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The first problem we have whenever we try to practice QuickBooks Online is how could we get access to the software hopefully for free so that we can practice with it because even in situations where we have access to QuickBooks Online it's usually from a work setting situation in other words we might be an employee of an employer that uses QuickBooks Online for their accounting purposes in which case we do not want to be entering data into that system to practice with or we might be a sole proprietor type of situation where we have our own company data in QuickBooks Online which again is another situation that we don't want to just be doing data input into the QuickBooks system just to practice with we would like to have a little sandbox our own space that we can practice doing data input in there are two primary options to do that with from Intuit the owner of QuickBooks one is the QuickBooks Online test drive option and the second is that Intuit owner of QuickBooks often offers a 30-day free trial for a new company file now each of these have their pros and cons that I would like to just touch in on briefly here first let's take a look at the QuickBooks Online test drive I think the easiest way to get into the QuickBooks Online test drive is actually just to type it into whatever search engine is your favorite search engine as opposed to going to the Intuit website you can go to the Intuit website and look for it in there but for some reason in my experience it's been easier to just search for outside of the Intuit website so that is what I will do here I'm going to search for QuickBooks Online and then we want to look for the test drive and note that if you're concerned that you're going to get the right place the right location that you're not getting into a spamming area or anything remember that the owner of QuickBooks is Intuit so it should have an Intuit.com as basically the final extension in the URL so this one looks like an accurate item here and so here's the QuickBooks Online test drive page and then down below we have the United States option that's the one that I'm going to be working with here so I'm going to say open up the test drive United States option I'm going to say I'm not a robot because I'm not I'm not a robot and so we'll go into it there and that's the first option so the pros of this kind of option is that it already has data in it so you can see if I go to the reports down here for example and I was to open up our trusty balance sheet I'm going to open it in a new tab and our income statement I know I'm doing this quickly but I just want to point out the data that is in it we'll get into diving into the data later but you can see there's something in the balance sheet you can see there's something in the income statement already that can be a great tool because that allows us to go to the end result here and then drill back down deconstructing like taking apart an engine back to the source document so we can see what happened to get to this point so I can drill back down on this data and I can go into a transaction report list and then I can further drill down there's nothing in this particular one I think let's go to the balance sheet there's always something in the checking account let's drill down on the checking account and then I can drill further down on each item to see the actual source data so that's great and that mirrors the kind of system that you would see if you were like going to take on a new job at another company and they're usually going to already have data set up and your primary goal in the accounting department is to see what they did last period and have some consistency going forward even as you fix mistakes you want to see what happened in the past and then try to move that going forward the problem with this though is when you're trying to practice setting up a new company file when you're trying to practice setting up a new company file then all this data kind of it's going to get in the way because it's already been set up so that's going to be a difficulty with this file also if you're trying to do data input for a long longer term type of project the sample company becomes a problem because when you log out of the sample company and log back into it it will erase all the changes that you made so if you have a short practice problem that you want to figure something out on this is a great tool to do it with because you could go in here and you can and you can test things out but if it's a long problem and you're going to have to do half of it shut down the system and then come back into it at a later point in time then this this file becomes more of a problem because you can't do that you can't you can't go back out and go back into it so you have to do the whole practice problem that you're working on in one setting if that's the strategy that you're looking to take as opposed to if you wanted to do a longer type of problem you could do the you could try to set up a company file to basically practice with right and then you can get possibly a sandbox that doesn't have any of this information in it already so you can test out whatever you're trying to trying to test out possibly setting up a new company file or if you're working a practice problem and you just want to have it as clean as possible with no other data in the system so that it's really easy to see then the free 30-day trial period will work so any kind of problem that you're working on you want to think how long is the problem that I'm going to work on and therefore can I do it in one setting one sitting in which case you might use the the sample file the test drive or if it takes longer than that maybe then maybe you need some other option possibly like a 30-day trial period or something like that so you can get more in depth now the second option usually I would go to the Intuit website here which is intuit.com and then go to the QuickBooks this is how I would typically go there you could search for QuickBooks but QuickBooks sales pages sometimes kind of funnel you around in funny ways right so I like going directly to the Intuit website and then go into the QuickBooks website and then QuickBooks will usually be advertising the online on their major sales page here but it looks a little bit different you can see they don't have that like free the 30-day trial option on this page for some reason but if you go all the way down to the bottom that for some time for years they've had all of their products listed at the bottom and so if you go to that page and then go to QuickBooks online then they have a slightly different sales page and now you see this toggling option up here for the free trial for 30 days now obviously the restrictions the bad things about the free 30-day trial is that now you've got to deal with another company file or something if you're gonna if you're gonna set it up they might ask for your credit card information for the 30-day trial so if you're if you don't want to continue after the 30-day trial you need to make sure that you that you cancel it you know before that time obviously you only have 30 days in order to practice if you're going to do a free a 30-day trial to test out what is happening here and they give you these scare options as well because if I toggle this over to the free 30-day trial they double the amounts down here so you'll see so you see the the plus option you know is double so you don't really you know obviously you don't want to pay $85 a month when you can pay $42 a month what we would like to do and from Intuence perspective you would think what they're planning on happening is you're trying to put your personal data your business data into QuickBooks testing it out for 30 days and then after that point in time they will have have you locked in right because now you're using QuickBooks and it would be quite difficult to change after that point in time so if you're using the 30-day test period what you really want to do is be testing if if you want to be using QuickBooks or if it's doing what what what you think it should be doing or how easy the setup process is going to be and then and then after the 30 days or before the 30 days is up then then you might want to look into the options of purchasing the software at that time possibly talking to like a QuickBooks dealer of some kind or setting up another you know company file and putting in the options related to to it at that point in time that's the that's the general idea so we're going into it saying I'm going to plan on setting up the company file just to practice with and I'm not going to try to lock myself in because of this switching of the price that those are the those are the option those are the pros and cons of the options so what we're going to do next time is we're going to we're going to set up a free 30 day trial that's the option that that we're going to be using here and but if you want if you think you can do you know the whole practice problem or parts of the practice problem using the sandbox here the sample company file that's free that you can do in one sitting then you can you can use that option if you so choose as well those are the options to be practicing with