How To Set Up Advanced Settings in QuickBooks Online

Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the QuickBooks Online screen and select Account and Settings under Your Company in the first column:

Navigate to Account and Settings in QuickBooks Online

Then click on Advanced in the left menu to reveal the nine categories of advanced settings:

Settings under the Advanced tab in QuickBooks

Below, you’ll find a brief description of the nine categories under the Advanced tab, along with how each feature is set up.

Click anywhere in the accounting section to view the full range of options and edit the settings. Click Save to record the changes:

Advanced Accounting settings in QuickBooks Online

A. Fiscal and income tax year: Select the fiscal year and tax year for your business. Most businesses use the calendar year, January 1 through December 31, for both their fiscal and tax year. If you’re a new business, consult a tax professional before choosing a tax year other than the calendar year.

B. Accounting method: You also need to set your default accounting method―cash or accrual―but you’ll still be able to select either method when printing reports. This is a powerful feature of QuickBooks since many small businesses use the cash method of accounting for their tax return and the accrual method of accounting for their internal reports.

C. Close the books: Closing the books is an important control feature for any bookkeeping system. It prevents inadvertent changes to prior accounting periods, which will cause an error in your beginning balance sheet for the current period. We recommend turning this feature on by entering the ending date of your prior fiscal year. You can select to either view a warning before making a prior-period change or require a password to make such a change.

In the second section, you need to select how your company is organized for income tax purposes:

Setting up Company type in QuickBooks Online

Choose one of the following types of entities from the drop-down box:

• Sole proprietor: A business with one owner that hasn’t filed with a state to be a corporation is a sole proprietor. Also, limited liability companies (LLCs) with one owner report their business income on Schedule C of their Form 1040. Read our guide on how to complete your Schedule C (Form 104) properly.
• Partnership: A business with two or more owners that hasn’t filed with a state to be a corporation is a partnership. Partnerships report their business income on Form 1065.
• S corporation (S-corp): A corporation or LLC that has made an election with the IRS to be treated as a small business corporation reports their business income on Form 1120S. We prepared a step-by-step guide on how to report your income and expenses using Form 1065.
• C corporation (C-corp): A corporation not electing to be treated as a small business corporation reports its business income on Form 1120.
• Nonprofit organization: Nonprofit organizations are corporations that have received tax-exempt status from the IRS. They report their annual activity on Form 990.
• Limited liability: Choose this option if your business is an LLC, but you’re not sure if you’ll file taxes as a sole proprietor, partnership, or S-corp.

If you don’t know how your business is organized, choose Not sure/Other/None. Click the green Save button to continue to the chart of accounts section.

QuickBooks provides you with a standard chart of accounts list based on the industry you selected when you created your company. We’ll cover how to add and remove accounts in a later tutorial on how to set up the chart of accounts in QuickBooks Online but, for now, there are a few advanced settings you can adjust:

Chart of accounts advanced settings in QuickBooks Online

A. Enable account numbers: Accountants often use account numbers to help organize their chart of accounts. For instance, your revenue accounts might start at 1,000 and your expense accounts may begin at 2,000.

B. Shipping account: You can specify which of your income accounts you would like to use to track your shipping income.

C. Discount account: If you provide a discount to customers for early payments, you can specify which account to use to track the discounts.

D. Tips account: Tips collected are a current liability until you distribute them to your employees. You can specify which account to use to track unpaid tips. Be sure the account you select is a current liability.

E. Markup income account: If you’ve chosen to markup expenses that are billed to customers, as shown in our guide on how to customize expenses in QuickBooks Online, you can choose which income account to use to track the markups.

F. Billable expense income account: You have the option to treat customer expense reimbursements as income or a reduction of expense. If you choose to treat them as income, this is where you specify an income account.

When you’re satisfied with your settings, click the green “Save” button, and then click anywhere in the Categories section.

QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced let you track profit and loss by both classes and locations. For instance, a retailer can examine profit for a particular product (class) sold at a particular store (location). We highly recommend turning on both classes and locations:

Category settings in QuickBooks Online

Track classes: This feature adds a class field to all sales and expense forms to enable the reporting of income and expenses by department or product line. We recommend enabling the warning if a transaction isn’t assigned a class. Finally, we recommend assigning classes to each row of a transaction rather than one class for the entire transaction since some transactions will likely involve multiple classes.

Track locations: This option adds a location field to all sales and expense forms. The definition of what constitutes a location is very flexible. You can change the label on the location field to business, department, division, property, store, or territory.

QuickBooks Online can make your bookkeeping faster by applying certain rules automatically. To turn automation on and off, click anywhere in the Automation section:

Automation settings in QuickBooks Online

We recommend turning on each of the automation options to evaluate whether it’s helpful. You can return to this screen and disable any automation you don’t like. These automations prefill a transaction, but any of the prefilled information can be changed before saving.

A. Prefill forms: This automation will prefill information based on the last form saved for that employee, vendor, or customer.

B. Apply credits automatically: QuickBooks will apply customer credits automatically to a newly created invoice.

C. Invoice unbilled activity automatically: We recommend setting this option to “Remind me to create invoices” vs allowing QuickBooks to generate an invoice automatically. Once you’re proficient in QuickBooks and confident that unbilled activity should always be invoiced, you can change the setting to allow automatic invoices.

D. Apply bill payments automatically: As you’ll learn later, most expenses are first inputted as bills and then paid for with a special check, referred to as a bill payment. This option will apply a bill payment to the oldest outstanding bill automatically.

QuickBooks Plus and Advanced users can track all income and expense items by Project. This is especially helpful for contractors or other businesses that have multiple jobs for the same customer and want to track each job separately.

Projects settings in QuickBooks Online

We highly recommend turning on projects to at least evaluate the feature. By turning this option on, there will be a “Projects” item in the left menu of your dashboard that you can explore.

In the latest version of QuickBooks Online, the time tracking option is no longer listed under the Advanced menu. Instead, it can be found directly under the Accounts & Setting page. Nevertheless, the settings are essentially the same.

It’s important to track employee time in QuickBooks, even if you don’t use QuickBooks to process your payroll. This is especially true if you bill customers according to time spent on a job. By tracking the details of the time spent by your employees, you can analyze expenses and profitability by class, location, customer, or project:

Time tracking settings in QuickBooks Online

A. First day of workweek: You can designate the first day of the week shown on weekly timesheets. This should match the first day of your weekly payroll periods, if applicable. If you don’t have weekly payroll, it’s a personal preference, but most people pick either Sunday or Monday.

B. Show service field: This field lets you specify what service was performed by your employee. We recommend enabling this option, as it provides valuable information to help manage your employees. For more information, check out our tutorial on how to set up product and service lists in QuickBooks Online.

C. Allow time to be billable: This option must be activated to designate a time entry as billable on either a timesheet or single-time activity form. When you check Show billing rate to users entering time, you have the option to show the employee’s billing rate to whoever is inputting the hours.

QuickBooks Online Essentials, Plus, and Advanced can record transactions in multiple currencies. Click anywhere in the Currency section to explore your options:

Currency options in QuickBooks Online

Click on the drop-down box next to Home Currency to select your currency. You cannot change this selection once multicurrency is turned on.

Turn on multicurrency only if you have customers or vendors that you deal with in a currency other than your home currency. Once turned on, multicurrency cannot be turned off, so we recommend that you learn more about multicurrency before making a decision.

If you decide you need the option, click the box next to Multicurrency and the box that confirms you understand that it cannot be turned off. You can check out QuickBooks Online’s guide on how to set up and use multicurrency.

In the latest feature of QuickBooks Online, you can switch Business Network on to connect with other QuickBooks users. When turned on, your business will be searchable in the QuickBooks Business Network. You’ll also be able to search the network for customers and vendors, send invitations to connect, and use the Accounts Payable (A/P) automation feature. When a customer or vendor accepts your invitation, you can send them invoices or receive bills through the network.

When you keep your visibility off, other QuickBooks users won’t be able to find your business on the QuickBooks Business Network, but you can still search the network for your customers and vendors, send invitations, and use the A/P feature.

Switching on Business Network in QuickBooks Online

Click anywhere in the Other Preferences tab to set your final group of advanced options:

Other preferences in QuickBooks Online

A. Date & number format: Select your preferences for how dates and numbers appear by making selections from the drop-down boxes.

B. Customer label: Select how you would like customers referred to on your forms. For instance, professional service firms usually refer to customers as clients and hotels refer to customers as guests.

C. Warn if duplicate numbers: We recommend turning on the warning for whenever a check, bill, or journal entry number has already been used. A good accounting system should have a unique number for each transaction, and these warnings will alert you to potential problems. There may be circumstances where you want to use a number twice, which you’ll be allowed to do after acknowledging the warning.

D. Sign me out: You can choose to be signed out after one, two, or three hours of inactivity. We recommend choosing one hour unless your computer is in a secure area where nobody else has access.