 zero accounting software 2023 set up bank feed test company file with 30-day free trial get ready to become an accountant hero with zero 2023 here we are at the zero accounting software website the url being xero.com because I'm in the United States I have a Ford slash US if you're located elsewhere first a word from our sponsor well actually these are just items that we picked from the YouTube shopping affiliate program but that's actually good for you because these aren't things that were just given to us from some large corporation which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you these are things that we actually researched purchase and use ourselves Bayer dynamic not sure if I said that right but this is the DT770 Pro 250 OHM studio reference closed back headphones I wear headphones basically every day for a large part of the day they are important to me therefore I've gone through many different kinds of headphones I've had these for some time and they've worked quite well they fit over my ears but I'm still able to put my glasses on under the headphones the headphones not pinching too tight on the glasses to give me a headache which is nice the quality of the patting is good and it has lasted for some time I've had these for some time now and they haven't gotten all torn up on me or anything like that I also like that I have a cord when I'm doing my recordings as opposed to a USB centered headphone because that frees up a USB port and I find the USB headphones to be less reliable they come with an audio jack that looks like this which is useful for me because that plugs into my audio interface however if you want to use the headphones for some other purpose I believe it's fairly easy to get a converter to other types of audio jacks if you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com where we have many different courses you can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model giving you access to all the courses courses which are well organized have other resources like Excel files and PDF files to download and no commercials then you should be able to follow along just fine with the practice problem because the concept of connecting the financial institutions the banks to the accounting software to zero as well as the double entry accounting system itself used by the zero accounting software is basically universal the major things that will differ from location to location is number one of course the currency so you'll have to deal with me measuring things in the units of dollars while you might be measuring things in some other currency even though the accounting concepts will be the same and number two taxes so taxes will be specific to a particular location even there you can get the idea of what type of tax is being applied however of course the exact tax that's going to be applied will be dependent upon the laws and regulations of a particular location so what we would like to do now is be practicing with the connection to the bank feeds in order to do that there are two main tools that zero provides us for practice one is the demo file which is great and number two we possibly could get access to the 30 day free trial to be practicing with that's the strategy we want to use here because that way we could possibly get a file that has nothing in it in other words when we're looking at the two methods that we could use possibly to practice with the demo file is a great tool because it already has information in it and we can practice basically manipulating that information that allows us to deconstruct going from the end result back to the source documents but if we want to practice setting something up like setting up the bank feeds from scratch then from the beginning then it would be nice for us to have a blank file that we can connect to the bank or import information into and for that it would be nice if we can get a free 30-day trial to kind of test that process out so the way we could do that if you're logged into zero you can simply log in here if you haven't logged into zero if you don't have an account then you can click on the try the free 30-day trial basically what you're gonna do here is enter your information into zero I don't believe you need a credit card at this time in order to log into zero so that you have an account once you have the account then you'll be going into zeroes dashboard and the zero dashboard is where you can set up new company files possibly taking advantage of the 30-day trial and be using the demo company so once we're logged in we should have something that looks like this so this is our custom zero dashboard and so now we're gonna have the company files that we have created down below now if you don't have any company files created you're not gonna have anything down here and we can go in and add an organization like a company or business file or we can use the demo company down below now remember the demo company if I if I open the demo company the tool of it is that it already had the great thing about it is it already has information in it so I can I can go into my actual reports accounting drop-down I can go into my balance sheet for example and it already is populated and so now I can make changes to it and then I can go back into the balance sheet and see what happens so that's a great tool but what we would like to do is try to create something from the ground up and so so if you if you don't have access to a 30-day free trial or you'd rather just use the demo company you may be able to use it because we'll mainly be trying to import information into the system for the bank feeds so so you could try to use the demo company and basically import the information but if you want to start from scratch like we would like to do here I'm gonna go back to the to the last organization or I can hit the drop-down and go to the zero let's do it that way so now we're back to our home page then the other method we could do is add another organization before I do that however I just want to point out that the demo company file the other advantage of it as I believe it it'll actually save the information in the demo company file because it's actually your you know demo company file and then you could reset the demo company file if you want to reset it to the original numbers in the demo company that's a big advantage in my mind to some other methods used by other accounting software like a QuickBooks online which has more of a universal demo file that will reset every time you log into it and and everybody kind of logs in to it in a different using a different login so I really like that tool and you can also change the country over here so that you could practice in the different locations New Zealand United Kingdom Australia and global so that's neat as well and we have the addition business edition premium so I'm going to close that up but we're going to try to create another company file utilizing the 30 day free trial so I'm going to say add a company file and then I'm going to say this is the business name I'm going to say bank feed file and the industry that I'm going to pick now note that the industry you pick will will possibly have an impact on the the general ledger that you will create because zero it's going to try to possibly put together a general ledger based on the industry although it's it's usually zero I think it's actually better than other accounting software tries to give you somewhat of a limited a limited gl so we'll pick an industry I'm going to pick just a store based retailing because what I wanted to do is give me some inventory accounts now most of the stuff we'll put into the system here will be will be based on a concept that we're trying to create all of our books from the bank feeds which means we're going to try to limit the the inventory is a distraction from that but then we'll put some items in there to show how how some areas cause problems like inventory for example so then I'm going to say I'm in the country of the United States so you can pick the country here we're going to say do you have employees I'm just going to say no here noting that when you're talking about employees you're talking about payroll and zero usually has a system for payroll called gusto that's an integration to do payroll within the zero system your options on payroll you always want to think them out very carefully beforehand are to do payroll within zero or possibly have a third party help you with the payroll so that you can just enter the data into zero but so we'll talk a little bit about payroll as well because that's another area that forces us out of a straight cash based system which could be dependent directly on the bank feeds to doing some accrual concepts sometime but we're not going to actually process payroll through the system and we say that we're not a robot because I'm not a robot I'm not a robot stop calling me a robot the computer's always calling me a robot and there we have it easy as that so now I'm going to close this back out and we can take a look at the at the accounting and look at our chart of accounts down here this is what they gave us for the chart of accounts so pretty pretty lean chart of accounts there's not like they don't give us an overwhelming number of accounts however next time what we'll do is we'll go through here and possibly clean up the chart of accounts a little bit and so that we can practice building the chart of accounts basically as we do the bank as we do the data input from the bank feeds but that's the that's the general concept so if I go back just so we can see what we have here and go back to our my zero now we have here we can go into the demo company still and we've got our file here that we can we can work in the demo company is still a great tool to have because you can practice your data input without messing up your company file or your or your practice file as you do basically the data input so we'll continue on with the with our practice file and future presentations