QuickBooks Online: Full Tutorial for Beginners

hi everyone I'm Hector Garcia I'm a CPA and I'm a big fan of QuickBooks online and I'm well known here in YouTube for all my Quickbooks online tutorials however I get many emails and comments and DMS of people saying hey it's a video that just simply walks me through just the setup process how to get up and running quickly and easily so I don't get confused so could you make a video about that and the answer is yes this is this is the video about that now before we get deep into the content here and I realize this video is almost an hour long and some of you will watch the whole thing some of you will just watch a part make sure you check out the description section where I'm gonna have my email address links to other videos or other resources that I may make reference to through the video and most importantly the timeline you can jump straight to any time stamp and it will take you fast forward or rewind to any specific section of this video that you want to get into keep in mind that after you're done with this video this is not gonna be you knowing QuickBooks 100 this is how to get started so any additional uh content that I create part two part three part four a natural continuation to this video it's going to be right there in the description section now if you're most people if you're gonna get started with QuickBooks for the first time you're probably just gonna go into Google and then search in Google the word uh QuickBooks because most people don't actually go to quickbooks.com they just search QuickBooks in Google and then they'll probably click on the very first sponsor link very first advertising link and it will send you straight into the QuickBooks landing page and you will be able to set up an account straight from there now if you have not set up an account yet I'm just going to recommend you that you can you you can go that route but if you're in the US I recommend you use my link I'll put it in the description uh below because my link will give you both a 30-day trial and it will also give you 30 discount for 12 months so if you go straight into QuickBooks maybe you get a bigger percentage discount but it won't be for 12 months that's a special a special affiliate link that I get as a QuickBooks reseller and I guarantee you is most likely going to be the best deal that you will ever see and if if if it's not true or if you have an issue with a discount at some point just email me uh about that anyway let's go straight to creating the account so I'm going to first select the version of QuickBooks a verse that best fits my business now I want to keep this video short so I'm not going to go in depth into the differences between the Simple Start 30 a month version Essentials 60 a month plus ninety dollars a month and Advance 200 a month I'm actually going to create a separate video that I'll put in the description as well what I'll probably go really really deep into like what each one of these are and what each of these features mean because it'll probably take me a good 20 minutes to go through all the features but long story short a brand new startup that only wants to track income like invoicing and doesn't want to track accounts payable like you know money you owe to vendors and you don't have multiple users and you just want to do invoicing and Banking and very limited reports so you would probably go with something like Simple Start um however most businesses I want a little bit more and they're they're looking mostly in this Essentials and plus area in the middle of the subscriptions and then the bigger businesses the more established businesses the ones that quite frankly can afford 200 a month even with you know the initial discount um those are going to be looking at that so most companies are going to be looking at Essentials and plus my favorite version the one that I put most of my new clients in is plus uh so we're going to start with that as the as the example for this video so I'm going to click on try it free and then the next thing's gonna ask you hey can you give me a user ID your cell phone number and a password now one really key important thing is if I put a user ID that's already an email that's in the QuickBooks database it's going to say tell you one uh error you already have this user ID it's already taken and then most people get really really stuck at this point and go oh my God I don't have a QuickBooks account but I have it Intuit ID and they get stuck here if you want to continue using that email address or that user ID that you created with QuickBooks at some point or within to it at some point in your life don't sweat it you can just click on recover your account and you can reset the user ID and password and you can come back into this screen come back into the link the same process after you know your actual user ID and password and then click on sign in but from this link process and then you can log in and then create the account under an existing login right because the login into QuickBooks and the actual account like the company file are two separate things okay so you just want to want to confuse those two so let's say this is not the case where you actually put an email in here and it doesn't give you any sort of error it just lets you go through with the process then you don't have to go through the whole reset process you're actually going to create the login account right here and then so I'm gonna put my cell phone number and you do need to put a cell phone number because it's going to send you a text a security text to make sure that you actually are based on the country that you're setting up the accounting and um that's going to be a requirement to log in then you click on sign in with email then you wait for the next step which is to verify the code that you got via your cell phone once you enter your code you click on continue and it goes to the next step whereas right now it's actually creating a new company file for you again while this loads the login into QuickBooks into the into a world into the QuickBooks world and the actual company file the actual database there could be two different things because some people have one login into QuickBooks and they manage multiple businesses so you can have one login that can log into multiple businesses most people just have one business so the One login just means the one company file they're going to be logged into next thing is you're going to click on next and you're gonna you're gonna follow the prompt so I'm gonna call this um hectors plus company and then I'm going to click on next and then I'm going to answer a series of questions and depending on when you watch this uh I guarantee you the questions are going to be essentially the same but they could change the order of the question so it's telling you hey how have you been managing your finances in the past so that you can give them information like well no I'm just getting started or I had some other bookkeeping software where I was using QuickBooks desktop and the reason for that is because if you're using any other way that QuickBooks can help you bring the information in such as QuickBooks desktop or Sage 50 or spreadsheets it's going to prompt you for sort of the next steps after you create the company which are the most natural things for you to do which is bring in your existing customer list uh via Excel or bring in your existing invoice open invoices or bring in your existing vendor list so so QuickBooks wants to help you have the best possible experience from the get-go this is the reason for these questions now let's just say that we're just a startup and I'm just going to say nothing I'm just getting started and then click on next and the next question is hey how many years have you been in business they sort of connect this with you know whether or not you're starting from scratch or whether you're potentially bringing some value and balances from your bank accounts and credit cards or whatever so this question is only kind of relevant again to try to help you set up those beginning balances and understand where you're coming from next question is asking me is this an LLC then I can put yes or no or whatever answer it is if if I put no the follow-up question is actually yes or no follow-up question is okay how is this structure is this a C Corp an S corp a partnership if you don't know it's okay you're not going to break anything you can just click I'm not sure it's totally okay but if you have an accountant a lawyer a trusted business person that helped you set up business you might want to ask what this is because it's gonna just gonna help you um set up the structure of of QuickBooks Online to sort of match how your taxes are going to be set up at the end of the year so I'm gonna put here S Corp and then I'm going to hit next and again you're going to put whatever makes sense to you and then you're going to put your industry now the industry helps when doing dashboards comparing numbers of your business versus other numbers in in Industry like the average numbers of the industry or when setting up the chart of accounts all these situations by effect um how QuickBooks get set up when you put whatever the industry is so I'm just going to put here uh Consulting and let's say I'm going to choose a marketing Consulting Services let's say that's where my company is and then I'm going to click on next and if you can't find it you could just skip it okay next question is hey what is your main role are you the owner are you a bookkeeper or the accountant are you an employee I'm gonna put the owner most typical thing go to next foreign whether you put yes or no that's really mostly um like a sort of a follow-up payroll question you know so are you gonna get paid with payroll keep in mind that QuickBooks Online is uh the core software and you can add Payroll Services to that so payroll is not immediately included with QuickBooks Online is something you add more to it so you just answer the right question again QuickBooks is just trying to help you guide you through you know their setup and the services that they offer that could be combined with QuickBooks so then you can choose here are you by yourself do you have employees do you have contractors um you can answer the right question here so I'm just gonna say uh I'm by myself no employees and yes to contractors and then click next and again nothing that you answer here is gonna break QuickBooks so you can all the settings can be changed later this is just to help you set it up in the right path customize to your needs okay does your bookkeeper help you does a bookkeeper help you with QuickBooks if I put yes this is actually gonna prompt you to invite that bookkeeper assuming that bookkeeper uses QuickBooks online so you invite that person bookkeeper or accountant that you collaborate and if you put no it doesn't prompt you uh to add that person but then you can always add that person later no problem next thing is asking you hey are there any any apps that you're using for your business and it puts like four or five apps in the screen in this case or seven and if you use PayPal or use bill.com or use Amazon business or use square or whatever if you hit yes to all these things then it's going to eventually gonna ask you to enter the user ID and password for each one because it wants to integrate it it wants to sort of save you a step since some of the transactions already sort of booked in there so the most logical thing is hey let me help you connect the transactions from that other app so you can save time doing accounting at the end of the day I think that the big promise of having your accounting on the web having your accounting on the internet on the cloud is connecting to these other systems and saving the potential time of entering the information twice you know like going to PayPal process a payment and then going to QuickBooks and process the payment again in QuickBooks that seems like double work so if you have PayPal you want to connect them so that information flows through also um if if it's not on the list here you can search on the drop down menu and they keep adding more apps pretty amazing the amount of apps you can connect into QuickBooks go through and search think of every possible app that you're using and and when they mean app just think about anything that interacts with your accounting so anything that contains customer information vendor information employee information Bank information transaction information money information um e-commerce right so if you have like um let's say Shopify your type Shopify here and that's in here as well and it adds it so it's just kind of an example of all the potential apps you can add and sort of create the sync with it now I'm going to skip this for now just because I could make the video much longer much more complex uh but we're gonna stop there now this is a big question which is you should connect your accounts to QuickBooks and the answer to this is yes you should absolutely connect your accounts to QuickBooks I think what QuickBooks Online does best probably better than any other accounting software out there is that synchronization with your Banks and it most banks connect to QuickBooks you download the transactions you categorize them this is something you absolutely yes you want to do now I feel that doing it right here it's kind of awkward just because you're in the middle of the setup and you get a little bit distracted just finding user IDs and passwords and stuff like that so I kind of recommend to skip it in this point and just kind of do it a little bit later um just keep a fun fact the reason why QuickBooks puts it in here it's because of a attrition I think um what I can tell from observation is whenever a user sets up a free trial of QuickBooks online and connects their Bank they're most likely to stay with QuickBooks online and not just play with the free trial because once you connect the banks it's a real business they're sort of committed they see the transactions you start seeing the value of QuickBooks when the banks are connected but again I'm going to skip it from this page I'm going to show you how to set that up a little bit later just because I just take in this particular page is a there's an awkward situation to create to connect the bank accounts so I'm going to skip from now and then it's going to ask you hey how do you track receipts and then I save paper receipts or I have digital receipts you can answer whatever it is and click on next the reason for this question is because you can actually add a phone app a QuickBooks phone app to your phone and you can actually scan uh receipts on the phone app and they sync with your QuickBooks and it keeps an archive of that receipt so that's really cool for people that like to scan the receipts take pictures on your phone all included within the QuickBooks Online subscription so then I'm going to click on next and then it's going to sort of guide you through hey since you're doing that make sure you download the phone on your I mean the app on your iPhone or your Android whatever it is so it just gives you kind of the links uh here you can take a picture with uh your camera on this QR code and it'll take you straight to the to the app on your phone so that's definitely something you want to do um don't stop right now to set that up in your on your phone I would probably do that right at the end uh of your setup that's my suggestion but that's what this is doing at this point then I'm going to click on next um and then it says hey what would you like to do with QuickBooks again whatever you put here it doesn't matter you can't get the wrong answer this just kind of guides you to like QuickBooks is going to try to tell you okay so the next thing you should do is this the next thing you should do is that based on these answers so if I say I send invoices and I pay bills and I track time QuickBooks is going to try to guide you to the process of learning how to do those things again so that way the experience of QuickBooks feel is more customized to your business so then I'm going to click on next and then the next question says hey let's set up invoices and payment options so really important question here when I click on next essentially what QuickBooks is doing at this point is they're selling you their services it's called QuickBooks payments and if you go to the process of um of configuring the payments account it says set up invoices but really what it's doing is it's going to do a credit check if you enter all the information and then uh with a credit check if as long as you don't have a big issue with your credit generally most people get approved and then you'll be able to create invoices with a pay now button and then people can pay you with a credit card a direct ACH with their bank they can pay you with Apple pay uh it's really cool I mean it's a probably one of the big advantages uh advantages of using QuickBooks online or account based accounting system is getting people to pay you electronically now you could do the setup uh at this point here in this page again another situation where I kind of recommend that you skip it and do that later because it interrupts the flow of the setup um and also if you set up the account uh with the link I gave you uh I'm gonna send you you can automatically get an email welcome email from me with um with a couple of videos If you reply to that email saying hey I want to set up a payments account um I connect you with my rep directly and they give you a very very small discount I mean it's uh you know point something percent off but if you do a lot of volume remember when you people pay you with a credit card you pay a percentage you pay you know anywhere between 2.7 and 3.5 percent and there are there are some preferential rates so if you have the ability to do that might as well set that up it'll take you an extra day versus doing it directly with QuickBooks no issues with doing directly with QuickBooks again you know I sell QuickBooks for a living some of the add-ons that QuickBooks has if if you buy them through a reseller like mine you get like myself you get a little bit of that additional discount anyway I'm gonna skip from now and then I'll show you how to go back and set those things up afterwards so I'm going to click on next um and then it goes to the next screen which says hey we're on the way we're setting things up and at this point you're just waiting for that let's go button to turn on click on the let's go button and then it should take you straight into the QuickBooks Online home screen now we're in the QuickBooks on my home screen again whatever you answered in the setup process there's no right or wrong answer you could always go back and change any of these settings um later on so I'm just going to x out of it and then I have something in my page I have I have a couple things first I had this sort of prompt saying you should connect your Banks and credit cards because we haven't connected them yet this other one says hey you should set up your invoices and your electronic payments because you told us that you wanted to invoice and right here the next setup says you should be um setting up the account to get paid online you should be organizing your expenses so this is this setup checklist is just sort of guiding trying to guide you to that process um I'm experienced I know how to use QuickBooks and I'm kind of showing you how to do that so I can just like close this checklist I don't even need that checklist anymore and I can get rid of it I can always go back and open the checklist again again QuickBooks is trying to self-guide you through the setup process to have best possible experience from setting up um a new account okay um you actually don't need to do anything in this home screen I mean you could you could go through it you can look at all the different things you need to do anything on the home screen once you're sort of an advanced user you'll probably be skipping the screen all day long okay now what does QuickBooks look like how do you navigate it let's talk about that left hand side it's called the navigation bar navigation bar is going to have menus and sub menus so here under business overview I'll click on that and then you'll notice that a whole bunch of sub menus up and up under it so whichever one I want to go to if I want to go to reports then it goes into the reports page which is in this white area that's over here I could always go back to the home page by clicking on the QuickBooks logo on the top that takes you back to the home page or clicking on so anything that says uh business overview getting things done that also sort of takes you back into that home page um Sometimes some of these things are difficult to find that you can't you're gonna have to go through the process of like clicking on each of these and sort of exploring what's on each one most brand new QuickBooks users that's what they do they'll click on like on each button and kind of see what that is um keep in mind that QuickBooks has essentially five things that they want to sell you on top of the QuickBooks software so the QuickBooks accounting software you can connect to the banks it can reconcile your bank accounts you can invoice you can track expenses you can prepare financial statements profit and loss balance sheet all that stuff is included with the core QuickBooks software but into it the maker of QuickBooks has multiple other interests I guess things that they want to help small business businesses do and one of it's going to be payroll so if you want to add employees where you want to give them a paycheck where they withhold taxes and they then into it QuickBooks pays the governments and sends the forms then you're gonna have to add payroll you add payroll typically by just clicking on payroll and there will be a button somewhere in your screen where you can click on enable payroll and you're gonna pay extra for that payroll is an additional charge like this for example says a payroll premium 37.5 a month for three months and then it jumps up to 75 that type of stuff so if you want to add payroll that's going to be an additional charge if you go anywhere where it says like customers or marketing or something like that there's an additional a different software called MailChimp which is part of the ecosystem of QuickBooks and they have like a super basic free version you can set up and that's really for sending uh newsletters batch emails to your customers you can set that up through QuickBooks if you want to start with something small you can go big I personally use MailChimp I used it before QuickBooks into it acquired it I love it this is how I email all of my customers all of my leads it's a great piece of software you don't have to use it it's not fundamental to the use of QuickBooks but it's there and again you can start with something free and then move up as you need it you will also see in like the banking side you're going to see a couple things at the a couple additional Services one is what they call QuickBooks checking which is basically a bank account the quick in this case is free they're not really selling you anything but it's it's QuickBooks is also a bank so you have the ability to to open a like a digital electronic bank account with them and then you get paid electronically and you can transfer it to your brick and mortar Bank from it but essentially the bank account it's like a virtual bank basically so you're gonna see options to do you're going to see that quite a bit very quickly hey you should do a QuickBooks checking account that's what it is it's a it's a virtual bank account my Quickbooks offers because QuickBooks is also a bank then you also might see something called QuickBooks Capital which is a quick book selling you alone okay so you get a loan um and sometimes there's short term sometimes sometimes they're long term it's all sort of interconnected with their system since QuickBooks is a bank too and they have all these small businesses using the software they see the opportunity for Lending money to small businesses um the other thing that you're gonna see is uh as I mentioned payments uh this is when when you invoice someone and um and you want to see the the the Visa pay now uh sort of button in there so I'll show you what that is so I'm gonna go create an invoice so I'm gonna go to uh get paid I'm going to click on uh create invoice and I'm going to create an invoice for the very first time so when you create an invoice um it's gonna you know every single time you go to a new screen you're gonna have pop-ups with tours and videos uh where you can watch and and it walks you through stuff I mean that's that's all fine and then they strongly recommend recommend that but um at some point if you want the invoice to be sent to the to to your customer and it have a pay now Visa Mastercard Apple pay whatever logo you're gonna have to apply to what's called a payments account now I'm gonna I'm gonna go through the process of creating an invoice with you just you can see what it is and we might get a pop-up saying hey this is uh a pop-up requesting uh for you to create the payments account oh it might not let's see let's see what happens and if not then I'll take you back to the payments uh settings and we can see we can add that up so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a customer so I'm just going to click on add new I get this little drawer that comes to the right and says hey what's the customer's name brand new account I don't I don't have any customers in there so I'm gonna put Maria Smith and I could go in there and put an address phone number email notes I mean there's all sorts of things I can add just for the sake of speed I'm going to click save and then that creates the customer I can now invoice Maria Smith so next thing I want to do is change the date of the invoice or whatever you know date of the invoice the due date do they can change automatically based on the term so if it's 15 days or 60 days or something custom I create do they get pushed automatically invoice number starts in one zero zero one like all accounting systems you can overwrite that and QuickBooks will keep track of the next number and automatically prompt the next number then we're going to select the product and service that we're going to send Maria Smith so let's say we're gonna we only have hours and services in there you can create an entire database or catalog of products and services at least that would be a subject for a whole different video by the way but by default you're going to have hours and services set up some certain big services and then let's say the unit the measure is an hour and then I'm charging for three hours and I charge let's say a hundred dollars an hour and then QuickBooks will calculate three times a hundred equals 300 and then under description we can put uh marketing Consulting for new website okay whatever uh whatever type of services I can offer and I can have um as many lines as I want okay I can just keep adding multiple lines and you can break it down in so many you know different uh itemized categories if you actually sell products and you want to charge sales tax there's a little setup button for you to go to the process of sales tax long story short sales tax is included with the core software so at least that is not an additional service but if you want QuickBooks to calculate sales tax and set up the amounts for you to fill out for your sales tax forms QuickBooks can do that down here where it says activate online card or bank transfer payments that has not been activated yet so if I actually send this customer an invoice if I send it right now if I go to review and send um and if I didn't put an email address it's gonna you know of course force me to put an email address in here so let's say that's Maria gmail.com or whatever the email is um that's what the email will look like it would be a little note that says your invoice is ready 300 and then the customer will not have a pay now button they're just gonna see view details so if you set up the actual payments account or the merchant account and that gets approved next time you send an invoice the customer will see pay now Visa Mastercard Apple pay and then they'll be able to pay you electronically trust me that beats you know getting a check almost any time of the day so if I just click on send invoice uh the invoice will be sent to Maria they can only really pay um via check I probably should have put the address of the business of the Maria knows where to mail the check so we can we can talk about that um I do want to mention something if you are in the middle of creating the invoices trying to kind of show you that so let me go back and create the invoice again and we're in the middle created something and then you want to set that up in the future you can just click the setup button and then it will take you to um the page where you're actually going to apply for that payments account all right so that's that was the workflow from the invoice but I'm going to x out of that for a second and just I want to show you something um let me save and exit and I'm going to x out you can also go through the settings and set that up so you can click on the gear menu we can click on account and settings and then we can click on payments on payments on the left hand side and then we can go to learn more about QuickBooks payments and that's going to take me it should take me to the same screen there you go same screen where you can apply for that payments account so again the purpose of this video is to walk you through setup like we're not really focused on like how to do things that would be an entirely different video check out the description below for any videos related to uh tutorials on how to do invoices and bills and reconciling the bank accounts all those things are going to be covered in different videos I'm focused on setup setup correct setup that sort of thing Okay so we've covered um the payroll add-on we covered the invoicing and payments out on if you wanted to add that we covered all the other things like QuickBooks checking QuickBooks Capital we covered the entire um setup process of the new account let's go through the chart of accounts and connecting your Banks into QuickBooks so to go to the chart of accounts we're going to click on the gear menu and then we're going to click on chart of accounts so Gear manual chart of accounts takes you to this place called the chart of accounts if you are not so good in um in accounting it is your first time looking at any accounting system this is going to be an intimidating page that's for sure it's gonna be something that you may have never seen before something that's confusing is asking for uh accounting technical stuff don't worry you will learn this stuff over time I have a different video where I just talk about the chart of accounts in depth so definitely check that out that's going to be a link in the description but in this page for now because we're doing setup all you want to do is set up any account that you're using bank or credit card or loan and if it has a beginning balance you want to enter those beginning balances so for example let's go to new and I'm going to create a new bank account and let's say I have a bank I have an account in Chase so I'm gonna go detail type and put checking and then here under name I'm gonna put Chase Checking one two three four okay I usually put the last four digits of the account makes it easy to identify then if if there's a beginning balance that I'm bringing over I'm gonna put yeah there's a beginning balance at the beginning of the year or there's a beginning balance at the beginning of the month depends on when I'm gonna start doing things in QuickBooks so if I'm going to start doing everything July 1st and I want to bring in the balances June 30th if I'm gonna start doing all the transactions starting January 1st then I want to bring previous year 1231 so you could want to strongly think about what will be the beginning the the first day in which you're going to be entering transactions into QuickBooks that way you know that the balances you're bringing in is for like the day right before that right so let's say I'm gonna start uh July 1st putting stuff in QuickBooks then I'm gonna bring in my balance on June 30th let's say that was ten thousand five eighty nine and then I click on Save and close and done the account gets created again we have a whole separate video we're gonna discuss chart of accounts in depth there's so much to talk about in this page I mean it's a blow your mind how in-depth this page is when it comes to the setup of your entire accounting system but you create all the bank accounts in here okay and then once you create the bank account in here the recommend this way I recommend it you can actually individually connect the accounts by clicking on the drop down menu and clicking on connect Banks so when you go to connect Banks then that's where you do your whole uh Bank connection process now I'm gonna X out of that for a second I could also go into like bookkeeping uh the area bookkeeping area on the left hand side or in some cases it could be called just transactions or it could be called Bank transactions or either bookkeeping Bank transactions or transactions and then there will be a button here to connect your account and it'll take you to the same place so the way you connect the account is is you click on the type of bank account that you have let's say you have an account in Chase then you're gonna click on continue and it's going to give you a pop-up that's going to ask you hey what's your user ID and password for chase after you put in user ID and password it's going to ask you a couple questions and then once you click uh on next it's going to download the transactions for you so let me do that and now it's going to connect to the bank it's going to start bringing in the information about all the different bank accounts then you're going to pick which specific account you want to connect you put a check box next to that the account that you want to connect then on the bottom you're going to click on uh the date in which you want to start bringing transactions in there so for example if I told it that I wanted to start uh July 1st then I picked July 1st if I wanted the beginning of the year I picked the beginning of the year if I want some custom date I click on custom and I pick the specific date from from the point I want to start downloading transactions again you don't want to be downloading transactions prior to the period that you're already loading beginning balance information because that's just gonna get really confusing and messy so then we're going to click on next and and next and now now it's going to start the process of of connecting the banks downloading those transactions and then once it's done connecting you're going to see a whole bunch of transactions loaded into QuickBooks and it's going to ask you what to do with them now we're not going to cover this in this video because this part of accounting which is called Bank feeds let me just go back and show you that screen so this part where you see um all these transactions listed here that were downloaded like these were a bunch of transactions that were downloaded from the bank in this case it was only you know five or six transactions dealing with these transactions categorizing these it's another skill set that you're going to learn you have to understand your chart of accounts you have to understand um how to match these things to invoices and bills that you're creating and that sort of thing so that's a whole other world but that gives you an idea more or less on how to get uh started with that and I do have detailed videos on that I'll put that on the description okay so lastly I just want to uh mention the most important thing is where everything is okay so we mentioned that we have this left navigation bar with sub menus you also have the new button the new button is going to be where all the transactions are going to be uh found where you can create them so if you want to create an invoice or an expense or a check or a bill or a purchase order etc etc you would do that all through the screen now you will notice that some of the links have like this little arrows on them like for example payroll and AD employee has a little arrow on it that's because these features are not included in this version of QuickBooks because I have not added payroll I have not upgraded or or added the additional payroll subscription so you're gonna have those little arrows just letting you know that there's an upgrade or an additional fee you have to pay to get access to that okay so that's what the new button is and I'll we'll go back and show you one quick thing about that that's actually pretty interesting um so we'll go back and and and and open up the screen again but this is where all the new transactions are going to be and then we're going to have the gear menu on the right hand side where it's going to be anything related to settings so we talked about chart of accounts already we're going to have all of our lists right uh tags custom Fields things like that we're gonna have the reconcile button you're gonna be doing a lot of that because accounting is all about reconciling and we're going to have account and settings now I'm going to go into account and settings and we went back we were there recently but this would be the place where you for example enter your business address you enter your phone number your website you can change you know the type of business that you are from IRS perspective and how you file taxes you can add your company logo you can load that from your computer you can change the company name you can add the uh EIN number the tax ID number so this is all like sort of the basic settings when you go on building a subscription uh this is where you can see what version of QuickBooks you have and you can also see the add-ons so I have QuickBooks Online payroll it's not logged in it's not added otherwise it will be a it would be a green little highlight there I haven't added uh QuickBooks time didn't talk about that that's for time tracking via uh your phone uh you can have your employees clock in and clock out via your phone that's an additional service there's QuickBooks online payments which we talked about um and those are really the principal ones this uh QuickBooks live full service bookkeeping that's a QuickBooks offering accounting services to their QuickBooks clients I don't want to get into that not a huge fan of my software company selling accounting services to smart business owners but that's a different conversation more complex than you will ever know but that is an option once you sign in and you subscribe uh they'll offer you a service which include humans actual people doing work with you alongside of you and you can also order checks and and and bank deposit slips and stuff like that but that's really not it's kind of inconsequential not many people do it now we have the company ID this number is going to be crucial for support so if you call into it and they're going to ask you what's your company ID that's where it is that's where you have it if you upgrade it or downgraded and you have an issue maybe with a discount not applying correctly or whatever and you call support you're gonna need that Company ID so that's a really important piece and as you go through there's all these other tabs that you can you want to explore I recommend you explore them so you can kind of see where the settings are see what things you can turn on or off you'll get a lot of insight about what QuickBooks can do by just going through these settings I mean I kind of wish that there was a little video next to each one that would be kind of neat right where you can click on the video and it kind of tells you what it is um that's something that they don't have that if I was the designer of the settings menu I'll probably put a little video explaining what each consequence of these settings are but if you click on any of these there's there is a little question mark and it kind of explains it to you but I think for for newbies a little video would be nice but you do see every once in a while you go into a screen that has a little video that gets that gets popped up I want to add one more thing here I'm going to go to building a subscription I'm gonna go to uh downgrade your plan and I'm gonna downgrade this to Simple Start and there's a very specific reason why I want to do that simple start again I mentioned the very beginning is the most basic version of QuickBooks it doesn't have a lot of features but a lot of startups are going to be using Simple Start I get it no problem so I'm going to downgrade to Simple Start for a second and I'm gonna go uh back into QuickBooks online and show you one sort of key thing that you're gonna see and it's gonna be for the people that select Simple Start or Essentials is when you go into this new button now you see this little arrows next to a lot of the transaction types so for example when I was in plus before purchase orders didn't have this arrow and delayed credit didn't have this arrow and the late charge didn't have this arrow that means that because you're in a lower version of QuickBooks Online these features are not available and they're going to require an upgrade of of the monthly um service so that's an important little piece I wanted to add when you click on the gear menu there's no arrows here um just because it's interesting on the gear menu they just don't add anything in here that you don't have access to so if you don't have access to it they won't add it here it won't it won't be there with the little arrows whereas in the new button everything is in there including the new arrows just to kind of remind you that QuickBooks can do that you just don't have the right uh version uh but potentially don't have the right version for that there's also um The Help menu you can do things in the help you can do things in The Help menu that essentially sort of search the web um you can there's a little chat bot here I don't know how effective it is but if you do the actual search and you ask the same question uh how do I receive a payment and I think I misspelled that okay put that correctly and you press enter um what it'll do is I'll sort of like search the web and it'll find an actual article so if I click on one of these articles there will be an article that walks you through um the the question maybe is what you asked maybe something similar and then sometimes there'll be like little videos in there that walk you through it so that's actually not bad as a matter of fact it's my opinion that QuickBooks as a whole it's probably the accounting package out there that has the most amount of help videos and active users so for most people getting started it's it's kind of a feel-good thing um so so it's there uh of course you know obviously I recommend you look at my YouTube channel as well for for for help and sometimes you can find uh things in the search menu so if you click on search and let's say you're looking for a profit and loss report and you don't know how to get there just type uh profit and and it'll try to search through the QuickBooks file through the settings to the different features and try to get you you know where you want to go so in this case you know there it is profit and loss so if I click on that it's gonna now create the profit and loss report for me I haven't created any transactions with the exception I believe of an invoice or sort there it is of 300 so you know you gotta start putting transactions in there for this too to be a thing right where the reports actually have information now I'm going to quickly throw a little bit of an advanced concept here and if you're kind of overwhelmed with the content that we've covered so far feel free to skip this and go straight to the outro if you want to but I want to give you a little bit of taste of uh sort of my world I've been using QuickBooks for a very very long time I am a very Advanced user if you subscribe to my YouTube channel you see that I have all sorts of videos with super basic getting started like this and some really advanced stuff but I'm passionate about using QuickBooks in the most effective efficient way possible so I want to show you a couple of little hints and tips and tricks on how you can get just much better using QuickBooks by using keyboard shortcuts or shortcuts in general so if you hit Control Plus on your keyboard or control minus on your keyboard it's going to zoom in and zoom out there's so many screens in which the font size it's way too big or way too small and you're going to find yourself is zoom in in and out and using the the standard Chrome Zoom mechanism or the standard browser so mechanism takes way too long so remember that control plus control miners or if you're in a Mac command plus command minor so that's sort of like the most basic keyboard shortcut the other keyboard shortcut you need to know is control alt question mark or control option question mark if you're on a Mac and when you do that the additional information window pops up it gives you the company ID which we talked about earlier that you might need for support or whatever and then it gives you a little quick cheat sheet that tells you which combination of keys if you hit Ctrl alt on the PC and this key or control command sorry control option and one of these Keys it can take you straight there so for example earlier I said that to go to an invoice you have to click on the new button and then you have to click on invoice Ah that's way too many clicks right so if you hit Ctrl alt or control option in the Mac I it takes you straight into the invoice so that's kind of like one of those key important navigation um keyboard shortcuts you need to know now in some screens for some reason and I really can't get into it when you press Escape it will close the thing that you had just opened the transaction you have just opened in some cases it doesn't really work but the Escape key is also really useful and hopefully they'll make QuickBooks better and better with Escape key just actually works in every screen but in most screens where something I overlaid on top like an invoice for example a check if I do Control Alt W or control option W you'll go to the right check screen or the screen where you can open and create the check and if I press Escape it should exit out of that in this case it didn't work so then I'll have to literally click on the x button so hopefully you know they'll fix you know where the Escape key doesn't work different top pick a conversation all together but I'm going to give you a really cool thing I'm going to show you a really cool thing which is an add-on you can add to QuickBooks an app that I designed right that's right I Hector Garcia designed this app I didn't build it I'm not a programmer but I have a programming team and this app is called Write tool now you're gonna see it on the on the right hand side of the screen and you see the right Tool logo this has nothing to do with QuickBooks you have to install it um on top of it and you install it through What's called the the Chrome web extension store I'll put a link to the description and it basically kind of looks like this and once you're in the Chrome web store for right tool there'll be a a green button on the top right that will say install into browser or add to browser or add to Chrome or add to Microsoft Edge it only works in Google Chrome as a browser or Microsoft Edge as a web browser so if you're using an iPad to use QuickBooks which uses Safari this won't work if you're using Safari on your Mac it won't work and it kind of works in Firefox but Google Chrome and Firefox and Microsoft Edge are the preferred browsers for QuickBooks Online anyway and it's also the only browser in which you can add this thing called Write tool for QuickBooks Online something that I as I mentioned earlier an app that I designed but why would you do that well first of all we have a free version and that free version will have little ads in the in the bottom right and but you'll have most of the navigation functionality you can do things like add to your favorite list of places you want to get uh two Quick Books quickly into this home page like for example I we pre-build like the top 10 I mean sorry X Out get rid of these to here but we we rebuilt the top 10 things that I think most QuickBooks users navigate to that generally will take the average QuickBooks user multiple clicks to get into okay so for example if I want to get into bank feed normally with QuickBooks Online using the left navigation bar you have to click on business overview and then you have to or actually you have to click on bookkeeping and then you have to click on uh transactions and then click on Bank transactions and that gets you into the banking screen uh now this left navigation bar that you see here this is the one that was new and now it's the old one but this left navigation bar could look a little different I'm actually gonna switch modes here and your your navigation bar in your screen might look maybe more like this one that you're seeing right here on the screen but just long story short if you wanted to get into banking again you have to put you have to go over to banking or transactions and then click on banking it takes multiple clicks whereas I'm just going to go to the home screen really quick if you're using right tool the additional app that I'm referring to you can quickly go to bank feed by just clicking on Bank feed and that one adds additional keyboard shortcuts so Ctrl alt 1 or control option one uh control command one on the Mac will take me straight to that or the same thing if I do the two or the three or the four so those numbers are there to tell you hey if you use control alt and that number or control um a command and the mac and that number those combination of things are actually going to get you to that specific shortcut so things that maybe QuickBooks doesn't even have built a shortcut for you can build your own so let's say you're setting some place in QuickBooks that there's no that there's no direct um uh link to it so for example I'm gonna go into let's say the audit log okay so that takes multiple clicks to get there let's say you love this screen this is like a screen that you go to many times if you want to bookmark it what you can do is you can click on add custom on the right hand side on the right tool you add custom and it adds it up here and you give it a name so we're going to call this uh audit log and you can give it any custom name this right here is the the URL per se and then you click on Save and you see that here it says audit log there it is so any point in time uh that you happen to be let's say on the home screen I don't have to click I don't have to click two or three times to get the other log I just go straight into my shortcut here and if if it happens to be in the top 10 and I can click and drag this and replace it with with any of these so I can put my other log in 9 for example I would hit the combination Ctrl alt 9 or control command 9 and we'll do it right now control command 9 it takes me straight into the auto log so we basically hacked 10 QuickBooks um to do a lot more than what it was meant to be meant to do via keyboard shortcuts and this favorite um screen here is just the tip of the iceberg I mean there's so many things here and I'll put in the description links where I go in depth right tool but just give you a general idea I'm going to click on the on our website where we have a list of keyboard shortcuts this group of keyboard shortcuts this is the same group of keyboard shortcuts that you get when you hit control um option question mark or Control Alt question mark this is the same group of keyboard shortcuts just to give you a reference point and then we've added once you add the right tool we've added a list of essentially you can almost essentially get to every single place in QuickBooks with a combo of a keyboard shortcut okay and or you can trigger certain areas inside QuickBooks inside reports inside customization going into um the the additional keyboard shortcut so I'll just give you an example uh deposit so um that's a u so I'm going to go back into QuickBooks here notice that there's no shortcut to go to deposits so this there was just no way to go to deposits in QuickBooks so like the normal way you would go into the passage you would go to new and then you click on bank deposit on top of the fact they have to remember where they are in the menu sequence so with right tool you hit control command U on the Mac or Ctrl alt U on the PC and it'll take you straight into the deposits that's kind of the point and um and again that's this is just like the super simple stuff you can actually collapse the left navigation bar and with right tool you can instruct it to stay collapsed so you can completely ignore QuickBooks as left navigation bar and like I said it's kind of like a hack right so you ignore the navigation bar and then there is a new button on the right hand side and you can also hit Ctrl command plus and it will open up that new screen but on the right hand side or you can do a control command minus and it will open up the settings screen on the right hand side so you can essentially usually completely kill the left navigation bar and use the right navigation bar or once you learn all the keyboard shortcuts you can collapse right tool and then you can use your keyboard shortcut essentially to almost get to anywhere in QuickBooks or control command plus that opens up the the the navigation bar and what's really cool is immediately after that I'm using my keyboard I'm not using my mouse I can completely go straight to where I want to go okay so control command minus or Control Alt minus and then again using the keyboard shortcut go straight to where I want to go you can only achieve this once you install uh right tool and again we'll put a link in the description for you to be able to do that and then there's this is a there's a free version and it has all the shortcuts that I that I just mentioned plus more and then later on if you're like a super power user you can add the pro version that adds a whole bunch of like crazy additional um shortcuts that we've created to really really really optimize your workflow but there's tons of amazing things like you can click on this little uh my microphone if you click on the microphone enable the microphone and then you can talk to QuickBooks and tell it what you're looking for so for example I'm just going to delete that for a second second I'm going to click on the microphone and then I'm going to say maybe balance sheet so I'm going to click on the microphone and say balance sheet I didn't type it I noticed it picked up and say two because I'm sort of doing a video at the same time so I'm gonna do a little bit different I'm just excited that balance sheet okay so it read it it understood that I said balance sheet it type balance sheet for me and it searched it in the right tool database of shortcuts okay which is you know super cool because almost everything that you can do in QuickBooks you can you can find through the right tool search so if I'm looking for a deposit for example I'll just type the word deposit and notice that QuickBooks gave me all the possible things in QuickBooks that contain the word deposit so you know this tool called batch enter deposits and um search recent bank deposits and recurring Bank deposits and payments to the deposit and payments deposit detail uh make deposit you know QuickBooks does have a search bar and I'll just show you really quick if I type the word uh deposit some things will show up but QuickBooks only gives me you know go to create a bank deposit and standard deposit detail and these are two accounts in the chart of accounts that contain the word deposit it does kind of work but it you will get more stuff here I'm gonna click on the microphone deposit there's a lot more things in QuickBooks that have the word deposit in it and I think right tool will also help you just discover things you didn't know um QuickBooks could do so that's actually really neat and if you don't know what to search you can literally just click on all shortcuts and you're gonna see uh the database of the full short uh shortcut list of every single page available in QuickBooks I again like I said this is an advanced concept if you're just getting started this is like super overwhelming but after you start using QuickBooks for a couple months sometimes a couple years I get it uh you will you're gonna want to go straight to very specific screens that took you know three or four clicks through the regular QuickBooks navigation system to use and you're going to truly appreciate saying you know what I want make deposit I want that as a shortcut or I want transfers I want that as a shortcut or I want receipts I want that as a shortcut and once you click on those little stars and you go back to your favorites there they are all those custom shortcuts you brought them up to your customizable right navigation bar and you have them right there and then same thing with reports you can click on all reports and you can navigate the entire reports database including this really cool hidden reports that are not available to users by default but basically custom reports that we built for our users and you can sort of explore those um as well so like I said if that was too much I get it ignore it imagine right tool doesn't exist hope you can just fast forward straight to the outro but once you trust me once you start using QuickBooks you add right tool into your life and then you're gonna completely fall in love with QuickBooks and you'll have the choice to use the left navigation bar that QuickBooks gave you or the right navigation bar so that's you know it's going to be completely up to you once you add the the additional Chrome extension called the right tool so anyway um I hope you enjoyed this video if you're getting started with QuickBooks Online I hope that at least you know where everything is that you don't feel lost I mean it it's it's overwhelming any new software it's always going to be overwhelming so you know keep calm you'll get there I have educated trained helped consulted whatever you want to call it uh probably over 2 000 people in a one-on-one basis in the last 15 years either in QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks online and let me tell you the Silver Lining everybody makes it everybody figures it out at some point some people take some a month some people take some two years three years at the end of the day um depending on the type of business that you have you might be very involved putting things into QuickBooks day to day or you might just do high level stuff like look at invoices look at reports and you have employees and people you trust doing that doing that piece of the work that's going to be different for for everyone um but most entrepreneurs most small business owners I think they draw tons of value from doing the books themselves so they can be in touch to what's happening with their money like who is paying them who's not paying them what customers pay on time which ones do not where's my money in my bank going you know what what things am I paying what what vendors am I paying what things I forgot that they were on subscription and I need to cancel them so the business owner being in touch with their books looking at their Banks looking at their accounting has really high value at first but then once your business grows you know that's where you get an accountant that's where you get a professional that's where you get a QuickBooks uh Pro advisor bookkeeper a CPA whatever you call it to help you and then you figure it out what that combination looks like what's a magic combination where you as a business owner do what you need to do to move the business forward and only touch the parts of QuickBooks that you really need to and then let other people do that and that collaboration hopefully is a net win for everybody you know you as a business owner get more time back to work on your business and bring clients and the bookkeeper accountant employee whether it's an internal employee I mean an internal bookkeeper or an external bookkeeper whatever it is that person obviously has a job or has income from the services and hopefully everybody everybody wins but one thing to be clear is if you want to know how to use QuickBooks well to the point that you understand everything you're doing understand the consequences of other people touching your QuickBooks understanding what happens if you reconcile the bank what happens with duplicate transactions where you create an invoice and receive a payment but you don't match them so once you understand all that and then start looking at the reports and see there's errors and you clean that up and it gets to the point where your profit and loss and your balance sheet and I'll do another video on financial reports that's another really crucial piece of this whole thing but you look at your reports and you say oh I trust them I know what I'm looking at I trust the information that's there that's when you level up as a business owner and then you know you start making better decisions based on you know a client you lost money on and then you see another client that looks and smells and feels like a client you lost money on you might not take that client you might price them differently or you might you know Do Better Contracting or better scoping or whatever so as a business owner once you start seeing in real time all these things that that affect your business because of a decision you made or because of a decision you didn't make because it could happen either way then you start becoming a better business owner and that's where you start truly feeling the value of accounting and bookkeeping it's very hard when you first set up QuickBooks to just see the value immediately and it's very easy to give up let's ask quick I'll go back to just managing things by hand okay so so stick with it um if you can find the pro to help you alongside of you find it um and then definitely subscribe to my channel and see the other videos I'll put some playlists and some links in the description to hopefully help you with the Journey of managing your own books thank you and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Hector Garcia CPA

Views: 155,821

Keywords: quickbooks, quickbooks online, qbo, quickbooksonline, quick books, quickbook, quickbooks online for dummies, quickbooks 2023, quickbooks online 2023, quickbooks online tutorial, quickbooks basics, Quickbooks online for dummies 2023, quickbooks tutorial, quickbooks tutorial for beginners, quickbooks accounting review, how to use quickbooks, quickbooks course, quickbooks review, how to use quickbooks online, master quickbooks, quickbooks for beginners, quickbooks tutorial 2023

Id: VpU0N3Y6xXs

Length: 59min 59sec (3599 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023