 Zero Accounting Software 2023 free 30-day trial, 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 the zero accounting software web page that's at zero dot com or X E R O dot com X E R O dot com they have prominently displayed on their web page up top and down below on the left hand side try zero for free. If you already have a log in you can go to the log in up top if we click on try zero for free we have some data input to put into the system they want the first name last name email phone number location with a drop down here are the various locations verifying that you're not a robot and then check it off I've read and agreed to the terms of use privacy notice and offer details now generally once you sign in for zero you'll basically have a zero dashboard so once that happens after you go into the zero home page you can then go into the log in and that log in location will give you the capacity to be practicing either with the demo or possibly starting up another company file possibly at that point having the option to have a 30 day free trial for that new company file so once logged in we're basically in our zero home page our custom zero home page it says hi whoever you logged in as in my case Bob and then we've got the information for the company information down below if we wanted to practice with the demo company file and then we could select the demo file down here after entering data into the demo file it's quite nice because you can reset the demo file or keep the data that you have adjusted within it and you can also change the country within the demo file on the right hand side what we're going to do here because we want to start a new company file and practice data input from scratch we want to add an organization so in the ad organization we're then going to say that this is going to be a business of let's give it so I'm going to give the company name get great guitars we're going to we're going to be practicing the selling of inventory which in our case will be guitars we can imagine we're in a store type of selling of setting so we have to track the inventory we'll do so on a perpetual inventory basis and we'll also have some service items that we will work in there including possibly guitar lessons so we could see the differences between selling inventory and having service items now I'm going to select an industry I want to take other other store based retailing because I basically want if they give me a chart of accounts to have a chart of accounts that's going to have a compatibility with selling inventory so if you choose different industries sometimes zero might be able to populate or provide you a chart of accounts as like a baseline that will will help you to start out that might be lined up to that particular industry which can be nice United States is what I'm going to choose here note that if you're in another location the double entry accounting system will be basically the double entry accounting systems the same what's confusing from location to location is one of course you're going to have a different currency but that's the concept of the currency will be much the same it's just a dollar amounts will be different so the concept is still good the other thing that gets confusing is taxes and sales tax or usage taxes can complicate things because they're going to be different from location to location as well as payroll taxes are where complications come in so in any case I'm going to go with the United States do you have employees I'll say yes here I'm going to verify that I'm not a robot and then down here we can buy now or start the trial I'm going to try to start a trial from here notice before I do that if it says you're coming from QuickBooks move your data into zero for free so if you have a prior accounting software system then the question is do you want to pull all that data from a prior accounting system into the zero system which could be great because you can run prior reports and things like that however it also means there's a lot of data when you first start the file the other method you might use is to say look I'm gonna I'm gonna cut things off as of a cutoff date from the prior accounting system and then put them into the current accounting system as of a particular point in time and then move forward from there so that's what we're gonna imagine doing here we'll have some numbers a balance sheet as of the end of last year that we're gonna put into the current accounting system and then start our accounting for the current time frame here going forward so I'm gonna go ahead once again to click that again because it keeps clicking on it's nice then I'll start the free trial here we go so then it says here hi let's get set up use this dashboard to get an instant overview of how your business is tracking go ahead and set it up so they've got the little watch overview of the main features down below if you want to check that out so nothing has yet been entered into the system but we should have a chart of account that has been set up for us at this time and we could find that by going to the accounting up top and then go down to the chart of accounts and we see we have this message here from zero you're using the retail organization chart of accounts you can customize this find out how in our help center so in other words when we set up the company file we told zero what type of industry we are in and it tried to give us a chart of accounts which should line up to that industry so for our case we indicated an industry that has inventory so we would expect then to see an inventory account and some kind of cost of goods sold account down below so that's good we have those items here note the chart of accounts might not be perfect we might be saying hey I would like to customize my own chart of accounts we can do that we can add accounts and we can remove accounts or make accounts inactive but as a general rule it might be a good practice to say I'm gonna put my chart of accounts together based on what is recommended by zero on the industry and then as I start doing my data input I'm gonna keep going back to my chart of accounts and try to see if they have given me an account that is applicable to the transaction I want to put in place if it is then I will use that chart of accounts and oftentimes the confusion comes down here with the expense categories because the expense categories are the areas where we have the biggest kind of variety or different options in terms of accounts we might be using often times and obviously there's more expense accounts than any other account type because when we're paying money out we're paying for all the different things we need whereas when the money's coming in it's usually for a specific thing we're doing in terms of generating the revenue so we could then check and see if there's an account here that we like if there is then we'll start using that account as we do the data input on the transaction if there is not then we might want to look for an account that is similar in nature and then go into it and possibly just adjust it change the name to what we think is most applicable and then if there's no account here at all for us to use that's when I would say we would want to add an account at that point in time after we do that for a couple months of data input then the accounting should be somewhat repetitive because usually the accounting is somewhat repetitive and we can then go back into this chart of accounts and trim it down hedge it down possibly removing or making inactive those accounts that we're not using so we'll dive into some more details on that as we start to enter data in future presentations I'm gonna close this out