Quickbooks Basics: How To Use Quickbooks Online

hello everyone welcome back to the clara cfo group channel today we are getting into a highly requested video so we are gonna dive into quickbooks online and how to use it really basic really high level but this is kicking off a series how to do things in quickbooks online so we are going to teach you how to do things in quickbooks online i know a lot of you are using the system and again it is one of my favorite systems for small business accounting well it is my favorite system for small business accounting so that's what i use with most of my clients and that's what i try to push people towards because i think it is the best system for small business accounting i know not everybody loves it but i do so we're going to be walking through first really high level how do you use it how do you get started what are some of the key things you need to know about an accounting system and then over the course of the next couple weeks we're going to dig into some other more detailed more specific ways that you can use the system to optimize your accounting because um really without good accounting we can't have good information to run our businesses so if your accounting is a mess you're not going to know what you need to do to make the best decisions to be profitable to be long-term successful in your business and how to make sure that all of your efforts are coming out in some kind of profit okay so we like to make sure our accounting systems are really nice and clean and we also like to make sure that everything's working smoothly i mean this is a tool it's a tool to help your life be easier but we need to know how to use the system because it can be a huge headache if you don't use it correctly but it can be like a huge blessing and a huge time saver if you use it correctly all right so that's what this video is about i hope this is helpful to you please put any comments in the comment section below of this video and tell me what you would like to see in quickbooks online because i want to know what the next video should be i've got a couple queued up but i'd like to see what your questions are so that we can get those answered and we're going to go through a series of lots of to do's and how to's on in the system so please make sure those are in the comments in the in the comment section below and also check out resources in the description box we do have a discount this is one of the best discounts you will see on the internet for quickbooks online so if you haven't gotten it yet definitely check out that link and if you use my link it does help support the channel so i appreciate it and i would thank you very much um so definitely check that out if that's something that you are needing all right i would say let's just get into it let's just get into it let's just go into the screen share and i will talk you through how to use quickbooks online here we are in the sample company of quickbooks online and we are going to be using this to explain how to use quickbooks online so it has some of the information in there and then we can add stuff to it but i wanted to show this to you guys as it is going to be our learning tool about um for the next couple videos i want to first say that if you don't already have quickbooks online you can go and grab it this is our favorite tool for small business accounting you can go to claracfo.com qbo and you will find this sales page and you might be asking yourself why use this sales page versus the one that i can just find on the internet and the answer is we can get you a better deal so we've got a little bit of an inside track with quickbooks online and we have a 30 discount for 12 months the one that you find when you go out and just find it at least at this point in time when this video is recorded they offer 50 but it's only for three months so i did the math you save a good bit of money when you do the full 12 months at a 30 discount and when you get this link you also get a full month for free so you can get a 30 day trial to see how it's working and then the discount starts from there so i wanted to just tell you guys about that we are able to get this discount because we have kind of an insider track with quickbooks online this is an affiliate link and if you use our link it does help support the channel so we really appreciate it if you are thinking about grabbing quickbooks online okay so um if you're trying to also decide which one you're in we'll probably do a different video for that but just super high level um some of the things that i'm really seeing the difference between and i i see most people either start with essentials or plus if they are kind of a smaller business maybe under 300 000 in annual revenue but one of the things i really like about plus is that it has the budgeting feature so if you do want to run budget to actuals and you want to put in a budget into your accounting system which i highly recommend i really like plus and then advance is really great if you have more than five users so this has a lot of user capability and it also gives you access to fathom business analytics and insights so that's kind of cool because it definitely gives you kind of that extra power if you've got a lot of data to process and you've got a lot of potential charts and graphs and you like to see that in a visual format this might be a really great option for you if you're just starting out essentials is pretty great for pretty much anybody but you know simple start is really good for a solopreneur situation but as soon as you start to kind of have other people who need to look at your books essentials is a great place to be okay and you get the manage and bill pay and essentials where you don't have that in simple start so i really don't see a whole lot of people doing simple start these days all right so let's get into the actual accounting so what is quickbooks online quickbooks online is an online cloud accounting solution okay so if you run a business you do need to have your uh your books kept quote unquote it is a a way for you to digitally keep organized all of your financials in one place and on top of that the accounting systems that we have now are able to have really high quality reporting so when you get all of you capture all of your data all of your transactions everything you do with your money and your business it gets put into this system and then what comes out of the system is things like a profit and loss report at the end of the day so you can see is your business profitable or your balance sheet how many assets do you have in your business what's the value what's your debts what are your liabilities and what is your equity in your business okay so we put good information in and we're gonna get really quality information out when we use this system properly okay now there's that's like the very basic function is just an accounting system means all the transactions go in and then on on the on the back end you get reports and you can see and analyze your data but quickbooks online has so much more than that we have ways to make the bookkeeping very very easy we have ways to invoice customers in the sales cycle you can keep track of your customers you can do lots of different things there you have the ability to track cash flow you have ability to track bills outgoing and who you owe money to there's even the ability to track projects and project profitability you can run payroll through quickbooks online and obviously reporting as we mentioned you can also keep track of sales tax and file 1099s which are for contractors you can keep track of mileage you can also do just basic accounting functions like manage your chart of accounts and also reconcile your bank accounts so there's really so much that you can do with this system it really is meant to be very comprehensive and really helping you track everything related to your money in your business okay so it's you know i think sometimes people think well why should i pay for a software if it's not doing a lot for me or if it's just a compliance software but really accounting software is something that you really can't afford not to have it's so much more expensive to potentially you know miss a tax filing or not you know keep track of all of your business expenses you know if you aren't keeping meticulous track of your business expenses you could be missing out on a lot of tax savings so we really try to encourage everybody to get into an accounting system and also to make sure that everything related to the business is including it included in the accounting system all right so high level quickbooks like one of the key critical things that if you're going to do one thing and make sure that this is done every single month is you're going to make sure that your bank accounts are connected to the system and you're going to add the transactions that are brought in from the bank feeds so the great thing about quickbooks online is that it's able to connect directly to your bank so you can set up a checking account and then you can say link account and you can go and you can actually it will pull the transactions for you and this these bank linkages are really fabulous and they pull transactions they can read the account now it doesn't give you access to for them to go and do anything to your account but it does have read-only access where it can pull the transactions and it can tell that you receive some money and that you paid out some money and then all you have to do as the user is just put it in the right account put it in the right bucket tell the system what the transaction was for okay so this is kind of the critical function this is the the lifeblood of the accounting system if you will and then any types of transactions that happen you know you might have a checking account maybe a savings account a couple credit cards you'd link anything like that that you're using in your business okay this is where the engine is like i said this is the lifeblood this is where if this part is not being done you won't be able to get any reports out of the system okay because this is how the system is finding out you know what is actually going into income and where the expenses are in the system and and then you're telling it at the same time which category it needs to go into remember um and we call the categories are basically which account it goes into which bucket so if i got money coming in and it says a rental you know that might be a rental backhoe okay so this was probably equipment rental so i might go in here and i might have a oh look at that i have an equipment rental account that says expenses so maybe it was a return i'm not sure i would want to know if this was an income item but we would add that there um oh it was a return because look at this this was a job expense um rental equipment it looks like maybe that was a deposit we got back or something like that okay so equipment rental we're going to add that and then it's recognizing see quickbooks online is pretty smart and if you categorize something that has a similar description it's going to make a recommendation for you and that's in this green color and i'm going to go ahead and say that that's what it is now what i would normally do if i'm actually doing the bookkeeping as i would be looking at receipts i would be making sure i know exactly what a transaction is before i add it um and then we've got this this concept of matching so we basically go line by line and we figure out how to do like where each one of these items needs to go now we're going to do how to use the bank feeds in a separate video so i'm not going to go too much into detail there but really classifying these things that are in the bank feeds this is the bread and butter of the accounting system we will go into more videos that have much more detail about how to use all these functions but we're not going to get into that today so one of the critical things that i also really um you know like people to be using when they're using quickbooks online is if you send invoices i love it to be connected to quickbooks online okay sometimes people use a separate system to send invoices but you know i really like though even if you're in a separate system sometimes you can connect your invoicing system to quickbooks online so let's say you're using a separate crm or maybe you're using something very specified to your industry sometimes you can also keep track or link that system into here so you can see it in both places because the really great thing about having your invoices in quickbooks is you are able to see through an accounts receivable report at any at any point in time how much is outstanding so if you need to go and start collecting things it's really it's right here right in your accounting system and it's accurate okay and then when that money comes in it will also recognize that maybe like you know 477 dollars and 50 cents is matching um an incoming payment and quickbooks is smart enough to recognize those two things and make it easier for you to both match the payment and close out the invoice the open invoice all right so i will really love the invoices system here and it's also great because when you send an invoice it will show you this invoice activity so it can see that it was opened and viewed and paid so it's really nice if you're having customers who maybe aren't getting back to you you can see when they've actually viewed the emailed invoice which is pretty great another thing i want to show you guys is about expenses so you can keep track of all of your vendors here in quickbooks online you can add a new vendor at any point in time you can add their company name their address you can even add their ein and you can click this little button if you know you need to track payments to a vendor for 10.99 you can click that little check the box which is so nice and makes 1099 reporting much easier at the end of the year and then you can also look let's say let's look at books by bessie and i can see all the transactions that were related to this vendor okay so that's really great if you're trying to stay nice and organized which hopefully you are and you can leverage the vendor profiles and keep track of expenses that way you can also do reporting so let's say you're a bookkeeper and the business owner would like to know how much they paid you as a bookkeeper throughout the year you could go and you could look up yourself in the vendor report and you can find all the transactions related to that vendor or if you're the business owner and you want to kind of see okay how much are we using this vendor versus that vendor you can see things everything nice and if the bookkeeping's being done properly you can see all those transactions by using this vendor tab all right and then really reporting so reporting this is one of the reasons i love quickbooks the most is because the reporting is really dynamic now these are my favorites i love to look at the balance sheet in p l every single month usually accounts receivable if the invoicing is being kept in quickbooks online but you have lots of other options for ways to look at the p l ways to look at your accounts receivable ways to look at your accounts payable and lot and your inventory and lots of other things as well and payroll if you have payroll so there's a lot of opportunities to dissect your numbers show really anything you want to know about your numbers when the bookkeeping is done properly you get a lot of great information coming out one of the things i love to see is sales by um sales by product and service so i love to see this report when it comes out of quickbooks online and it can say okay this is this is all the invoices that went into the design this is all invoices that went into this type of work this is all the invoices that went into this type of work so you can really start to analyze your information and get a lot more business insights that way but remember the qua the the whole concept of any type of accounting system is the concept of garbage and garbage out so if you're not putting the information into the system in a way that gives you the ability to um to track it then you're not going to get a lot of great reporting that comes out so when you're in the banking fees i always tell people make sure you are there's something in the description and something in the payee because if there's not then it's going to be harder to know you know i i want to know that the payee says books by bessie because then when i go to the vendor i'm going to be able to see all of the transactions that say books by bessie but if i don't put that if i don't take the time to actually fill out this vendor customer then you know i'm not going to have that great reporting capability all right all right you guys well uh this is super high level how to use quickbooks online i really just if you're going to have one main takeaway from all of this it's that this is a great system to help you stay organized and then the second takeaway would be if you're going to spend time on anything and doing anything right make sure you are spending time in this banking feed and getting these transactions put into the right place well i hope that gave you a really good high level overview of what the system can do for you and remember that if you are looking to get started definitely check out my link below you get a free 30 days and 12 months of a discount a lot of the deals that you will see will only give you three months of a discount so remember we try to get you the best deal over here okay all right well give this video a thumbs up if it was helpful i totally appreciate it and we stay tuned for this series because we've got a lot more coming all right thanks bye

Channel: Clara CFO Group

Views: 354,333

Keywords: quickbooks online, quickbooks, qbo, how to use QBO, how to use quickbooks online, Quickbooks online tutorial, qbo tutorial, qbo bank feeds tutorial, qbo overview, qbo basics, quickbooks online basics, quickbooks 2022, quickbooks 2022 review, what can quickbooks do, best accounting system, accounting for small business, get started with quickbooks, discount quickbooks online, quickbooks basics, qb online tutorial, QBO training, QBO guide, qbo 2022, How to do stuff in QBO

Id: 0aXgVoVybNU

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022