 QuickBooks Online 2024. Set up 30 day free trial to practice with bank feeds. Get ready and some coffee because we get things done on schedule with QuickBooks Online 2024. When at first a word from our sponsor. Yeah, 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 CPA six pack shirts. A must have for any pool or beach time. Mixing money with muscle. Always sure to attract attention. Even if you're not a CPA you need this shirt so you can like pull in that iconic CPA six pack stomach muscle vibe man. You know that CPA six pack everyone envisions in their mind when they think CPA. So as a CPA I actually and unusually don't have tremendous abs. However, I was blessed with a whole lot of belly hair. Yeah, allowing me to sculpt the hair into a nice CPA six pack like shape, which is highly attractive. Yeah, maybe the shirt will help you generate some belly hair too. And if it does make sure to let me know. Maybe I'll try wearing it on my head. And yes, I know six pack isn't spelled right, but three letters is more efficient than four. So I trimmed it down a bit. Okay. It's an improvement. If you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com For attempting to practice to learn any kind of software such as QuickBooks Online. One of the first obstacles we have to overcome is how can we get access to the software possibly for free and in a format best suited to the practice we would like to do. To think about this question I think it's useful to categorize software this way. Some types of software once you get access to it you can create multiple files from it. Other types of software every time you create a new file you have to pay for a new piece of the software. For example, when we think about desktop type software such as office desktop products such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel. Once we have access to the software we can create multiple Word documents. We can make multiple Excel workbooks from that piece of software. That makes it easy to practice with those software once we have access to them. Other types of software often online software often web based software such as QuickBooks Online. Require us to purchase another piece of software every time we want to start a new company file. We can also compare this to the old QuickBooks desktop version which is still in practice. QuickBooks Enterprise is still going. QuickBooks Desktop Pro there's questions about how long they're going to keep QuickBooks Desktop Pro but we won't get into that now. The point being that with the desktop version it's similar to Microsoft Office products like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel. In that once you have access to the software you can create multiple company files. With QuickBooks Online we have to purchase another piece of software for each new company file that we create. That actually makes it a little bit easier to practice with something like the QuickBooks desktop version. We have a little bit different of an obstacle to think about when we're going to the QuickBooks Online versions. There are tools provided by Intuit however so let's give a list of some of these tools. Noting that one of the main problems we have is that even if we're using our own company file that's not the best file to practice with because we don't want to just enter transactions into our own data in order to practice entering transactions. So we need some kind of sandbox in order to practice with and here are basically the options for that. So we have number one we've got the free 30 day trial period. So you might be able to set up a trial period if you're interested in testing out QuickBooks Online. So we'll take a look at that option noting that when you're looking at a free 30 day trial the benefit of getting access to the software in that way is there's nothing in it at that point in time. That's a great practicing tool to do the startup process to set up the software from scratch. However oftentimes you're in a situation where you don't want to practice setting up software from scratch. You want data that's already in the system and for that the best version is the free test drive. So you can search online for QuickBooks Online test drive. We'll take a look at this or you can also find it in the Intuit web page. This file already has stuff in it so you can practice generating reports from a file that already has items in it. Now the free student version is basically kind of a variant of the free 30 day trial. You might if you're a student I believe at an accredited institution although you can take a look and do some more research with QuickBooks on what would qualify. You might be able to get access to the software for a longer period of time possibly and possibly even get practice materials in that situation. So if you're in that situation you can look into that in more detail and then obviously we can think about if we can get discounts talking to QuickBooks Online distributors and CPAs and see if we can get discounts on software if we would like to be purchasing the software. Obviously if we're practicing with the software to see if it's something that we want to purchase then these tools could be useful as well. So let's take a look at a few of them. Here we are in the Intuit website so intuit.com. We have different softwares up top. This is where I like to start instead of trying to go directly to the QuickBooks website because I think this site is always the same starting point and then I go to QuickBooks here and that's the software owned by Intuit. And then I tend to go all the way to the bottom of the software because this sales page will change. But if you go to the bottom of the page it has the products which have been there for a long time and then I can select precisely the product I want to look at which is QuickBooks Online. So if we go into QuickBooks Online you can see up top they have the try for 30 days here. If you scroll down and look at the pricing options they also have the toggle here. We'll come back to that in a second. And I believe on this page if you scroll down you'll also find the test drive. So we'll scroll down and say there it is. Here's the test drive. Now this page might change over time so it might be easier when you're looking for the test drive to just type into your search engine QuickBooks Online test drive into your favorite browser and then look for the option that has Intuit.com and the URL Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks. Go into that file and then I would choose I'm choosing the United States version of the software verifying that I'm not a robot and continue. Now this file is great for practice but it will reset all the time after you enter something into the worksheets but you can see here that in the reports it already has things in it. So if I go into the balance sheet there's already data in it. Whereas if I start a new file from scratch it's not going to have any data in it. So this would be a great tool to kind of mirror as though we're going into a new job or something like that where the file is already set up and I want to practice using the data sets that have already been set up. However it's often really useful to look at the underlying foundational items in the setup process because that helps you understand what the journal entries are doing, what the foundation those journal entries are laying on are and if you're a bookkeeper then setting up the new company file is often what ends up going to be a main kind of part of the job. So for that the 30 day trial would be a great tool to practice with. So I'm going to close this out and remember even if you have your own company file then again the problem is that you don't really want to practice on your own company file because you don't want to practice data input. If you want to test out connecting to the bank feeds but you're not sure if you want to do that then you might not want to do that in the company file that you're currently using because if it doesn't work out then it might be an issue. If you're trying to connect an app that you think sounds like it could be a useful tool but you're worried about it you'd like to test it then again you don't have that same kind of backup option typically with the online although they are making some changes to that that you might have with like a desktop. So what I'm going to do here is go to the 30 day trial version here and then I'm going to toggle this on. So remember if I toggle this on it's going to scare us because it's going to increase all the prices. So I'm going to toggle this on it increases the prices but the idea with a 30 day trial would be that I'm testing it out you probably don't want to be purchasing it at the end of the 30 day trial and paying the $90 and you probably don't maybe want to be totally committed to this software when you're on the 30 day trial. You want to test it out and run two different softwares parallel or run a practice problem in the 30 day trial and then after you think it's a way to go you might then look into the purchasing process possibly looking into seeing if you can get discounts at that time. So I'm going to go ahead and say free 30 day trial and choose the plan and so it has the payroll options here as well. Now note that payroll is an add on feature so you could I believe still get the 30 day trial with the payroll without being charged with the payroll. We're not going to be using the payroll in our case so we don't really need to add the payroll for our practice problem with the bank feeds. We will discuss some components of payroll and how payroll might work into or fit into or complicate the bookkeeping process with our bank feed example but we're not going to get into detail on the payroll and we'll talk about different options for payroll and whatnot but just note that when you think about payroll you don't really have to select the payroll right when you set up the file because you could upgrade the file at a later point in time often times and you also really want to think about what's the best way to set up your payroll trying to get it set up properly from the start of when you start payroll do you want to do it within QuickBooks or do you want to do it in some other with a third party provider so I'm going to go next and then so then it has our log in for the free 30 day trial here so if you don't have an account then you can create an account even if you have an account you might be able to still get the 30 day trial because you're attempting to practice with a new company file now obviously if you're giving them any payment information like a credit card or PayPal or something then you want to make sure that you cancel it before the 30 days if you don't want to get charged if you don't want to continue with it after that point in time okay so then I'm going to put an address here I'm just going to put an address in Beverly Hills 9505 I'm kind of making up an address low mean drive Beverly Hills or let's say 90210 Beverly Hills California so we're going to say that we're in California the address is going to be useful possibly for you because if you're doing something like sales tax or anything like that then that'll typically be based on the location where in the California sales tax is a is something on the state and local level so you could try not to put an address in there but the address might be necessary for certain types of things like I say such as the sales tax now we're going to go through a little setup interview process before we get the QuickBooks file set up which can be a little bit scary at first because we might think hey look if I get this incorrect my whole QuickBooks file is going to be messed up but that's not usually the case because a lot of the information in this interview process might be more for internal purposes rather than having a big impact on the file that will be created number one and number two because some of the options QuickBooks will ask you to set up such as if you want to connect apps or if you want to have some kind of payments set up or if you want to be connecting to the bank feeds even are things that you don't have to set up in this interview process you could skip those items and set them up at a later point in time it's not like you have to do it now or you'll lose it so don't worry too much about that we're going to skip through some of those items including the bank feeds set up and then show you how to set up the bank feeds once we're in the QuickBooks file okay so it says welcome we're glad you're here here's what we'll do today so tell us about your business get expert help if you'd like set up what you're here for so that's what I want to do set up what we're here for so what do you call your business we'll use this to get you started so the company name would be something of course that might be populated on forms that might be going external to the business such as invoices and estimates for example so I'm going to say it's a bank feed practice file for our purposes here because that's what we're going to be using it for I believe this is more for internal use how have you been managing your finances no matter where you're coming from we're here to help so nothing I'm just getting started peach tree, sage, peach tree, spreadsheets QuickBooks desktop other QuickBooks software and other so note if you were coming from another accounting software then you have to think about how you want to be transferring the data into the new QuickBooks software your general options being that you can try to somehow import all of the prior data into the new QuickBooks software so that you can still basically run reports and see information in the past however you might not want to do that for multiple reasons it might be more difficult it might mess up the transactions in the sorting process going from one to the other and it might be a good opportunity to clean up your books as you're going from one software to the other so your other option might be to say hey look I'm just going to enter the beginning balances as of this point in time going forward typically wanting to include an entire year in one software so that you can basically create financial statements from one software possibly to help you use your for your taxes out of one software and therefore possibly needing to run two softwares parallel to each other in other words if you're starting in February you might want to try to enter the books into your new software for January and February even though you already have that information in the prior software so that you can run parallel for a certain amount of time and have one year's worth of data in the new software okay if Peach Tree was the old competitor to QuickBooks desktop for a long point of time and then it went to Sage 50 so a lot of people might still be using Peach Tree or Sage so that's a common competitor and now the online version is trying to get people to move from the desktop version to the online version so you might have some more resources with those two options possibly to try to get the information from like the desktop to the online we have other courses or sections on that we'll dive into that in more detail we're just going to start from scratch in our case because we want to start the setup process from scratch so is bank fee practice file your main source of income we'll use this information to get you started now I'm going to say no and it's kind of like well why do you need to know that QuickBooks is that really going to help me set up the file I doubt it sounds like internal information I think they want that for their purposes so how long has bank fee practice file been in business again probably not useful for the setting up of the file probably information that QuickBooks is gathering about us so what kind of business is this tell us how your business is set up so is it an LLC now we're talking in the United States about different entity types so from an accounting standpoint all entities are basically thought of as separate from the individual even a sole proprietor liability perspectives related to them and depending on the different entities and different ownership structures for a partnership versus a sole proprietorship versus a company versus an S corporation and so on so I'm going to say no it's not an LLC and then is it a sole proprietor that would be one person a partnership two or more people non-profit organization so those are organizations that pretend like it's not about the money when you know it's basically about the money and then the S corporation is a type of entity that's a corporation that has flow through to try to have tax implication liability implications the standard C core short corporation I'm not sure we're going to go with the sole proprietor again don't worry about this too much here this might have some impact on the tax accounts that you set up but even that I don't think is all that useful I'm not going to have an impact on the chart of accounts I don't believe as that you would think it would because you would think it would change the general ledger accounts but I think QuickBooks just tries to throw in some massive chart of accounts as a starting chart of accounts no matter what you put here so there we go so what's your industry so start typing and select the industry so we can select the industry and again you would think the industry would have an impact on like the general ledger I don't think it does though but I'm going to pick one I'm going to pick a generic all other miscellaneous store retailers so that I have like a store situation so if they did change the chart of accounts you would think they would give me inventory and cost to get sold but again I don't think they do I think they're just going to give me some massive chart of accounts no matter what I put here so it probably doesn't matter that much so what's your main role at bank feed practice so owner employee bookkeeper account other I'm going to say owner probably doesn't matter to the bookkeeping bookkeeping is going to be the same the file is going to basically be the same they probably want that for their own internal purposes so they know everything about you so who works at this business so help us understand who is part of the team so we've got the business of one contractors I plan to hire in the future employee's other so this probably doesn't matter as well they're trying to see if they can upsell you to payroll you would think here so we're going to say okay there's that so does a bookkeeper help with your books if so we can connect them to your account so I'm going to say no for now which means they're probably going to they might try to sell me a bookkeeper they might recommend a bookkeeper you would think we can take bookkeeping off your plate so our quickbooks live your post books up to date and keep them that way so categorize transactions reconcile your accounts and run reports share insights about your business want to learn more about quickbooks live bookkeeping we'll help you decide if quickbooks live bookkeeping is right for you so we're going to say no thank you they're trying to upsell us to do our bookkeeping for us that's nice but so what apps do you use for your business so here's another place where you might say if I if I skip this then I might be missing out on these apps but don't worry you can add the apps later so the major apps paypal is a pretty neat app but it's really a connection kind of to a bank feed so you can so it's basically a bank feed kind of thing but they give you a little bit different of a layout with the app which is pretty neat and then if you have like a Shopify or Square or Amazon or eBay these are the other stores if you're doing an e-store or something like that we have another course or section on that if you want to look into those in more detail but I'm going to skip it for now and what do you want to do in quickbooks we suggest these features based on what we know about your business your selections help us create your setup checklist so again these probably don't have a big impact on your books but they're going to give you a checklist right so that it's not just because they want internal information about you they're going to give you a valuable checklist that's going to help you it's not very helpful checklist I don't feel like but in any case so send and track invoices yes track and receive expenses we'll say okay manage and pay bills yeah track my team's time maybe track sales maybe track mileage probably not accept payments okay well that means they're going to try to set me up with a they're going to try to get me on their checking account but get business banking create estimates or quotes maybe manage inventory maybe manage sales tax maybe so again this product if you don't check off one of these and you're going to do one of those it's not like the end of the world I think this is basically internal documentation for quickbooks and they're going to give you a cool checklist but they okay so want extra help we'll get you up and running so you can hop on a 45 minute call with an expert to get guidance on what you'd like to get done learn how to connect your banks set up a chart of accounts send and track invoices manage and pay bills automate your tasks so no that's cool that they have that but no we're not going to do that so now we'll be able to accept payments track expenses okay get paid with invoices so set up online set up online payments to let customers pay you on the spot so this is basically quickbooks trying to upsell us basically to use their banking system in order to and one of the benefits of that is it makes it a little bit nicer to integrate into your invoices so that they can click on the invoice and have a payment so it is pretty neat but we're not going to do that we still can connect bank feeds even if we're not banking basically with into it or quickbooks the owner of quickbooks all skip that and link your account and see everything in one place securely link your banking credit card select the accounts you'd like to bring in see what your cash flow looks like so we're going to be connecting our bank accounts but I'm not going to do it here because I want to show that you can connect the bank feeds within quickbooks you don't have to do it through this interview process and I almost think it's better not to so I can see what's the system looks like what's in the chart of accounts before I start doing that so I'm going to say skip 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 so notice I think quickbooks really likes this receipt because they're their geeks over there application makers made this cool phone app that takes pictures of receipts and what not but in reality I don't think it's that useful for a lot of people because everything's online right now so you have a nice audit trail of everything you paid for because you paid for it with an electronic transfer these days so any case I save whatever this is internal information for them I save paper and digital receipts and so on so let's go next keep your receipt and maximize deductions so get the free quickbooks mobile app with your subscription snap your receipt and bills then we'll match it to your books download the quickbooks mobile app so this is thing they really hyped this up when it first came out and it's pretty neat that it does that but like I say I don't think a lot of people are doing their books with receipts now because you're not like using paper checks anymore you're using electronic transfers and the electronic transfers have an audit trail that's way better than if you were writing like a check in or paying someone with cash in which case you would need the receipts so in any case you're on your way so it's pooling the information personal dot dot let's go building the checklist it's doing everything let's see it let's see what you what you got here so there's our file and here's the fancy checklist so they didn't they weren't gathering just information about you for their own for their own data file they made this amazing checklist with that information which is going to make things easier so we probably won't spend a lot of time on the checklist it might be helpful but there's that it's set up for us is the chart of accounts so if we look over here we have the chart of accounts so if I go into let's go in the transactions and then on the right we've got the chart of accounts so they gave this massive chart of accounts so here we have that quick note on the navigation here so this can look overwhelming if it's like the first time you've logged into QuickBooks so just realize that the basic outline is going to be the middle part of the screen is where something is going to be displayed and then you're going to you're going to navigate through the screen either with those foundational items which are up in the cog so when you're setting up things like your settings your managing of the users and you're entering your lists which include you could get to the chart of accounts here and the items here and other types of lists these are the foundational things that you need to lay down before you do the day to day input and then when you do the day to day input typically that is done with forms all the forms are typically located under the plus button broken out by cycle customer cycle otherwise known as revenue cycle sale cycle maybe accounts receivable cycle the vendor cycle otherwise known as the expenses cycle possibly the accounts payable cycle the purchases cycle and then you've got in essence payroll within here the payroll cycle and those are the major cycles and we can generate the forms here the forms are the things that create the actual transactions so whenever we enter transactions that construct the financial statement we use the forms noting the primary goal of the bookkeeping process is number one creating the financial statements and related reports the major financial statements being the balance sheet the income statement otherwise known as the profit and loss and then number two communicating as we do our transactions with the people we do business with and trying to make that communication as smooth as possible that being the customers the vendors and the team so we enter the transactions here we communicate with people that we do business with and the centers what I would call centers the sales center otherwise known as the customer center the expenses center otherwise known as the vent or the vendor center or the expenses center and then if we had payroll we would be dealing with the payroll center and here although you might set up payroll in multiple different ways you might have a payroll provider or something like that now with the bank feeds they're mainly going to be managed in this transaction tab so within the transaction tab we've got the bank transactions that we will deal with and then we have our chart of accounts in here as well our rules and our bank reconciliations so that's a quick overview of the layout now you also have some things to just note if you're not used to like online software web based software if I hold down control and scroll in I'm on a normal windows computer I'm not sure exactly how it works on a Mac but I'm assuming you'd have a similar zoom in then you can zoom in to the screen now as you zoom in and out notice that the shape of the screen and the icons on it will change so just if you're looking at a phone you can go on a tablet a lot of people do their work on their phone right now which seems crazy to me because my eyes would never be good enough to do or at least not now are you good enough to do that so but just note that then the icons are going to be different if you're working on a phone you obviously know this I would assume but if you're coming from the desktop version that might be something new to you and then and then note that if I want to have two screens open two tabs at the same time I can right click on the tab up top and then duplicate the tab duplicate the tab so now I can have two tabs open once we get some data in the system my typical setup process will be to open the reports on the left hand side have the major balance sheet and income statement reports open in tabs to the right and then have my data input tab on the tab to the left that means that I can work on all three tabs at the same time but a new tab such as refreshing the reports I need to refresh the screen so if I was to run a report there's nothing in it because we don't have any data in it as of this point in time but if there was I'd run it every time I go back on over here and refresh the data every time I do a new data input also note that you might also want to work on the QuickBooks sample company file the test drive which already has data in it from time to time even as you're in your own practice file or in this file now I don't think you can really log in sometimes there's an issue logging into the test drive when you're already logged in to your own file so to get around that if you want the two open at the same time is that you can use another browser such as using chrome versus edge fire versus Firefox or whatever browser you are in there's usually an incognito window right so I could select the item up top and I have in this case I have a new private window that I can open and then I can search for QuickBooks online test drive and I think it's easiest just to type into the search I'm looking for Intuit.com to have in the results test drive into it so that looks like the one and then I want to open this up this is available in English Canada English so I would like the US one but I'm going to just open this one for now just so we can see it and so then it makes me pick the buses buses I am not a robot and then we can have the two files should be able to be open at the same time and if I go to the reports on this file then of course there should be something in them already if I go to the balance sheet there we have it so now I can have these two things side by side if I want to practice data input over here and not mess up my current which is kind of like my company file or mirroring my company file I can do that so note there's two kinds of practice files we have here then we've got a 30 day trial great if we can get access to it or the student file to have a sandbox that has nothing in it practicing the setup process the starting process connecting to the bank feeds uploading the bank transactions and making the rules for the bank feeds and what not and then we have the sample company file which is great because it already has that stuff set up and then you can deconstruct from the end result the reports back down to the source document and then you can also practice data input with a file that already has the foundational items set up so we'll continue on with our practice problem next time