46 Free QuickBooks Tutorials: Learn QuickBooks Fast
Tim is a Certified QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) Pro, QuickBooks ProAdvisor, and CPA with 25 years of experience. He brings his expertise to Fit Small Business’s accounting content.
This article is part of a larger series on Accounting Software.
Welcome to the Fit Small Business free QuickBooks Online tutorials. Whether you are new to QuickBooks Online or could use a better understanding of the program, these tutorials are designed for you. Each QuickBooks tutorial provides an in-depth lesson complete with text, examples, and a comprehensive video demonstration.
While there are many good accounting software options for businesses, we rated QuickBooks Online as the best. These free QuickBooks tutorials will help you harness the power of QuickBooks Online while saving you time and frustration. If you’re ready to purchase the product, Quickbooks Online is offering new customers 50% off for three months or a 30-day free trial.
QuickBooks Online Tutorial: What’s Covered
Our course starts with setting up QuickBooks Online for your business. We cover how to record your income and expenses, how to manage bank and credit card transactions, how to manage payroll, and how to run financial statements. There are 46 tutorials in our QuickBooks Online tutorial, spanning eight lessons. You should plan at least two hours to complete the first lesson, which includes 15 video tutorials.
About half of the tutorials have an average runtime of five minutes or less, and the longest tutorial is slightly less than 14 minutes long. Each lesson has been broken down into bite-sized tutorials. Each QuickBooks tutorial includes a video where we demonstrate the concepts presented in each lesson.
How to Get the Most From Our Free QuickBooks Tutorials
You don’t need to be a certified public accountant (CPA) or even have an accounting degree to use QuickBooks Online successfully. While some basic bookkeeping knowledge would be helpful, it’s not required. In our free QuickBooks course, we will teach you what you need to know to manage your own books.
QuickBooks Online allows you to:
- Organize income and expenses: Having your income and expenses all in one place will make it easy to provide your CPA with the information to file your taxes.
- Give your accountant/tax preparer access to your data: QuickBooks allows you to create a secure user ID and password for anyone you want to give access to your data. You can also control if they can edit transactions or view and run reports.
- Access up-to-date financial reports: QuickBooks allows easy access to financial statements when you need them, such as applying for a business loan or line of credit.
Now that you understand the importance of maintaining your books, here are three tips to get the most out of our free QuickBooks Online tutorials:
- Use QuickBooks every day: You will learn QuickBooks fastest if you use it every day. For the first lesson, we suggest you watch three videos a day so that by the end of day five, you will have completed all 15 videos.
- Follow along in your QuickBooks Online: We suggest you have your QuickBooks file open and mimic what you see in each video tutorial with your own data. If you don’t have QuickBooks Online yet, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
- Start at the beginning: This course was designed for new QuickBooks users, with each topic building on the previous one. Unless you are a seasoned QuickBooks user, I recommend you begin with Lesson 1 and complete the course in the order it is presented.
Our free QuickBooks course consists of eight lessons.
Part 01:Setting Up QuickBooks
In this lesson, you will learn how to set up key areas of QuickBooks like bank and credit card accounts, invoice templates, products and services, and the chart of accounts. By the time you complete this QuickBooks online tutorial, you will be ready to start using QuickBooks to manage all of your income and expenses.
The features and settings that you choose in this lesson will affect every area of QuickBooks. For example, you will set the default payment terms for customer invoices and vendor bills. You will also choose whether to turn on inventory quantity and cost tracking.
The Setting Up QuickBooks lesson includes the following tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How to Set Up Company Information (5:24 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Customize Invoices, Sales Receipts & Estimates (5:40 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 03 How to Set Up Invoices, Sales Receipts & Estimates (5:57 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 04 How to Set Up Products and Services (3:55 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 05 How to Set Up Messages (2:37 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 06 How to Set Up Statements (2:13 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 07 How to Set Up Expenses (5:56 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 08 How to Set Up Advanced Settings (9:31 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 09 How to Import Bank Transactions (12:26 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 10 How to Import Credit Card Transactions (10:21 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 11 How to Set Up Multiple Users (13:01 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 12 How to Set Up the Chart of Accounts (6:36 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 13 How to Set Up the Products and Services List (10:01 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 14 How to Set Up Customers (13:41 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 15 How to Set Up Vendors (12:41 video watch time)
Part 2:Managing Sales and Income
This lesson covers how to record your sales and track your income in QuickBooks Online. There are two types of sales in QuickBooks: credit sales and cash sales. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to keep track of your credit sales by creating and emailing invoices to your customers as well as recording cash sales where no invoice is needed.
You will also learn how to apply payments received to outstanding invoices so that your accounts receivable (A/R) is up to date and income is not counted twice. After this lesson, learn about A/R aging reports, which will help you manage unpaid invoices.
The Managing Sales and Income in QuickBooks lesson includes the following tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How to Create Estimates (Quotes or Bids) (9:26 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Create and Send Invoices (8:00 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 03 How to Receive Payments (5:51 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 04 How to Create & Send Sales Receipts (7:01 video watch time)
Part 3:Managing Bills and Expenses
This lesson covers how to manage your bills and record expenses in QuickBooks. As a small business owner or manager, you know that managing expenses is as important as generating sales. By the end of this QuickBooks lesson, you will be able to keep track of expenses in a couple of ways.
First, you can write and print checks directly from QuickBooks to pay for expenses that require immediate payment. Second, you will be able to manage what you owe to vendors by entering and tracking bills. You will learn to enter the payment of these bills correctly so that the expense is not recorded twice.
The Managing Bills and Expenses in QuickBooks lesson includes the following tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How to Write & Print Checks (5:26 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Enter Bills (6:19 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 03 How to Pay Bills (5:30 video watch time)
Part 4:Managing Banking Transactions
You will be able to manage all of your downloaded banking transactions by the end of this lesson. You will also understand how to enter basic banking transactions manually. Finally, you can use the reconcile tool to ensure the transactions on your bank statement match what has been entered into QuickBooks, resulting in up-to-date financial statements.
If you need a refresher, we walked through how to import your banking transactions into QuickBooks in Lesson 1, Tutorial 9. The Managing Banking Transactions in QuickBooks lesson includes the following tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How to Enter Banking Transactions Manually (7:17 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Manage Downloaded Banking Transactions (9:47 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 03 How to Record Bank Deposits (4:22 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 04 How to Transfer Funds Between Bank Accounts (3:51 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 05 How to Handle Bounced Checks From Customers (6:57 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 06 How to Process Bank Reconciliation (15:31 video watch time)
Part 5:Managing Business Credit Card Transactions
Bookkeeping is much easier when cash transactions are kept to a minimum. One way to limit cash transactions is to use a credit card. This lesson will teach you to download and track your credit card purchases in QuickBooks and reconcile them with your credit card statement to ensure that they match.
The Managing Business Credit Card Transactions in QuickBooks lesson includes the following tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How to Enter Business Credit Card Transactions Manually (8:42 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Manage Downloaded Business Credit Card Transactions (14:04 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 03 How to Enter a Credit Card Refund (4:00 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 04 How to Reconcile Business Credit Card Accounts (14:37 video watch time)
Part 6:Managing Credit Card Sales
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to manage credit card sales with either a QuickBooks Payments account integrated with QuickBooks or a third-party credit card processor. You should consider accepting credit card payments as a convenience for your customers and to increase the speed that you collect outstanding invoices.
The Managing Credit Card Sales in QuickBooks lesson includes the following tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How to Manage Credit Card Sales With QuickBooks Payments (12:59 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Manage Credit Card Sales With a Third-party Credit Card Processor (10:39 video watch time)
Part 7:Set Up and Manage Payroll
By using QuickBooks Payroll, all your wages, salaries, and payroll taxes will be included automatically in your financial statements. After this lesson, you’ll be able to set up employees in QuickBooks, enter and run payroll, pay employees by direct deposit or check, and reconcile your payroll taxes.
The Set Up and Manage Payroll lesson includes the following seven tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How Set Up and Run Payroll (22:29 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Manage Payroll Tax (7:41 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 03 How to Add Historical Payroll Data (22:28 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 04 How to Set Up Automatic Deposits
TUTORIAL 05 How to Print Payroll Checks (3:49 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 06 How to Run Payroll Reports (3:41 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 07 How to Reconcile Payroll Liabilities
Part 8:Reporting in QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks will generate important reports that will provide you, your accountant, and your banker important insights into the financial health of your business. This QuickBooks tutorial will teach you the importance of and how to print the profit and loss report, balance sheet report, statement of cash flows, and A/R and accounts payable (A/P) aging reports.
One of the primary purposes of using bookkeeping software like QuickBooks Online is to determine the health of your business at any given point in time. Having the ability to produce solid, accurate financial statements can benefit you in the following ways:
- You might gain potential investors
- You might secure a business loan or line of credit
- You can make better business decisions, such as whether you should sell a new product or service or drop one that is not doing so well
The Reporting in QuickBooks lesson includes the following tutorials:
TUTORIAL 01 How to Run a Profit and Loss Statement (10:57 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 02 How to Run a Balance Sheet Report (8:26 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 03 How to Run a Statement of Cash Flows (7:27 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 04 How to Run an A/R Aging Report (8:05 video watch time)
TUTORIAL 05 How to Run an A/P Aging Report (6:29 video watch time)
Bottom Line
Our QuickBooks Online tutorial will teach you the basics you need to know to start keeping the books for your small company or employer. Don’t be intimidated by the size of the tutorial―take one lesson or tutorial at a time. Get started today.
