 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 go into 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 gonna search for QuickBooks Online and then we wanna look for the test drive and note that if you're concerned that you're gonna 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 gonna say open up the test drive, United States option. I'm gonna say I'm not a robot because 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 gonna open it in a new tab and our income statement. I know I'm doing this quickly, but I'm just wanna 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 gonna take on a new job at another company and they're usually gonna 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 wanna 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 gonna get in the way because it's already been set up. So that's gonna be a difficulty with this file.