up yet because it didn't set up a checking account by default. Let's go in and set up our standard checking account. So I'm going to close this back out. I'm going to go into the list drop down the chart of accounts. Notice it started with accounts receivable so we don't have any checking account. It does that I believe in part because the checking account are the things that might be assigned to a bank feed. And so it's trying to say when you set up the checking account it's going to ask you if you want the bank feeds and whatnot. That's why possibly they don't do it by default set one up a general checking or cash account. But we're going to deal with bank feeds at a future point in a whole nother section. So so we're not dealing with bank feeds now because generally it's useful to think about what all the forms do on a manual process so that you can then apply the bank feeds in the appropriate point for for that process. So we're just going to add an account. I'm going to go to the account and say new account. It's going to be a bank account. Let's add a banking type of account and say continue. And I'm just going to call it our major checking account checking. Now if you were in practice doing that you might have like the last four digits of the account number or something like that to help identify if you have multiple different checking accounts which checking account you are using could be a common practice. One problem with that however is that when you then make reports you've got these reference numbers which are great for internal use but don't look as nice for external use. So just be aware of that kind of stuff the formatting of your reports internally as you do the in as you do the data input versus kind of external but we'll keep that here. We don't need a sub account. No description is really required bank account number. I'm not going to put anything in there because I'm not going to do the direct pay or the routing number. I don't really need that because I'm not going to be doing the direct pay. I just want to assign the checking account and then a tax line represents if we're going to try to enter our books so that we can kind of export the data directly to attack software for example that has a lot of potential. I've experimented with it but I haven't really seen it used really well in practice because often times you need to make adjustments to your data input even if you use the tax codes. So you still generally if you're going to do your taxes right need to export the data to excel and do some tax adjustments to do it properly. So I don't so it's kind of cool this tax code thing but I haven't seen it work great yet at this point in time so I'm not going to use it. So remind me in order to check so I'm not going to order any checks with it. So there it is save it and close it and then it says set up online services to save time. Your financial institution may offer account statement downloads and other bank feeds. Meaning it's basically asking do you want to set up bank feeds. We got a whole another section on bank feeds and bank feeds can be great but just realize that you have to understand the accounting process to really understand how the bank feeds are going to fit into you. Accounting process are going to fit into your accounting process. So no I'm not going to set up bank feeds right now and then I'm going to go back into my preferences edit preferences. We're in the checking account now it says open the right checks. So here open the right checks I'm going to be putting this to my major checking account open the bill pays. So when I pay the bills it's going to be going to my major checking account when I pay sales tax I'm going to pay it out of my major checking account. When I make deposits they're going to be going into my major checking account. That will typically be the case you will typically have one major checking account that you'll be doing the stuff to generally on the company preferences print account name on the voucher. I'm going to keep that off as the as the default change right check when non cleared check is printed. So I'm going to keep that off as the default. So that's going to be the original date. I believe that you entered the check as opposed to changing the date start with pay E field on the check. So when you go into the check it you could try to adjust where it's going to start when you start entering data. So if I say OK here and I enter a check form now which we should be able to do since we've got a checking account. I enter a check form then where is it going to start notice it starts up here on the account and maybe you're going to say well it's always going to go into the checking account. So maybe I wanted to start down here because I don't need to change the date if I'm working in real time. So maybe I wanted to start right here. Now obviously if you're entering a whole years of data it's starting up here can be useful but that could be a useful tool. Edit preferences company preferences in the checking account. So maybe that could be a useful thing. I'm going to keep the default though. Warn about duplicate check numbers. You're typically going to want to keep the default of that being on because that's an internal control. Remembering that the checks if you actually physically write checks you may not because you might use the check form for electronic payments. You might be doing everything with electronic payments. The check form still represents the form which will be decreasing the checking account. So electronic payments and so on will still use kind of a check form typically. If you're physically writing checks you will still have to buy external checks and put them in the printer or you might physically write the checks and then mirror the check that you wrote into the QuickBooks system and the doubling of the check numbers can double check that no one steals the checks and you're missing the check and that kind of stuff. So autofill pay account number in the check memo. So that will help you to fill out you know to eat more easily fill out the data as you go into the data input. So I'll typically keep that on by default. Select default account to use open the create check payments form form with account. So if I open the create paycheck. So when you have a paycheck again I'm still going to be going to my checking account open the pay payroll liabilities checking account. Notice with the payroll sometimes it's useful to have another account just for payroll. So when you're setting up payroll you might think maybe I want a separate checking account for another internal control. Why because payroll is complicated because you're most likely to be sued by your employees out of anybody possibly. And if if something does happen in the future it could be a little bit easier to look at all the payroll stuff coming out of the same checking account. Adds a little bit more complexity to do that. However because then every payroll what you would have to do is transfer money from your general checking to your payroll account to cover the payments coming out of the payroll account. So you still got to transfer it from your checking account. It's an added step. But when you go back in and try to see what happened it's easier because you don't have all this other stuff going into your checking account. It's just the payroll stuff. So keep that in mind if if you're considering payroll do you want to set payroll up first or correct as good as possible going into it. Because again if it gets messed up then it's one of those things that it causes you more problems in the future. So view and enter downloaded transactions using advanced mode express mode or classic mode. So let's see what they have to say about these three modes. Notice this deals with bank feeds so it doesn't really matter for us here because we're not going to be using bank feeds. We will have another section on bank feeds if you got like a whole course or section on if you want to look at it. But advanced mode this uses the transaction list window to add or match transactions. So you can quickly update transactions for future matches and create rules to automatically recognize and match transactions to your books. So kind of an automated kind of process because as you enter the bank feeds you can try to make the bank feeds more automatic due to the accounting system being repetitious over time. Having similar transactions helping you hopefully to create rules. So we'll talk more about that. So express mode this uses the transactions list window to add or match transactions renaming rules are created automatically and then you got the classic mode. So this uses the account register to add or match transactions aliases match names exactly and you control when you want to create aliases. So there we have it. We're going to keep it on the advanced mode here turn on bank feeds log files. I'm going to keep that off here as well for the defaults. So those are those will continue on with the preferences next time.