 Zero Accounting Software 2023 Navigation Overview and Company Settings. Get ready because 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 our Custom Zero homepage going into the new company file of Get Great Guitars. We started up in a prior presentation. Last time we started up the company file. We took a quick look at the chart of accounts. This time we want to take a look at navigational type of techniques that we will be using as we do data input for our practice problem in future presentations. So the first thing we want to think about is where are we generally going to be going when we do data input into the system and where will we generally be going when we want to analyze the data that has already been input into the system. So like with most accounting software, there's different ways that we can often do the same thing. Although I do think that zero is more streamlined oftentimes than other accounting software which actually can make things a little bit easier because there can be more confusion when there's a bunch of different ways that you can do basically the same tasks. But as we do the data input, we could go into the dashboard. So we're on the dashboard here and they have items on the dashboard. So the general categories here are get visibility over your cash flow, get paid faster with online invoicing, track where your money is going, pay your bills on time, manage and pay your employees. Stay on top of your taxes, track time and cost on your jobs and explore apps that connect with zero. That's one place we can go but typically when we're doing the data input, we're going to go into the dropdowns up top and to the plus button over here. So when we do the normal day to day data input, the fastest way is often to hit the plus up top and we have our normal data input type of forms, invoices, bills, contact, quote, purchase order, spend money, receive money and transfer. A lot of the activities on the day to day process will be done. We then have the dropdowns up top. So if we go to the get great guitars dropdowns, we've got the files, we've got our settings, we've got the subscription and billing projects. If we're using projects, we might touch on the use of projects but that's kind of a specialty type of area. Expense claim, analytics, workflow max, which is another integration type of app that you might be using for example if you had a job cost kind of system. HubDoc, which is another possible type of integration and then the App Store. So then we have our general locations up top. We're currently at the dashboard under the business. We've got the short term cash flow, business snapshot, invoices, quote, sales overview, bills to pay, purchase order, purchase overview, expense claim, product services checks. We have the accounting, bank accounts reports, advanced fixed assets. You've got our chart of accounts, which of course is a quite common place to go and fixed assets, payroll. If we turn on payroll, they have the payroll integration with gusto. So we might touch in on the gusto. I think they have a free trial kind of components that we that you could take a look at if you want to work with that. And then we have the contacts, all contacts, supplier customers and suppliers. Now, the other thing we want to note when we're on a web based software, it's got some neat features because we're actually on a website. We wanted to zoom in, for example, I could hold down control in a Windows system. I'm using a Windows computer and then scroll in. So it might be a little bit different on the Mac, but you could see in the zoom window here, I'm zooming in and that's great because now I can zoom in and out. Notice, however, that like with any kind of website, the format and the layout of whatever screen we are in will then adjust in terms of how zoomed in we are into the screen. And we could see that with an extreme example because that's basically what they do when you open up a application on a phone is they adjust everything around in a different way to fit the phone. So the great thing about that is that you can zoom in and you can and you can get better views. The downside of that is that what is on my screen may not exactly match your screen if you have a different zoom level into the screen because the website will then populate the items up top to to fit the screen more easily. Now, with zero because they have such a clean layout up here, we don't have a whole lot of stuff up top and it usually doesn't. You can see there's not a big impact like on the homepage when I when I zoom in until I go way in right. So it usually works pretty well with zero but the other thing to kind of keep in mind is that if you're doing a data input in something like an invoice. So if I do a data input on an invoice, we can zoom in on a website in the invoice but it says is it recommended that you add your organized contact zoom out of that. You can zoom in here to see stuff in more detail. However, sometimes and zero is pretty good at this, but sometimes when you zoom into a data input field and then enter the data, it can kind of mess up the data input. So if that happens, then you can close out the invoice and go back into it. Now I think zero is getting better and better at that. And while I'm zoomed in, I'm in and I enter data. It doesn't oftentimes mess up the invoice, but if it does, if something gets messed up, then what you want to do is go out, go back into it at zero at 100% and then redo the data input if you run into an issue like that. Now the other thing that's nice about a web based software, but you might not be used to it as much if you're coming from a desktop software. In other words, if I came from a desktop software like a QuickBooks desktop versus a zero online or something, the desktop software has different ways that I can navigate between windows. So for example, I might want to have an invoice open as well as my reports open. Well, in a desktop software, you can have like a navigation pane possibly on the left that you can navigate between different windows. With a web based software, we of course have tabs up top that we can open up. Now the tabs are a little bit tricky because you have to make sure that you're refreshing the tabs as you're working in multiple tabs, but they can be quite useful to have multiple tabs open. So typically we're going to want the financial statements balance sheet and income statement open as we do data input so that we can see the impact on the balance sheet and the income statement. So we don't want to have to generate the balance sheet and the income statement after we do every data input to verify that the financial statements have been populated with the new data input. So the way we can do that is I can right click on the tab up top and duplicate the tab. So this is what we will start to do every time I will duplicate the tab. I'll duplicate it two times usually right click on the tab and duplicating it again so that I can then go into these two tabs and put my financial statements in these two tabs. So if I go back to the middle tab, I can go to the accounting and open up the balance sheet. Nothing's in it right now because we haven't done anything to it. And then I can go to the next tab as it's thinking and I'll open up the accounting and then the income statement or the profit and loss. Go back to the balance sheet over here. So now I'm going to zoom back out. There's nothing in it. But now as I do the data input, I can do the data input on the left side. And as I'm over here, I hit the plus button. I enter my invoices, my bills, my contact and so on and so forth. And then as I do the data input, I can go back to my balance sheet over here. Make sure I update it to refresh the report and I can see the activity as it pulls into my financial statements. So that's the typical workflow that I will be using. I'm going to have these three tabs open at least. And then the first tab is where I do the data input. The other two tabs is where I'm going to verify that the data input is properly flowing through to the end result, the financial statements. The other common place to go when we're doing our normal kind of data input, if we have the bank feed set up is into the banking information. So we could go to the accounting up top and bank accounts and we can add the bank accounts. Now when we get into the bank accounts, you got this connecting to the bank feed type of issue. So we might have a whole nother course or section that talks about the bank feeds. We're going to first think about the accounting process without the bank feeds because we want to think about what the flow is in a normal accounting process so that when we add the bank feeds, we can see how the bank feeds will fit into that process. However, if you want to jump forward and just connect right to the bank, then you can jump forward to that course or section if you so choose. But I highly recommend if you don't have an idea or a concept of how the accounting system works, that you first think about how the accounting system works. Otherwise, what happens is you pull a bunch of information in from the bank feeds and a lot of people don't realize they still need to do some work to actually get that information from the bank feeds into the accounting system. And when you have a more complex accounting system, one that varies from a cash based system, which often happens if you have inventory or have to track accounts receivable or have to track accounts payable, for example, then you have to think a little bit more in depth in terms of how the bank feeds are going to fit into the system. So it'll kind of vary by industry by industry. So we'll talk more about that in future section or course. So the next thing just to note that your settings are in here. So if I hit the dropdown up top and we go into the settings. So here you have your general settings and your features. So you've got the organization, users, currencies, connect apps, subscription and billing. And then over here you're invoicing your payment services, email, check styles, zero to zero and custom contacts. We might go into some of these settings one by one in a bit more detail in a future presentation.