How to Set up QBO in Less than 20 Minutes (DIY)

welcome back to the Clara CFO group Channel today we are going to set up a QuickBooks Online file from scratch so we're going to go ahead and get the trial and then we're going to set it up I'm going to give you guys some tips along the way I'm going to show you how to make sure you can get that 30 discount for the entire year because you do need to set it up correctly in order to get that and then we're gonna we're gonna set it up we're gonna set it up from scratch I'm gonna have go through some of the setup things to think about and um I will be just recording things as I'm having reactions to them and so hopefully this will help you make your life a little bit easier when you go to set up your QuickBooks online account from scratch if you're not already subscribed to the Channel please go ahead and subscribe also make sure you click the little notification Bell so you'll be notified whenever we have a new video all right let's get into the screen share all right the first thing we're going to do is go ahead and figure out how to get started with QuickBooks online so we're going to start from the very beginning and you'll get to this page by going to Clara uscfo.com Qbo and then you'll get to this accounting page and what you should be seeing and if you're not seeing it you might want to try clearing your cookies but you should be seeing this 30-day trial plus a it's a 30 discount for 12 months and this is the deal that we're gonna get started with so we're going to go ahead and click try for free we're going to go ahead and create a Intuit account so you'll enter in your email address and your mobile number and you'll create a password and you'll go ahead and sign up with an email so I'm going to go ahead and do that now all right so once you go ahead and set up your account you're going to be redirected to a setup screen and so um I actually went ahead and set up my account with an existing account so but still it doesn't have anything already answered for me so we're going to go ahead and make up a new company and we're going to call it the Clara consulting company um just to make it easy okay let's go ahead and click next so what do you call your business consulting company and I'm going to go ahead and check that this is my legal business name um and we're just setting this up as a trial but you will go ahead and put in your business name and check whether or not it's your legal name they'll probably give you the option to do a DBA if not this is where you can either start completely from scratch or it can walk you through the steps if you already have a QuickBooks desktop if you're coming from Sage Petri or another bookkeeping software if you've had spreadsheets or something else you can go ahead and click um which option you have we're going to go ahead and just get started from scratch today and then this is where it'll start to ask you questions about the business so let's do one to two years next what kind of business I it is an LLC I'm going to say that this business is an LLC taxed as a sole proprietor for the purposes of this walkthrough and then look at that it gives you the option to tell you how you're taxed so when you're an LLC you'll either be taxed as a sole proprietor partnership or these other options so usually the what we see most often is that you're either a sole proprietor at text as an S corp um if you don't know you can skip over this and you can set this up later but if you do know you can go ahead and make the selection now and then this kind of industry option this is going to um it doesn't really matter except for they will potentially change your chart of account slightly so I would go ahead and just try to get as close as you possibly can so if I put in something like Consulting here let's see what it comes up marketing Consulting I'm going to put other management consulting services and then what is my role so who is actually setting this up is this you as the business owner then you'd go owner's partner is this an employee of the business or is this an external bookkeeper an accountant or maybe even a consultant outside a consultant I'm going to go ahead and put this as the owner and then this will give you the option of starting to potentially have certain other add-ons so I if I'm a sole proprietor I don't have anybody else I can say iFly Solo or if I have employees I can add that it will you can tell them how many people you have working for you if you have contractors you can also like you can say you can select multiple ones here so what I'm going to do for now is I'm going to say iFly solo and I plan to hire in the future will help you connect if you help Okay so let's go ahead and say Yes um it says great you can invite your Canada bookkeeper to work with you wonderful what apps do you use in your business so I would actually recommend not connecting any apps at this point um the most problems I see from people having issues with QuickBooks is connecting PayPal PayPal actually has some um uh is it can be tricky and you need to make sure you set it up correctly so even if you use PayPal I actually say maybe don't connect it right at the very beginning it's not a great way to kind of get settled and get started with everything what you want to do is kind of get into the flow of the bookkeeping talk to your bookkeeper before you decide whether or not you're going to connect PayPal I actually would recommend that for most of these apps I did do a video on connecting Amazon business but I would hold off on connecting anything right when you're first getting started so let's go ahead and select skip for now now this is a place that you can um link your bank account so I highly recommend linking these things so skip over the apps but do connect all bank accounts that you have in any credit cards credit cards kind of act like a bank account so you want to make sure that you're including them in getting them actually connected because that live stream of transactions is going to be coming into your QuickBooks account and you want to make sure that all those expenses are actually being captured so we're going to go ahead and click Link account so you can see what you need to be able to do that and we'll just kind of Step through something real quick I'm not going to live connect any of these but I just kind of want to show you so let's just say you have a Chase account you would go to Chase and then you would click continue and then it will actually pop up and give you the option to log in to this account so you can go ahead and actually do that directly so it is using a secure connection so you don't need to worry about anything as far as security goes it is a read-only access us that you're giving to QuickBooks so that they can pull these transactions they have zero ability to actually affect anything on your account so you would go through this process where you connect one by one where you connect any credit cards sometimes let's just say you have three bank accounts and two credit cards with one organization sometimes you can just do one login and it will pull all of those accounts and you can check which ones you want to pull now the big thing is if you have any personal accounts also tied to business accounts let's say chase you have a personal account and you have an account you just use for business and maybe a personal credit card and a business credit card uncheck anything that is only personal because you do not want to pull that into QuickBooks you only want to pull in anything that is directly related to your business so you'll go ahead and connect those accounts and then it's going to keep we're going to keep going on this so now it's asking how we do our receipts so it's kind of gathering some data for us they're probably going to be selling to you down the road so just kind of be you know be aware that this is fact Gathering but it's also kind of getting they're also tailoring what else they might offer to you um so you might say okay I saved my seats for digitally um and it says we have a better way to help you do that which they do you can touch everything digitally um you save paper and digital we have paper receipts they they have options to get things digitized and get them attached to your transactions or you can say I don't save receipts at all and I'm just going to go ahead and click that for now although that would be very bad of me because I should be saving receipts all right keep your receipts to maximize your deductions okay this is a good um a good example of where there's they're giving a recommendation they're saying yeah you should be keeping your receipts and this is a way you can get their mobile app and then anytime you make a transaction you can just easily put it into the app and it will add it to your QuickBooks so this is a way that they are offering you and kind of walking you through the products services all right so now it's saying how do you intend on using QuickBooks and this is probably one of the more important screens to really think through so no need to rush this right now but um the biggest thing is you want to think about how how do you want to use it do you want to be invoicing directly in the system do you want to use it to track time will you be paying bills out of the system and like managing them when they come in are you going to actually put them into the accounting system and then pay them do you have inventory to manage do you need other things like sales tax help or do you actually need insurance do you need to be able to create estimates or quotes this might be a time where you can think through how do I want to use QuickBooks right maybe right now you're using a separate app for invoices maybe you want to move all your invoices to QuickBooks so you'll definitely want to say send and track invoices absolutely do I want to accept payments by credit card and ACH yes I do I also want to be able to pay my bills um I do want to be able to send estimates but you know honestly like in my business let's just say for Clara Consulting um we are we do all of our proposals and everything outside of the system and we're not sending them through QuickBooks so I'm going to leave that unchecked for now um we have a separate system for time tracking so I'm going to say I'm not going to track time at this point in time I have no inventory because I'm Consulting um I don't really have anything to sell apart from my time and the invoices so I'm not going to track sales I already have business insurance I am going to manage sales tax and maybe I'll track mileage deductions for example okay so now it's gonna have us start getting these things set up so getting an invoice template set up is really great you can customize it you can upload a logo you can do lots of things as far as like how what you want to see on the invoice so let's go ahead and set that up real quick now I'm not going to go through everything here so I'm just going to do a quick um really quick let's just say make it um this nice pretty kind of teal color I'm gonna I would upload a logo and then I could send a fake one to myself if I want to see what it looks like so I'm going to go ahead and click Send okay so this is actually what that looks like when it comes from the system so this is what your customer would be seeing if they get that invoice and then they will also receive a PDF copy so this is where you can test it you can you know upload your logo you can actually go in and change you know what you want to be once you what you can go in here and change how you want this your address to be shown you can even change the formats they actually have lots of different ways that you can customize invoices so um you know you can get as specific as you want here you can put a little note at the bottom you can put in different products and services and descriptions and you can also show units quantity and a total extended amount so there really is lots of different ways to show things on these invoices but we're going to go ahead and click next you can spend lots of time making your invoice exactly what you want it to look like um you can set up payments so this is another thing I highly recommend getting set up if you're going to be invoicing in the system you can in order to do this it does take a couple days because they will make a small deposit into your bank account and you need to go in and verify those amounts so you will need to put in all of your business information and I'm not going to do that because I'm making up a fake business and I believe you need to put in an EIN number if um I don't see it there you will need to put in some personally identifiable information see here's a Social Security number so in order to um you know accept payments you are going to have to give a little bit more information and then when you get into payment deposit info then you'll put in your bank account information um you do not need to use a QuickBooks checking account okay so you will add a checking account instead and this is where you you can directly link to it um and you should be able to get your account connected I think there's a way to manually set up the account if for some reason you can't get a direct linkage okay so you would just go ahead and click get set up when all of that is done and you can also do that at a later time so if that seems like it's too much right now and you just want to get the accounting up and running you can always go in and update and get connected for payments at a later time it's very very easy we're going to skip that for now since I've walked you guys through that um okay this is where they're going to give you some more features remind you to get the mobile app clearly they want people to have the mobile app so um you can check that out and they do have an ability for you to get paid faster through QuickBooks I actually don't use this most of the time because they take a small percentage so um just before you sign up for anything like that make sure you are reading the fine print and make sure that you are okay with what these offers are from QuickBooks okay um and it looks like this is just a little bit of a survey I'm pretty confident and I'm gonna go forward how much progress has you made towards what you want to do in QuickBooks um I don't feel like I've made a lot of progress so far actually um okay so now they're actually going to go ahead and start setting this up for you and this is kind of the beginning this is everything and so they will give you this option of doing a tour I do recommend you go ahead and Skip click through the tour it does make sense to go through that I'm not going to go through it right now um but it is going to kind of point out some key things for you one really important thing to note is that if you are using my discount where you want to after the first 30 days you want to take advantage of that 30 discount for the full year you do need to make sure that you've input your credit card information before your free trial ends so go in here and go to accounts and settings and then you'll go to billing and subscription all right so after you've clicked billing and subscription you will see whatever you've signed up for here so um it you'll it'll also show you what that 30 discount is for the 12 months so you can go ahead and check that and then you can easily upgrade or downgrade from here so if you um if you you know realize hey I actually need some additional features once you get really all of this set up you can go ahead and upgrade or if you said hey I actually don't need all these features you can downgrade your plan so in order to lock in that rate what you need to do is you need to click subscribe and then when you get to this payment method screen you'll go ahead and put in your credit card information here and you do need to make sure that all of that is there and go ahead and save the payment method to your Intuit profile and then um and you can read the fine print here I authorize to the Intuit to charge my card on 1021 which is actually 30 days from when I started this so um it's it's telling you that even if it's not like you start losing your free trial um once you put in your credit card information you still get your 30-day free trial so that way if you change your mind you say hey actually I don't want QuickBooks you can pull out of it and then you would have to go in and cancel the plan um but you do need to have this saved in here otherwise you will lose your discount another thing I want to make sure you see is do not click this save with annual plan because if you do the math on this it doesn't give the 30 discount so you want to be on this where it shows your 30 discount okay so make sure that's really clear keep an eye on that okay don't get charged the annual amount because you're not getting that 30 all right so hopefully that's what you need to do to make sure you're locked in on that 30 discount one thing one question I get a lot is when I do videos I am not looking at the same view that you guys are looking at so if you want to change to look at the view that I'm looking at you will go to this little gear icon up here and then click to switch to accountant View this is the sidebar that I use when I'm doing my tutorials okay so if you need to or you can go back and switch back to business View one complaint I've heard about business view is that people don't like that um it seems like they're being sold to in this view so um you'll notice like here's this is kind of just showing things here's like a suggestion um here's business insurance they're they're probably gonna try to sell business insurance get paid let's see if they have any offers anywhere here don't leave money on the table try QuickBooks time um you know so some of these things people might not necessarily want to be sold to and when they've already paid for an accounting software which I understand so if this is annoying to you go ahead and look at the accountant view now the other thing is if you're watching my tutorials you might want to just go ahead and click to accounted view even if normally you use the other view just so it's easier to follow along when you're actually watching my videos if you have gotten started then you are probably at a place where you could do a couple things you could go ahead and start to customize your chart of accounts and I have a whole video on customizing your chart of accounts so you go to accounting and then you'll go to chart of accounts and this is where you can start customizing everything here so do do it's interesting they've had they have a different standardized chart of accounts now which I find kind of interesting um it seems a little bit better than the old one honestly but there's lots of extra accounts in here now it looks a little bit more like my chart of accounts at this point which I'm not I'm not mad about okay um so you can go through here and you can deactivate anything you know you won't use like let's say if you don't have a home office you can take out all of that if you don't have any vehicle expenses you can just you can go in here and make an active for anything that you don't want to use or you can just leave everything there and then you know make things inactive down the road when you just realize you don't need them anymore so customizing your chart of accounts would be a good next step and then you really start to get into using the software and that's where we get into banking and then this is where we would see um all of the um transactions that have been uploaded so this is why you need to connect accounts or you need to directly upload transactions so you can upload a CSV file or a bank statement file some bit some um Banks actually have these um these upload files available for you so you can see if you can download your bank details if you're not getting directly connected you might be able to upload your bank details directly from one of these file formats so check for that but you can either manually upload transactions or do it automatically I highly highly recommend making sure that these Bank feeds are automatic because you're more likely to get everything into the system if you're doing it automatically and every now and then you do have to check because sometimes things get disconnected or if you change your password things might get disconnected so you know it will give you an error if it's not uploading but I highly recommend doing it automatically I've never ever had an issue with it um where it causes any issue on the bank side and it's a trustworthy connection so I highly recommend that if you can't then manually upload your transactions and that's always an option as well okay and then I do have a whole separate video talking about actually categorizing things in the bank feed and really once you start categorizing things in the bank feed you are up and running with your accounting system and there's other things you can start using like creating an invoice you can go ahead and start tracking your expenses and do the whole bill pay thing you can directly connect payroll here you can also sync up most payroll systems with QuickBooks as well so like Gusto and just works both of them have linkages to QuickBooks online so if you're using a separate payroll system you probably have the option to have some type of linkage to your payroll system but this should give you a get you up and running with your new QuickBooks online account and I hope that this has been really helpful and please please let me know if you have any questions as you're getting things up and running and I'm happy to answer questions for you okay well that is how you set up a new QuickBooks account hopefully that has been helpful to you guys please make sure you put any comments and questions in the comment section below also make sure you check out the playlist of how to do stuff in QuickBooks Online I did about 10 12 videos on how to do stuff in QuickBooks online and so there's a couple different um a different videos that are really important especially like setting up a chart of accounts and knowing how to use the bank feeds and kind of getting started on that one month of bookkeeping so make sure you check those ones out because they will be super helpful and they will be your friend because we do a lot more screen sharing like this okay so thank you for being here if it was helpful please give it a thumbs up I would appreciate it so much alright bye

Channel: Clara CFO Group

Views: 109,864

Keywords: quickbooks online, quickbooks, set up QBO, set up QBO from scratch, getting started with QBO, quick start qbo, get qbo set up, quickbooks online setup, how long does it take to set up QBO, getting started qbo, qbo quick start, set up QBO from desktop, qb desktop to qbo, QB desktop to online, how to set up QBO, how do i set up quickbooks online, setting up quickbooks online, help with setting up QBO, help set up qbo, guide to qbo setup, qbo setup guide, setting up qbo, qbo

Id: hyWnHBtRB_4

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2022