 Zero Accounting Software 2023 New Customer Setup and Accounts Receivable Beginning Balances. Get ready because it's time to become an Accounting Hero with Zero 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 our custom zero homepage going into the new company file we set up in a prior presentation that being get great guitars. We're continuing on with entering our beginning balances imagining we're pulling those in from a prior accounting system as well as laying down those foundational items necessary to make the data input forms as easy as possible going forward in the normal accounting cycle. Jumping on over to our beginning balances these are the list of beginning balances we want to put in place. Our strategy is not to put them in as one giant journal entry because we want to make sure that we're doing so and putting them in place in a way that we have our compensated for any kind of special needs that a particular account has. So last time for example or in a prior presentation we entered the inventory in such a way that we can track the inventory and have the subsidiary ledgers in place. We have a similar type of issue with accounts receivable. Now note that some industries might not have accounts receivable because you might be in the kind of industry where you basically are on a cash based system. So a quick jump on over to our flow chart over here this is a QuickBooks desktop flow chart but it works well just to see the flow of the normal accounting cycle. And remember that if you're on the sales side of things the revenue cycle the easiest kind of business would be one in which you just get paid from like a platform like a like gig work like you get paid by YouTube or something in which case you would probably just wait till something clears the bank and record it as revenue when when that happens with the bank feeds. However if you're in a cash register situation like a restaurant or a food truck then you're going to have to record the transactions as they are happening typically because you would like to have that added information of recording the sales as they happen as an internal control and then group those transactions and deposit them into the bank. And then if you're in an industry that you have to do the work first like an accounting firm a law firm for example you do the work first you invoice the client and you have to deal with that accounts receivable tracking the accounts receivable hopefully then getting paid on the accounts receivable and then depositing that money into the bank. So whether or not you deal with accounts receivable will be dependent largely upon the industry that you are in. So if I had beginning balances from accounts receivable in my prior accounting system and I'm just trying to put them as a beginning balance in place and then move forward from here I want to put them in place so that they're tied out to a particular customer so that I can continue on with the normal process. If I put accounts receivable in as a journal entry one zero might not allow me to do it because zero is going to force me to add a customer oftentimes possibly and two even if I could do it I wouldn't be able to record the receipt of the payment I expect to receive at some point going through my bank account possibly tying it out to the receivable in my normal flow process so that's why I have to kind of think about that when I put this on the book so I'm going to do two things at once here then I'm going to add the customers and then I'm going to try to assign out the beginning balances for the particular customers that we have so as I add the customers you might think about that as just a normal kind of thing that you might do as you're starting your new company file in order to make the data input meaning invoices and so on easier for future transactions although many times it's easy to just add the customers as you go so in other words if you had a prior accounting system then you might not need all the customers to pull them into your current accounting system because you might not do a lot of business with them or it might be easy for you to set up the customers again or you might be in a business where you're not really interacting with your customers a lot other than the sale facilitation like if you had an e-commerce store you want them on your newsletter but you're probably not communicating with them directly a whole lot all you have is minimal information so the question is do you want to pull in those customers to your new accounting system if you're in the type of industry that you deal directly with customers a lot and and do custom services and stuff like that accountants lawyers and so on landscaping and that kind of stuff then you would like to have as much detail on your customers as possible so you can facilitate and and nurture the relationship going forward for future projects that for on a on a continual type of basis so you might then get your customer information such as this from from another system whether that be your email or your other any other database program you could typically export it to excel and once we have it in excel we can then import it into the zero system is the fastest way to do this we could also put it into zero one by one but if we have a lot of customers like with the items service and inventory items that is it's probably easier to import it however we want to probably do the same thing with the customers in that we pull the template from zero and then we populate the template by just copying and pasting over to the appropriate fields so we can upload it easily so one thing to note with with the this kind of data it gets a little bit messy sometimes because one database program for example might record a name as the last name and then the first name and then another another database program might record it as the first name and then the last name and and then another database program might have first name and last name in two different cells so if that is the case you might have to do a little a little fancy work in like an excel for example to either break out or combine fields together so that they will fit into the proper database program and there's there's a lot of little excel tricks that you can do to make that process easier so I'm not gonna get into it like an excel tutorial on how to do that but just note if you google search for tricks to do that kind of thing there's different there's different ways that that that that you could do that so so just keep in mind that that's a common issue and there are workarounds that you can look up and there's it you know so I won't get into that in detail but just keep keep that in mind all right we're gonna go into the we're gonna go into the contacts over here under the contacts we can have all contacts or customers and customers and suppliers we're focused mainly on the customer side of things however the data input is much the same in zero for the two and because you could imagine it would have similar kind of data that would be populating for it so one way that you can you can add our new customers this is I can go with a new button up top and we have a fairly significant amount of data that we could potentially put in place for a customer but most of it is not required so if I was to go through this we got the contact name account number account number might not be a required field first name and last name might not be required because you might just have the business name email address might not be required although more and more emailing the invoices is something that we do so that's probably something that we want we'd also like to have that for our email marketing possibly additional people so you can add another person business information so you got the phone number which again not required field but if you have a person that you deal repeatedly with that could be useful website and then notes for the client you have your addresses so you got the billing address and the delivery address if different which again depends on whether or not you're going to be shipping to them as to whether you will need that and then you've got the sales account invoice due date amounts are using the original settings so we're gonna tax exclusion if there's exclusion of the tax and then the sales tax we have a similar kind of thing if they were excluded from tax that we saw in a prior presentation usually those would be using the original settings discounts if applicable for that we can put in place for a particular customer we might say that particular customer we're giving a discount to them in particular credit limit amount block new invoices use organization settings for the branding theme so we could then say that we want a different branding themes which is going to be our custom forms like invoices and whatnot purchase defaults defaults can be overridden so purchase defaults select the account if you were going to purchase these items this would typically be more on the vendor side of things than the customer side of bill due date amounts are these are the tax for the purchase side of things now what we would like to do is import this because it would be faster and we're not going to use all of those fields we're just going to use the the name the email the phone the street the city the zip and then we want to get these beginning balances in there as of the end of last of the prior year to the year that we're going to start our accounting notice the sum of those ar's add up to the 20,500 so these customers will help us to populate in the future invoices and it'll help us to get that beginning balance in place all right so let's do it we're going to say if I hit the three dots up top we can import so I say import says here prepare file to import download the template and add your contacts don't delete the column headings as they are needed for the import to succeed so we won't delete them although there will be a lot of them to update contacts already in zero export contacts to csv and edit them in the spreadsheet existing contacts will be updated if the value in contact name matches the name of the contact that already exists so in other words if you already have contacts in place but you want to update them not one at a time in zero but export that information to a csv file and then adjust it in excel and then import it that might be faster you can do up to 1,000 contacts to be imported each time so we're going to download the template here so instead of making our spreadsheet into a csv file and trying to upload it we're just going to copy and paste these columns to the appropriate columns in the csv file that they provide us so let's open this up and it's less likely we will mess up the system when we do that now when I open this up it's opened as a csv file now so I'm going to do the same process we did with the service items and inventory items I'm going to save this as an excel file so I can make adjustments to it with excel formatting and then I'll save it again as a csv file when I want to import it so that it'll be in the proper format so I'm going to go where did I put this I can't think because I'm talking you talk too much just do the just find the thing so okay this is on the zero this is contacts template okay that looks good movie B to the end let's zoom in on this a bit so we've got all those fields because there's all these different contacts right but we're we're just going to use the ones we need so if I select all of these fields well let's just do it this way I'm going to select row one and then I'm going to wrap the text wrap it send alignment and wrap the text so we could see a bit more detail let's center it to why not all right contact name account number email address first name last name p o attention p o address p o p o p o and we're dealing with customers so we don't have a lot of p o stuff attention to address attention to city region phone okay that's a lot of stuff all right so let's go to the contact name that's easy we're going to put our contact name it's just going to be anderson guitars and we're just going to we don't really even have a contact we're just using the generic company name so I'm going to copy that put that in the contact name that's the only required field as you can see with the asterix so I'm not going to put anything into the account number email address we have that so we've got the email addresses here so I'll copy that we'll say say that here and paste it into the email where was that email addresses I'll make this a little bit wider all right first name I don't have first name last name because I only have the company name I don't need anything for the p o's because these are customers uh s a attention to address uh s a address let's see so notice they have the address line one and then they've got the zip code and then they've got the country so let's see if I can line that up I'm going to go over here and say all right here's my street addresses now again some of this could be combined with a comma or something and you'd have to break it out in order to populate it so you want to you know test out that you get the right breakout and there are tools you can look at excel tricks to kind of do that but I'm going to pick up the street address which I'm going to put in this one make this a little bit wider hopefully I've get this right and then the city is going to be here I'll pick up the city is here okay uh city and then we've got the zip code zip code there's a code on the zipper zip code and then uh country region okay let's keep it at that for now phone number let's go the phone number we have that we've got the phone number and so I'm going to say boom and then the fax mobile another number skype bank account bank account info tax number accounts receivable accounts receivable tax code name accounts receivable tax code website legal name discount company number due date due date due date sales account purchase account tracking purchase tracking blah blah default default something something who and wow a lot of personal email okay I think we've got what we need oh it's a lot of fields but we didn't get to put in the beginning balances so we'll have to deal with that so I'm going to import these first and then I'll deal with that beginning balance situation so let's go back on over and I'm going to go all right let's save it first so if I messed up I can go back into it and then I'll file and save as a csv file uh it's already a csv file dang it let's save it as a excel file too excel file so if I messed it up I can go back into the excel file so I should have one that's excel and one that's a csv I believe now let's close it out and double check that double check uh let's see so now we've got the customers here and we have now here are the two of them we've got the contacts and a csv and then the contacts in our excel and if I open up the csv format it takes away the formatting again takes it back to to look like this so it just removed the formatting but it's got all the stuff in it all right let's close it out and let's cop I'm going to copy this location and import and then we're going to cross our fingers and hope for the best that's how we do that's how we do stuff here we cross the fingers and hope for the best so this is going to be the contacts template let's import that all right it's a csv let's do it let's try it out it says import no three contacts has warning that will affect how they'll import all right I'm going to go ahead and force it and see what happens let's complete the import complete the import okay so there we have them in there so there's Anderson there's Jones guitars there's Smith guitars that looks good so then if I go into Mr. Anderson now we've got our information up top so that looks good if I edit Mr. Anderson and we go into here we've got our name account number it's all we need phone number populated address the delivery address so the billing address it looks like enter address manually didn't populate uh but that's okay purchase defaults okay I won't change it now so you obviously you want to kind of you know test that out and I think the I think the address is one of the things we kind of want to just you know check on on how best to populate the address because you know that obviously could be an important component in terms of how each of these lines are going to basically be input into the system here so if I was to edit this just to look at this field so attention field the address and then you've got these other lines that's where it had line one line two I didn't see a state so that's kind of annoying that I didn't so obviously it'd be good to have the state populated and then country and use this as the as the billing address so I can select that and it'll populate up there okay I won't go into that more detail but that's the general process of putting it in place for us I want to now think about how we can then put in the 20 500 now that we have these people in place now usually the the form that is used to do that would be an invoice form so the easiest thing to do would be just to make an invoice form for these customers but I don't want to make it in the current year I'm going to make it in the prior year so that if I record the other side to income it just rolls out into the open into into the the balance sheet for the first year so so I'm just going to make a normal invoice and so let's let's see how that works if I go back on over I'm just going to go all right now I need to invoice for these three customers to put the accounts receivable on the books so we're going to go all right this is Anderson Anderson I'm going to invoice for 5000 jones 75 and 8000 for smith because that's the form used to put put the accounts receivable on this is going long on the video so let's try to do this quickly so I'm going to make an invoice and we're going to say this is going to go to customer uh mr. Anderson and so there we have it now importantly the date is going to be back in the end of last year because I'm going to do all of my adjustments in 2022 the end of it and then due date I'll let it populate branding standard United States and then down here I might now you could set up another item just to do this process and possibly put the other side of the item to like an equity account but you don't really need to because I could just say that I'm going to use my normal hourly or whatever and I'm just going to put in that it's going to be for 5000 and it's going to go to a revenue account now I could this is another way I could change it I could change it here and put it directly into equity so it doesn't hit the income statement but I don't really care that it hits the income statement because it's going to be doing so in the prior period and I'm putting these beginning balances in place as of 2023 so it will roll into equity either way so I might just call this like like um beginning balance now also note that this invoice doesn't actually tie into the invoice that I created if I did so in my prior accounting system the other thing you could do is mirror the actual invoice that you put in in your prior accounting system but maybe you don't need to do that maybe you just need to have it in there so that I can collect on it when I receive the payment so what's this going to do it's going to increase the accounts receivable by 5000 the other side's going to go to revenue but in the prior period therefore it'll close out to equity for us so I'm going to go ahead and approve and add another and then we'll check it out on the financials let's approve uh complete the tax field so I'm going to say it has no tax all right let's say approve and add another approve and add another and let's do it again this time for Jones Jones guitars as of the end of last year December 31st and boom boom boom boom looks good I might not even need an last chosen item I'll say this is going to be the hourly and this is going to be beginning balance and I'm just going to put the amount here is going to be 7500 so I'll just say 75 and it's going to go to revenue that's cool so we're going to say this is going to increase accounts receivable the other side's going to go to sales in the prior period and that's fine so I'm going to say one more time uno vase mas approve and add another thank you Jones may I have another it needs a tax rate I should go back into those items and say that the service items are exempt from tax which we I won't do now because we're running long on this one and we want to you don't want to go too long people get bored all right and then let's do the last one this is Smith I don't know how they get bored when we're doing like accounting stuff it's super exciting but this is going to go back to people are weird you know weird people all right so this is going to be hours two and this is going to be the beginning balance the ending balances and this one is for eight thousand eight foul eight foul all right and it's going to tell me I need to say tax exempt I'll say all right let's approve it save it and then let's check out our forms so I'm going to right click on the tab up top and duplicate it so I can open up my financials I'm going to right click on that tab and duplicate it again I'm going to go back to the tab to the middle and open up the financials so we're going to go into the accounting and the balance sheet we want as that is thinking I'll tap to the right and I'll go to the accounting and this time the income statement is what we want on this one and then let's change the date range up top I'm going to say this is going to be last fiscal year so now I've got that 20,500 in revenue and you might say well I don't want it in revenue but it's in there as of last year so that's fine because we're starting the new accounting system in uh January of 2023 if I run this for December now I've got my accounts receivable on the books that's what we want to see and the accounts receivable if I drill down on it is on the books not using normal forms invoices in other words it's not a journal entry that is put in place so I know so it looks normal from a bookkeeping perspective going from here forward going to go back to the report now on this side of things if I if I put my income statement to the current year so if I say I want this fiscal year 2023 then nothing's in it and that's good because we were starting as of 2023 so although it hit the income statement it did so in the prior year and it rolled out into equity in other words on the balance sheet you can see it down here in the current year earnings if I'm in 2023 but if I push this up to this year end of this month let's say update now you can see down here it pushed it into retained earnings account so it rolled in to the retained earnings account so that's fine that that's what we want to see if you don't want it on the income statement at all then as you did the the transaction you could record it directly to you know retained earnings or or owner's capital all right if I go back to the first tab the other thing that's nice about this is if I go into my customers now then I've got my three customers notice they're pulling in you know to the customer area because I have customer type transactions in there they owe us money there's the five thousand we see the amount that they owe us so it makes sense from a bookkeeping standpoint now so when the next thing happens we receive payment we can go through the the normal process of receiving the payment on the open invoices all right so our bottom line here if I were if I go back to my balance sheet we've now got the the accounts receivable twenty thousand five hundred we got the two thousand eight nine six the other side's going to equity that's our that's going to be our our general routine and once we do all of that equity will wash out and be correct although possibly in multiple different equity accounts and then we can just clean up the equity that's the strategy for getting these beginning balances on the books and doing so in such a way that the supporting accounts accounts receivable sub ledgers and so on track such as the inventory sub ledgers and so on track properly