 Here we are in our QuickBooks Online test company file. Remember the two ways you may be able to practice with QuickBooks Online, possibly for free, is one, utilized a free 30-day trial, often offered by Intuit, Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks. Best way to get there, I believe, is to go to the Intuit website, intuit.com, search for QuickBooks, and then I would go all the way to the bottom of the page where they have the products down here and then search for QuickBooks Online, and then you'll be able to see, hopefully at this point in time, the free 30-day trial here and this little toggle button for the free 30-day trial here. The second option is to utilize the QuickBooks Online test company file. Best way to find it is to just go to your favorite search engine and type in QuickBooks Online test company file. If you want the two open at the same time, then you're gonna need to use a different browser. If you're using Google Chrome, you can then also use the incognito mode to have them open at the same time, which you could find by going to the three dots and go to the new incognito window, opening an incognito browser, type in QuickBooks Online test company file, and then search for the option that has Intuit, the owner of QuickBooks in the URL. Now we're gonna be in the accountant view as opposed to the business view. You can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top and then switching the views on down below. Now we wanna take a look at some of those cool tools. QuickBooks Online provides us allowing us to better track and categorize our data, including class tracking, projects, location tracking, tags, and sub-customers, which used to be called jobs. Although these tools give us a lot more flexibility, they also come with problems, possibly leading to paralysis at times for multiple different reasons. One is just cause there's a lot of them, which is a little bit overwhelming. Two is that the functionality of these tools can sometimes overlap on each other. So for example, if you have a particular thing that you would want to do, you could pick multiple of these tools that might be able to accomplish that task, leading to the question of which tool would be the best tool to use for the particular task we want to get done. Three, you might be trying to integrate multiple of these tools into your accounting system. So when we try to stack them together and see how the interplay between these tools will work, that can add a lot of confusion, a lot more kind of options as well. And four, if you've learned accounting from like a textbook kind of situation, you're basically learning a double entry accounting system. Some of these tools, what they're really doing is kind of adding another dimension. So the double entry accounting, you can think of doing on like an Excel spreadsheet in a two dimensional kind of system. And now they're breaking out the data and like another dimension, right? So now we're gonna have basically an income statement with multiple columns. That could of course be quite confusing to first try to grasp just the double entry accounting system is quite complex in and of itself. And now when you add this third dimension that we're gonna be breaking things out in, that is gonna be confusing at first. And then when you look at different options to do that, that gets more confusing. So first what we wanna do is just kind of look at these tools in chronological order for the most part as they basically came up. And then we'll get into each of the individual tools in and of themselves, which tools might be the best ones to do for a particular kind of thing that you're trying to accomplish and then how the tools might interplay on each other when you might use multiple tools at the same time. Chronologically, the first tool we had was called jobs back in the old QuickBooks desktop version. When it was converted to QuickBooks online, they changed the terminology from job to sub customers. They're linked to customers as the name would indicate. So in the sales tab on the left hand side, your customers up top, I've got three generic customers here. If I had a job cost type of system, it's possible that I would have multiple jobs, for example, tied to customer number one. Like if I was in construction, I might have a job doing a patio versus a job building a wall or something. And those would be separate jobs that I would like linked to customer number one. To make a job or sub customer, I can go to the new button up top and then I'm just gonna name it a number 400, let's say. And I'm gonna make it a sub customer of customer number one. Now I can make it billable or not billable to the customer. So I'll keep that as the default and then I'm gonna save it. And it shows up as our sub customer here. Now, to some degree, this concept has been taken over by the projects to some degree in like a job cost system, which we'll talk about shortly. But the projects are only available if you've got QuickBooks Pro Plus, I think, or above if you have something below that, then you might be able to do similar kind of things still with a sub customer setting. And you can also use those two things in alignment. So the fact that you have projects doesn't necessarily mean that you're never gonna use sub customers because you might tie a project to basically a sub customer. The basic idea here would be that you're gonna assign items to the customer. And then when you run reports, you can run reports by customer. So for example, if I go up top, right click and duplicate the tab so I can put a report in the tab to the right, we can go to the reports on the left hand side, open up a profit and loss. Let's change the range up top from 010123 to 123123, run it, and then I can run it by customer, which will break it out up top by customer, which will also include the jobs. It'll give us a breakout basically of the jobs up top. So when we think about the next dimension, what are these doing from a report standpoint, a lot of the times we're thinking about the profit and loss and breaking the profit and loss from a single column document to multiple columns, which will be broken out in this case by customers, which also include the sub customers, and then we'll get into classes and so on and so forth. Now, the next thing that happened chronologically, I believe, was the class tracking. Now, notice that the jobs kind of most closely aligned to the projects. The projects kind of overtake some of the functionality of the jobs, but I think chronologically the next tool that came in place was the class tracking. So let's take a look at that. To do the class tracking, you got to turn on class tracking. So note that if I open up a normal kind of invoice or something without class tracking, then it won't have this class tracking field in it. And that'll be easier because then you'll have less fields when you do the data input. But if you want to do class tracking, then you want to turn this on and you'll have these data input fields, of course. Now, where's the class tracking located? It's in the cogs up top, settings on the left hand side. Under the advanced tab, and then you've got your categories. Both class tracking and location tracking are in the same area, but location tracking actually came up a lot later. It's a lot, it's much newer of a function. And it's kind of a variant, of course, on the class tracking. So let's first just look at the class tracking here to turn it on. Obviously you toggle on the class tracking and with the class tracking, you'll be able to assign a class to not only every transaction, but every line item of the transaction. The general goal will be similar to what we saw with the project, with the sub customers. We can run reports, primarily an income statement, but you also have some functionality on the balance sheet to run reports by class, which adds another column of the classes.