 QuickBooks Online 30-day free trial and free test drive. Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online. 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. The first thing we want to remember is that there's a difference between the free 30-day trial and the test drive for QuickBooks Online. These are two potential options to possibly get access to the software for free, so we can test it out and practice with QuickBooks Online, both of them having their pros and cons, which we'll dive into in a little bit more detail shortly. But remember in the course, we're going to be using the test drive, the free test drive for the first half of the course, and the second half of the course, that's when you might want to utilize the free 30-day trial if you can get access to it at that point in time. So we're going to start out looking at how to get access to the free 30-day trial, but remember, you might not want to actually fully commit to that yet until the second half of the course we're just going to be doing comparing and contrasting between the free 30-day trial and the test drive, the test drive being the one that we're going to use for the first half of the course. If you turn on the free 30-day trial and then go through the first half of the course, then you're going to utilize some of those 30 days before you really get to the part of the course where you need that 30 days for the free test drive. Okay, so how do we get in there? First, we can go into the Intuit website. Intuit is the owner of QuickBooks, so we could just type in Intuit.com. That's I-N-T-U-I-T dot com. They're the owner of QuickBooks. For a long time, they've got the softwares that they own up top. We're going to go into the QuickBooks software, so I'm going to go into QuickBooks. And then usually on this first page, they're kind of emphasizing their online version of the software. So you're usually going to scroll down and see their purchasing options for the types of QuickBooks online, and we'll talk more about them in a future presentation. But it's a little deceiving because you don't see the 30-day free trial because it's laid out on this page as of this point in time. It says enjoy 50% off of your first three months and then it has your plans on down below. But, however, if I scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, then for a long time they've had all of their products listed out at the bottom of the page. So if you go into the QuickBooks online from here, then you could scroll down to their pricing options and now it looks a little different. They still have their options down here. But now they have the toggle wheel that we have noticed in the past, which you can go to the free 30-day trial. Now I'm a little skeptical because they're changing their pages a little bit with regards to their marketing pages. And sometimes such as with the QuickBooks test drive, it's easier to just do a Google search for the test drive file. That's how I would recommend to get to the test drive. And you could do that for the free 30-day trial. So if they remove this little toggle altogether, then possibly you could just go to a Google search and go there directly by saying I want to go to the free QuickBooks online test, let's say 30-day trial, something like that. And you're likely, I'm not going to go to the ads here. I'm just going to go to the QuickBooks online advanced free trial. So this is another way that you might be able to get access going directly to a page. So once again, I'm a little skeptical that they might change their sales page and remove the toggle altogether, but possibly not remove the capacity to have the free trial if you can get to whatever page they put the free trial on. So if you were going to go into this option and complete the process, you'd have to toggle to the free trial. Now notice they're going to keep scaring you down here by increasing the price because if you toggle this off, they're basically saying as I interpret it that you have 50% off for three months. So they've got their prices down here, but if you take the free trial, then it's going to be the full price. Now notice how we're going to utilize the free trial here. Oftentimes if you were to start your own company file and you're like, I'm going to test this out and then you put your own data into the software for 30 days and you start doing your accounting in QuickBooks, it's likely that you're going to start paying for QuickBooks after the 30 days because you already have your data in it. However, if you're using the free 30 day trial as a practice problem, as we'll be doing in the second half of the course, then you're not as committed to following through after the free 30 days because we're not putting our actual data in it or we're not committing to it, right? We're just practicing with the software. That's why we're going to run a practice file with the software and it'll be easier not to keep going after the 30 days if it's not your actual data that you're putting into the system. So that's one thing to kind of be aware of. Also, after the 30 day trial, you might still be able to look for other options like talking to an accountant or a QuickBook provider and your accountant to see if you can get discounts on the purchase of the software at that time. So that's what we're going to do in the second half of the course. So I'm not going to turn it on fully right now but I just want to note that you have to toggle this to the right. We're generally going to use the plus option and even when you go through the plus option, it's going to give you another little scare screen that basically says, hey, do you want to purchase the software with the discount generally or do you want to go with the free trial? You've got to find the unhighlighted button on the bottom that's going to say go to the free trial. And if you search on this format, now you've got this page 50% off and then you've got your free trial. If you go into the free trial here, then you're going to have to start an account if you don't have an account. If you already have an account, it's possible you might still be able to get a free 30 day trial of another company under that account. Because you can imagine what QuickBooks is trying to do with the 30 day free trial. They want you to start putting company data into the system for 30 days and that's going to commit you to keep on moving forward. So they might not be providing the free trial just for one user of the software, but possibly providing a free trial like per company. So even if you already have a QuickBooks account and you already have a QuickBooks company file on the second half of the course, if you could still get access to a free 30 day trial of a blank system, that would be great because that allows you to enter data into the system on the second half of the course. That's the beauty of having the free 30 day trial of a blank file because there's nothing in it. That means we can build something from scratch. We can lay down the foundations. However, in the first half of the course, that's not what we want to do. In the first half of the course, we want something that's already been built. We want something that's already put together so that we can deconstruct the financial statements and see how they were put together. Once we've deconstructed to see how something was put together to get to the end result, that's when we want to utilize this free 30 day trial so that we can have a blank system and we can practice putting data into the system from the base floor, from the foundation up. And like I say, even if you have your own company file, you're not going to be able to practice in the same way with the system for the practice data. You're going to want a fresh file. If you can get a new company file that has a 30 day trial for the second half of the course, that would be great. Now also note that if you have a company file open, sometimes the Intuit website will always go to open up the company file because the cookies and whatnot will remember the last time you logged into Intuit. So if you're logging in to like a separate account like the test drive version of QuickBooks, then you might want to do so in a different browser or you'd have to log out of QuickBooks. So for example, you might have your own company file here but you also want to log into the test drive. If you try to log into the test drive file in the same browser that your QuickBooks file is in, it'll try to log you into your QuickBooks account possibly. So you can either go to a different browser like I'm in Chrome and you can go to the edge, I believe this one is. And then we can search for QuickBooks online test drive. So now I'm looking for the test drive. Now again, you would think it would be easier to go to the Intuit website and search for the test drive but in my experience, most of the time it's easier to just do a search in your favorite browser for the test drive. Now as I'm searching the results here, I'm looking for results that have Intuit in it because it should be Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks. So for example, this one says QuickBooks, it has the Intuit.com as part of the URL. So it's more likely to be a place to go. So if I go into there, you've got the test drive. So I'm on a QuickBooks.Intuit.com. So I feel pretty confident that this is the test drive file. So we have the available QuickBooks test drives you got the United States one. That's the one we're going to be working with most of the time. So I'm going to be picking that one up. You typically have to verify that you're not a robot. And then we go into the test drive, the test drive. So there we have it. And so now because I'm in different browsers, I should be able to put these browsers kind of side by side. And if I'm working with my company file over here, I can have another QuickBooks file open on this side without that's in another account like the test drive account without QuickBooks getting messed up to do that. So just something to be aware of. Now the test drive file is a really nice file because it's going to already have data in it. So if I was to go to the financial statements, for example, going to the reports, going to the standard, I'm just going to open up a balance sheet. Now the balance sheet and the income statement are going to be the end results. I'm going to scroll in a little bit. This is what we're creating as we enter the financial transactions. The basic layout of what we will be doing is we're going to set up the system. If we were to start a new company file, meaning the general ledger and the items, so that we can enter data input forms, which are typically going to be expense forms, bills, invoices, and so on. The data input forms are then going to be entering the financial transactions automatically impacting at least two accounts on the financial statements, balance sheet, income statement, and related reports. So as we do the data input, we're constructing the end result of the balance sheet and the income statement. Now the nice thing about having a company file that already has data in it is that what it kind of simulates what most people experience when they go to work and like an accounting office, because clearly usually you're not setting up the data from scratch, you're trying to deconstruct what has happened in the past and simulate what you're going to do then in the future. And that's kind of what we're going to start out doing here. We're going to say, okay, how was this thing built? How can we deconstruct it? One way you could do that is a great tool is we can drill down on these line items and see the activity in each of these accounts. And I can drill down again on these line items and then go back to the source documents that were used to enter these transactions. So here's a check form, for example. And so that's what we want to do. We want to start to understand these forms and we'll kind of use this file to go back and forth from entering the data into the system to see the impact on the financial statements and then go into the financial statements and drilling back down to the forms that we have entered. The idea being that every time we enter a new transaction indicated by these items we want to start to visualize what's the cycle of the next step that's going to happen in the accounting cycle, how are we going to proceed with that cycle and what will be the impact of the financial statements. If you start a new company file from scratch then we don't have this end result built yet and we have to kind of build it from scratch. And that's a great exercise to do but it's a lot easier. It's like an engineering problem where, you know, it's like if someone steals our technology and then reconstructs something that's a lot easier to do if you already have deconstructed it from the start, right? So if you have an engineering thing and they're trying to rebuild a tank or something, if someone stole the tank and they deconstruct the tank then they are much more likely to be able to reconstruct it after that rather than working from scratch. So that's why we're going to start with this on the first half of the course. Now some of the pros and cons of this file are that every time you log out of the sample file it's not going to save your changes. So you can't really do stuff and then come back later and have the file be changed for what updates you did, right? It's going to reset every time you leave and come back into the system. So every time we do something we're going to kind of assume that we've refreshed all the data for the most part and start hopefully with the same kind of data set as we move forward. So that's what we'll do for the first half of the course. Also just remember the other way you might get in here because you don't want to be using the same browser that your QuickBooks file is in because it might try to log you into QuickBooks is you can use the, this is Chrome and most of the browsers have this incognito mode. So that's another way that you can use the incognito and search for the free QuickBooks, QuickBooks test drive. So if you don't have another, if you don't want to use another search engine like Firefox and you just want to use Chrome but you don't want it trying to open up your other company file as you use this one you can go into the test drive this way I can see this one I see it's into it that looks like the one. So that looks like the page and so you can use your incognito mode generally as well to have these basically two kind of browser windows open even though they're both Chrome this time this one being the Chrome that I'm logged in on possibly and this one being the one that I'm going to be utilizing the test drive that allows you to kind of go back and forth if you have two screens which can be a useful tool as well anytime you run into that problem you might want to try opening up in incognito mode or you might want to try opening up in another browser so you can kind of work on both of those files possibly at the same time.