2020 QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor Certification: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know (& How to Pass!)

hi i'm marty remmers with crystal clear cash flow and every single day i get questions about the quickbooks online pro advisor certification test every single day so i'm getting a little overwhelmed with having to respond to all these messages so i decided to put together this video it's going to be everything you ever needed to know about the quickbooks online pro advisor certification test i have no idea how long this video is going to be because i'm going to cover a lot of stuff so i'm going to put down in the comments below a table of contents so you'll be able to just skip to the time stamp for the specific question that you had and um hopefully i will knock out everything if you have any additional questions that i don't cover here of course comment below and uh or reach out to me and i don't know if if there are a bunch that i didn't cover then i will consider remaking another video but i think that i have a pretty good grasp on what everyone is asking um since i have been inundated with all these questions so um so i'm gonna hop over to a presentation slideshow format i don't know how to do the little thing that the gurus do with the picture down in the corner like everyone's doing that i don't know how to do it so it'll just be a static picture of me but i wanted to let you know that i'm a real person and i'm really gonna answer all these questions for you and we'll just go from there so let's hop over to the slideshow okay so as i mentioned my name is margie remembers my company is crystal clear cash flow just a little bit about me i am a lean bookkeeper quickbooks online pro advisor and daily money manager my website is crystalclearcashflow.com i am also the creator of the fast and easy way to quickbooks online pro advisor certification both the basic and advanced courses you can find more about those at crystalclearcashflow.com forward slash qbo and as i mentioned people ask me every single day a bunch of questions about the quickbooks online pro advisor certification so the number one question people ask me is is pro advisor certification worth it and of course the answer is absolutely positively yes and here's why now when i was first considering becoming a bookkeeper i reached out to another bookkeeper that i knew and she gave me a ton of advice and one of the things she said to me is that i absolutely had to get my quickbooks online proadvisor certification and she said she said she had not ever had one single client ask her if she was certified she said nobody it's not that kind of a certification she said but the thing is is that when you get your certification it forces you to learn all of the ins and outs of quickbooks online so you're going to learn all of the things and little tricks and different features that you wouldn't otherwise if you were just kind of learning it on your own and then once you have that certification of course into it is going to keep feeding you the um all of the new stuff you do have to recertify every year and they're going to tell you what's new that's going on and so you're always going to be in the loop if you have that pro advisor certification the second thing is is that it gives you bragging rights like once you have that certification you can put that everywhere so you can put it in your email signature you can put it on your business card you can put it on your website everyone knows what quickbooks online is it is the number one accounting software in the world and it has been around for ages and when you introduce yourself and you say that you are a quickbooks online pro advisor people know what that means they will remember it and they will give you referrals and they will just keep it in their brains that that's what you do and they'll reach out to you if you need help the third thing is that it allows you to be listed in the pro advisor website so um once you get that basic first level certification you can create a profile and here is my profile this is what it looks like it's the intuits find a pro advisor or find an accountant or um they have a different bunch of different domains to help people find you um and then you can put all your information about here and it will actually collect leads for you so you this could be your only website if you are just starting out in your business this could be your only website if you wanted to and you just purchase the domain to have it point here now this is the string the url for my pro advisor profile and that's super long but i did create a little quick link it's super easy to do don't ask me to do it ask your web person to do it but it's super easy to just do a redirect and it takes people directly there so i have that little quick link but i could if i wanted to just set up www.chris and then when people went there it went directly to my pro advisor website i mean it's got everything that you need on there including a way to collect reviews so um so and this is super valuable too so if you scroll down after the you clicked the reviews or scroll down on the page you would have all the reviews from the different people the stars and the uses and the services and you know and all that stuff it's just so valuable so impactful when people see that um and then the last reason why it's so worth it is that intuit will market your business for you now i'm not saying that you can rely solely on your pro advisor page but it's a huge aspect of um of marketing your business and intuit does it so intuit spends tons of money making sure and paying for google ads and everything making sure that they're find a pro advisor or find an accountant or whatever ranks high on searches and then people go to that website they look for somebody local or they look for somebody that does um specific things and um and intuit pays for that they pay to market your business for you as long as you are listed there then you'll show up and people will find you without you having to do anything so yes yes yes absolutely the pro advisor certification is worth it now the second question that people ask me is how do i sign up for my free quickbooks online accountant account now people that are talking to me already know that that exists if you don't then i'll just tell you that um that quickbooks are intuit provides a free account for accounting professionals and this accountant account is kind of special not only is it special because it's free but it's also special because it allows you to connect to other quickbooks online subscriptions so you could have multiple you'll be able to connect to multiple clients under your one accountant account and it's totally free so how do you find it well it takes it's a long website to get there so again i created a little quick link for you go to crystalclearcashflow.com forward slash free qboa and when you see that qboa that means quickbooks online accountant so um so just head over there and it'll take you to this page if you look up at the url you see it's like a long thing who can remember that um but anyway it goes to this page and then you just sign up for free they don't ask you for background checks or any anything to like prove that you're actually a business or anything you're just gonna put in your business name and your contact information and then you're gonna good to go you're gonna have this free accounting uh software that you can then use for yourself and your clients all right so the third question people ask me is how do i access the free pro advisor training so you might not know this but um but intuit provides all this training for quickbooks online and and you know it's really smart for them to do that right it's because they want they want pro advisors out there talking to people about their software they want the pro advisors to be as educated as possible so they put together this free training you have to know how to get to it um once you log in you're going to go on the left-hand side we call that the left nav bar and then you're going to select pro advisor you're going to select training and then it's going to take you to this page which is going to list a ton of different online courses that you can take the first one that's theirs will be whatever they're promoting at the moment and so on in this case for this one it is that introduction to quickbooks online for accountants it's already automatically open expanded you could go through this training it's probably valuable to like kind of get your feet wet but this is not the certification course so to get to the certification course you want to close that little arrow and then you'll see all of them listed here and and there's more that you can't see on the screen so there's the quickbooks online certification that's the basic level and then that there's the quickbooks online advanced certification so you're just going to click that little down arrow and that will open up the the training and so those are all of the different sections and what we're seeing here is what's called the self-paced training so they have these different modules and you just go through them and learn the information now they do into it does also provide free webinars so if you clicked webinar um it would take you to something like this depending on what is being offered right now they offer them about once a month once you know every other month something like that they're live um and if you learn by hearing like i do um then they're valuable because you kind of get that information in your ear like while you're watching the slideshow but one thing that you need to know is even though it's live you can't stop and ask questions so there really is no they have a chat window but but if it doesn't really it doesn't really work you might as well be watching the recorded version and there are recorded versions too so you can you can take that but for our purposes today we're going to talk about the self-paced training um so you'll notice that there are eight different sections in the training that's going to be important in a little bit um and you'll notice that for each section it says how long that quickbooks export into it expects that it's going to take you to get through that section so section one is one hour if you total all of those up then for the basic what they call the core level course it's according to them at seven and a half hours the advanced level is ten sections and they say that's eight and a half hours um my personal experience is that you need to double that like like seven and a half hours i would say it's really more like 15 hours and um the advanced it's really more like 17 hours and maybe even longer than that i mean for the advanced i took the the webinar um because i i like to learn through hearing and that was three full days of training i was so overloaded oh my gosh it was so much information and that was three full days and then um i still like had to go through the training and over and again so seven and a half hours eight and a half hours like that's really not even close to how long it's going to take you double that or more i mean i think i probably spent about six weeks really diving into the advanced information and um and getting through that that's how long it took so all right so the next question is how do i access the sample company so this is something that's actually really cool that and i'm just so grateful that into intuit provides this uh is that they have a company out there that is just for it's like a sandbox it's for you to play in and you can go in and you can learn different features and test different things out it's super super super helpful so um the way you get there is once you log into your account you're gonna click this little gear icon up in the upper right hand corner and you're gonna select sample company and once you do that um you'll get this little warning now you can cannot be in the sample company and in your quickbooks online accountant account at the same time now this is going to be important when it comes to taking the test because you can't be taking the test and then open up the sample company because you'll lose your test so what you can do is if you can open the sample company in a different browser so for example i took the test in google chrome which is what they actually recommend and and then i had in safari i had the sample company open so that i could look stuff up there um so anyway so you click continue and then it takes you to craig's design and landscaping services you will become very very familiar with this pretend company because that is where they have all of this uh fake sample information it's really great to play around in here just note that anything you change um once you log out it'll reset so everything will be gone so if you are working on an exercise that takes a while make sure that you stay logged in that you do all of that at one time the next question is where do i find or take the test so you do that inside the training course so here we are inside that uh basic training and then you'll notice that there's a little button there that says take exam you'll also see that if it's collapsed then you'll see it right there take exam notice here that the advanced certification is grayed out and there's a lock on it that's because you have to get your basic or core level certification before you can take the advanced test now once you click on the exam button then you'll see something like this now you'll notice that the test is divided into sections and each section exactly correlates to the training module which we saw in the training section so there is a test for each section and they do not overlap so you can in fact it's highly recommended that you learn one section and then take the test for that section learn another section and then take the test for that section a lot of people try and go through all of the training and they're just overloaded they don't remember anything then they go to take the test and they're like i don't remember anything so it's much much easier if you just do a section and then take the test for that section notice here that each section has a different number of questions so in this case there's ten questions for section one but if you look down at section three there's only nine questions and it varies you want to calculate about two to three minutes per question so um so the first section should take you about 20 to 30 minutes and that's actually how intuit came up with this about 25 i'm pretty sure is that they did two to three minutes and then they took the average of that so um so yeah so that's how long you need to set aside to take the each section of the test next question and i kind of already answered this is do i have to take the entire test in one sitting the answer is absolutely not there are some caveats though so um while you don't have to take the entire test in one sitting you do have to take each section in one sitting so you need to complete a section and submit it and then you can go off and you know do whatever you want after you've submitted it but if you leave in the middle or if you close out in the middle of one section then you will lose that and then when you go back to take it again the questions will be different because there's a question bank and it's somewhat random not entirely random but you know somewhat random it'll pick which questions so um so make sure you take and submit one full section before you go and do anything else and then once you submit that section you can't edit that section anymore so so click submit after you're absolutely sure that those are the right answers all right so the next question that people ask me is is the test timed um and the answer to that is no it is not timed however your login will time out so the test itself you can take as long as you want as long as you're in it as long as you're clicking around um but your login will time out so you don't want to like go to the bathroom in the middle or take a nap or whatever now you can um and it's highly recommended that you increase the amount of time before you get time down i'm going to show you how to do that you simply log in you go to the gear menu again oh and i forgot to mention all of these things that i'm giving you instructions for um i put together a document so that you could have the instructions and you don't have to just watch the video again and i'm going to link that uh below so you'll have that a link to that document all the other links that um i've mentioned in this video i'll put in the description and then the table of contents too that i mentioned so i guess it's going to be kind of a long description but anyway so you click the gear icon and then over here where it says company settings you're going to click that you're going to go to the advanced tab and then you'll click the pencil icon here and you'll notice what we're changing here is something called sign me out if inactive for and it's d the default is one hour but once you click the the pencil icon you can then change it to up to three hours once you've done that you click save and then you click done and then you can go on your merry way so the next question i get is when do i get my results and um a related question is do i get results for each section and this is kind of an uncomfortable topic to talk about it's not really very fun because the answer is sometimes sometimes you get results for each section sometimes you don't sometimes it's instant sometimes it takes a while so i wish that i had a better answer i wish i had a better answer for that um i'll just show you um a couple of things um here in the certification exam you'll notice that there is a section up here that says zero of eight sections past uh for some of my students when they pass a section it will update that number so then you'll see um that you pat that they they'll see that and go yeah i passed that section other people they it doesn't update and they don't they don't see it when i took the exam myself it said for section three i got this little trophy it says section past woohoo and i thought well does that mean i didn't pass sections one and two like why did i get a trophy for section three and not one and two and the answer is it's just quirky i i don't i don't know i think they're trying to tell you per section but then they haven't rolled it out for everybody so i i don't know i mean i had one student who actually received the message that she had not passed a section and then when she submitted the whole thing it said she had passed that section so i i would not rely on those section results at all like no at least not until intuit gets a little bit more stable with their quickbooks online certification test for right now you just need to wait really until you get your official results and those will come instantly once you have submitted the entire exam so you're going to submit each section then once you are finished with each section there'll be a button to to submit the entire exam and the moment you do that you will know whether you passed or whether you failed any individual sections if there were any sections that you did not pass and pass by the way means 80 percent you have to have gotten an 80 or higher on the section which means for i i showed you earlier that each section has a different number of questions so that means that for each section you can get some different ones wrong right so if if your section has 10 questions you can get two wrong and still be okay um if you your section only has six questions then you only can get one wrong and still have that eighty percent so anyways you have to have at least eighty percent for each section to pass and if you don't pass a particular section they will tell you that you didn't pass that section and they will tell you what concepts you need to work on but they will not tell you exactly which question you missed which can be frustrating when you then want to retake the test because you don't know so i'm sorry that's just kind of frustrating but that's the way it is all right the last question is if i fail do i have to retake the whole thing and the answer is luckily no no um if you fail you only have to retake the sections that you didn't pass now it used to be well let me back up a little bit and say that if you do not pass after three tries you do get locked out for 60 days so you cannot take the test again for 60 days now it used to be that if you failed and got locked out then when you came back after those 60 days you had to retake the whole thing but people are telling me now that that's no longer the case that even after the 60 days you only have to retake the ones that you uh that you didn't pass all right so um yep you only have to take the retake the sections that you missed all right a couple of additional tips for taking your quickbooks online pro advisor exam um as we've already talked about and this is super important so hopefully i've said it enough times take one study one section and then take the test for that section don't try and study the whole thing and then try and take the whole test because that will just be too overwhelming and it will drive you crazy um the test is open books so i mentioned um previously that you can have that sample company open as long as it's in a different browser so it is open book so it's you're welcome to look stuff up and um you can have another window to keep quickbooks online open so you can look up stuff there and then have you know your test in one window and then if you want the sample company open make sure that's a completely different browser to be able to look stuff up for that the test is a multiple choice so if you see a round button that means there's only one answer if you have a check box that means there are multiple answers so sometimes they'll say um which two options are available when blah blah blah or they'll say um uh name name three features of blah blah blah okay so um so in that case you'll check two or three you know whatever the number is every so often there is a question that will not specify how many it'll just say check all that apply or select all that apply and that's kind of annoying because you don't know how many it's expecting but however here's a little trick is that the next button will appear when you have checked the correct number of items so if you're not sure how many you need to check just check them until the next button becomes active and then you will know now in the advanced test there are sometimes you have to do math sorry folks sometimes you have to do math and so it's just a short answer box that you put in but most of the time it's just a round button or a check check box for multiple choice so i want to go back to this first question which is is pro advisor certification worth it you know i've gone through a bunch of things hopefully i um in the beginning i talked about how great the certification is but sometimes it can be a hassle and the training is really long and it can be confusing and i find that when people ask me this question is pro advisor certification worth it what they're really asking is is it worth my time and effort to go through intuits training because i already mentioned that for the basic course that's like 15 hours of your life um and and that's that's being conservative i mean if if you're going from nothing if you've never learned the software seen the software before um and you're going through that or a lot of people are coming from desktop and quickbooks online version is completely different so it's in a way it's almost like learning new software um so if you're going through that it's very it's time consuming and it can be very confusing and frankly the training does not adequately prepare you for the test um and it it doesn't do that because sometimes the questions on the test are very tricky and they use words or terms that that they didn't describe in the training so unless you especially in the advanced version but this is also true in the in the basic version is that if you have never taken an accounting class there are just some terms like debits and credits that maybe uh that you don't actually know what those mean and so it can be going through the intuits training can be very uh frustrating and painful and so that's why people ask me this question like should i even do this because it's just so painful right now and um and it's because of that that i created my fast and easy way to quickbooks online pro advisor certification courses um i come from a background of software training and development for proprietary software and so when i was going through the training myself i just thought oh my gosh i could do this so much better i could make it so much faster and easier and just cut to the chase and explain things in a way that makes sense to people and i just was hearing so much pain and frustration from other bookkeepers about this that i finally decided to just do it and create the course and so um let me just tell you a little bit about it it like i said it's called fast and easy it's fast so um the reason it's fast is because we cut out the fluff we just teach you exactly what you need to know to pass the test the basic course instead of taking 15 hours you can have your certification in four hours the advanced course instead of taking 17 hours is going to be five or six hours i'm actually at the time of recording this i'm still that's still in development but that's what it's looking like it is it's more intensive than the basic i mean that's why it's called advanced um so but yeah that's going to be about five or six hours which is still a heck of a lot better i mean really i think i took six weeks of full-time studying and trying to get through it so if you could get your certification your advance certification in six hours that would be pretty awesome for you um so it's fast and it's easy so i have put together little videos just like this video um they each last about 30 to in the advanced course they're 40 minutes in the basic course there's a 10 minute one so a little video that goes over the material you need for that section plus for every section there are quick notes which is basically a summary of the information that you learned so that when you're taking your test remember it's open book when you're taking your test you can go back and remind yourself of the different things quickly and easily and then many of the sections have exercises that go along with them and this is something that's really lacking from the intuit training is that they give you a bunch of information but they don't provide exercises for you to go in into the sample company and actually learn how to do the thing so um so there's exercises included with my course as well to help you with that um the other thing is that my course makes the information crystal clear i am all about clarity that's why i named my company crystal clear cash flow is because i don't like things that are muddy i don't like things that are confusing i want things to be crystal clear and so in my course i made sure that i have graphics and animations and simple explanations that teach you the different pieces of information that you need to be able to pass the test and i do it using terms that are exactly the way that you need to know those terms for the test and and frankly that is really lacking from the intuit training and i get so many people complain to me about it they're like what like this turn this term like was never in the training how am i supposed to know that so um so my course you know clears that up and then the last thing is my course is absolutely guaranteed i mentioned that if you take the quickbooks online certification test on your own and fail three times then into it's going to prevent you from taking that test again for 60 days and i know for me like that was such a frustrating idea because what good is it for me to wait 60 days if i still don't know the information it's not like i'm magically going to know the information 60 days later so that was super frustrating and for my course you get a guaranteed pass and the way that we do that is if you don't pass the test the first time you take it then you can get personalized help in your retake and um this is huge um in fact wendy here who i was helping her take the with a retake she said your course is so well done and this personal help at the end is super valuable um she had one section that she hadn't passed it's super tricky and so we just hopped on the messenger and i helped her with her retake and she immediately got her certification so if you don't pass it the first time you can get personalized help in your retake and if you don't pass the test after your third try we're gonna completely give you your money back but you know what i have never had to do that because everyone passes their test everyone gets their certification and we have a big party every day i just i i can't tell you how thrilling it is for me every time i get these messages that people have um taken their test gotten their certification and are able to like move on with their lives and their business so um because i feel like so many people just are uh they're frustrated they're hitting their head against the wall and they're they're not able to move forward in building their business because they're just so stuck on this and so it's just so thrilling for me to um to hear those those success stories anyway so my courses quickbooks online certified pro advisor both basic and advanced money back guarantee um that you will pass those in four to six hours and you can find out more at crystalclearcashflow.com forward slash qbo okay so that's it i hope that i was able to answer every single question that you have and everything that you need to know about the quickbooks online pro advisor certification test if i missed anything comment below send me a message and i will of course address that for you and if you want more information about my courses that'll help you pass the certification test fast and easy the information is in the link below about that too so that's it um i would wish you good luck but you don't need it because you got this i'll see you later you

Channel: Fast & Easy QBO ProAdvisor Certification

Views: 24,199

Keywords: QuickBooks Online, QBO, QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor, QBO ProAdvisor, How to pass the ProAdvisor test, How to pass the QBO ProAdvisor test, How to pass the QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor test, how to pass the quickbooks online proadvisor exam, QuickBooks Online Certification, quickbooks online proadvisor certification exam, QBO Certification, QBO Certification exam, bookkeeping, qbo proadvisor certification, qbo proadvisor training, how to pass the qbo exam

Id: 9fKpKIpO2Qs

Length: 36min 55sec (2215 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020