59 Free QuickBooks Tutorials: Learn QuickBooks Fast (+Video)

hi this is Tim Yoder with fit small business I've been a CPA for 26 years and today I want to teach you how to use QuickBooks Online so today's lesson is about a one hour overview of how to use the product if you're familiar with bookkeeping software this should probably be enough to introduce you to QuickBooks online so that you can get in and kind of learn how to use it on your own it's a very user-friendly software if after this video you need more details we have fit small business has 46 free QuickBooks Online tutorials each of them have a video as well as in-depth screenshots to help you through all of the major processes to find those just simply Google fit small business free QuickBooks Online tutorials and also also throw a link below this video in YouTube so that you can find that page so let's start with just the basic navigation around QuickBooks Online I'll share my Quickbooks online screen with you okay so this is our we're in payroll right now the first place we want to be able to look is in our dashboard okay so the dashboard is going to give you some basic information about your company there's really three main areas we want to learn to navigate to the first is this company this company settings in the cogwheel up here if you click on this this is where you're going to make all of kind of your permanent changes to your company so any company settings will be here chart of accounts will be here product lists that you have in inventory will be here things that don't really deal with any particular customer or vendor or transaction so more kind of the permanent items for your company information will be up in this cogwheel the second area that's important to navigate to is this new button this is where you can go to initiate any new transactions now in QuickBooks Online you'll find there are always several different ways to get to the same screen however I'm showing you kind of the basic way that I like to navigate as you get experience you may find that you like to do something else but I like to initiate all my new transactions from this new button and so here we have all these transactions listed by type so here are all the transactions um that deal with customers here's all the transactions that deal with vendors employees and then some other transactions so this new button you wouldn't go here if you want to want to enter a new type of inventory right that's a permanent item that would be in the cogwell this would be new transactions so perhaps the purchase of an inventory item that's a transaction for that you would go to this new button and the third place we need to be familiar with is this left menu bar in QuickBooks online so this is where I like to say this is where you go to manage your company so if you want to look at outstanding invoices we can go to sales and we can go to the overview this is what I like to call our sales Center so this gives us an overview gives us all sales it gives us our customer list um notice within customer list actually within all of these is going to give us the two estimates we've had we have some unbilled activity we have six invoices that are overdue and we have 13 open pledges so most companies will not be dealing with pledges that's something that would be more for non-profits but this is what I like to call our sell Center or our customer center and it shows us all of our sales and customer activity now notice you can actually initiate a new transaction from this screen here like I said there's multiple places to initiate all of your various transactions okay so um that's our Customer Center what I would like to call our vendor Center is going to be down here um in our expenditures so if we go to vendors this is where we can monitor kind of all of our vendors so we have purchase orders we have bills that are overdue and we have bills that have been paid again we can come up here and we can create a new vendor or we could import vendors from a spreadsheet good so those are kind of your major areas probably one other area we can talk about is reports if you go down here here is where we'll talk about this in more detail a little bit later today but this is where you can go to reports to print out your most common reports okay so that's kind of a basic navigation of QuickBooks Online you got your cogwheel for your permanent items you've got your new button for your new transactions and then you've got your left menu bar to kind of find information out about outstanding bills outstanding customer invoices or really any of the other things that go along with managing your company great so let's go into a little bit more detail on setting up your company so we're going to do this from the uh cogwheel right because this is setting up the company this is kind of all the permanent information so let's go up to our Cog wheel and let's first look at the basic information and options so we're going to go under your company here to account and settings and this first part under company this is where you're going to enter your very basic information so you can see I have my tax form set up as a non-profit organization that's why it was giving me the option to collect pledges but let's go ahead and let's change it to a corporation foreign okay so here's where we set up all our basic information notice you can actually upload an invoice and not an invoice sorry upload a logo right here and that'll make that logo available um to put on various forms like invoices um the next important tab here would be our sales Tab and this is really important so if you want to set up your invoices you're going to go to this customize look and fill button um and we do have some we'll talk about this a little bit more later but we also have a couple of videos in our in our more expanded version of the tutorial um that deal with uh customizing your invoices so you can change colors you can change layouts you can change what appears on it I'm very very flexible you can even import a PDF of an invoice template you you design outside of QuickBooks Online and the only warning I would give you about that is if you import a PDF of an invoice once it's imported you can't do any more customization of that within QuickBooks okay sales form content this stuff is very important um so if you turn something off here it won't appear on your input screen when you're creating a sales form so that would be like a sales order sales invoice sales receipt okay so once you if you turn something off here it won't appear on that screen so if you're ever trying to learn how to do something and the tutorial you're watching that screen doesn't match the screen you have on your QuickBooks it's probably because you have something turned off here you need to turn it on so that it appears on your input screen so that you can use that field okay great so that's your sales settings very important um let's talk about our chart of accounts so let's uh click out of here and again go up to our cogwheel and go to our chart of accounts okay so here's your chart of accounts um you can create a new account by clicking new up here okay you need to give it an account type Etc um you can delete accounts here however if you have used the account before it won't allow you to delete the account because if it did those transactions would be deleted and then your books would be out of balance so once an account is used you can never delete it however you can come here and make it inactive and what that does is uh make it so that you can't post any new transactions to that account okay and so that is how we deal with our chart of accounts you need to be able to set up your customers and vendors so this is these are something that are not just kind of a permanent item to your company but deal with customers and vendors so it's not going to be in our cogwheel it's going to be over here in R for customers it'll be what I call the customer center which is our customers right here under sales and so here's where we can create a new customer okay give it all of its information addresses all of this stuff okay that's where we can create our new customer vendors is very similar let's go to expenses under expenses we have vendors this is what I like to call our vendor Center if you're familiar with QuickBooks desktop products that's kind of where I get the terms customer center and vendor center from I don't think they technically call it that in QuickBooks online but here we have again our vendor Center and we can create a new Vendor by clicking here or if we want to import a bunch of vendors at one time we can go down here to import vendor and that's how we create a new vendor so now let's talk about customizing our invoices a little more so again we're going to go to the cogwheel account and settings and then here go to our sales settings now part of customizing your invoice is going to be making sure you have the right sales form content and the product and services uh set up properly because that's going to determine what fields are available on your invoices you want to make sure you get that set up properly and then by going to the customize look and feel button we can actually customize colors layouts things like that within our invoice and so here you can see some of these invoices have been uploaded so you can actually uh create invoices in a PDF file QuickBooks Online will help you map them to the fields within QuickBooks and then you can upload them now the only problem with that is once you do that you can no longer customize them within QuickBooks they're simply a PDF so let's open one of the templates that were not imported so this template here was created purely within QuickBooks online and we can see the template here now the template the dimensions are off a little bit on this because of this the my monitor but when you print it it will print on a normal eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper so um you can do all sorts of fun stuff you can change your fonts you can change your layout you can Splash on some color you can customize what the emails say that go with the invoice so if you're really interested you'll look at this play around with it it's pretty user friendly however if you have some more questions we do have those 46 free online tutorials and those do cover uh in a lot more detail how to create these invoice templates now the final thing I want to talk about today for our customizing the company is setting up our products and services and this is very very important for any company that sells inventory so we're going to go up here to our cogwheel and under our lists we have products and services now any inventory items you have it is incredibly important that you set them up as an item within QuickBooks so let's do that so here I'm going to come new and I'm going to set up an inventory item okay I'm going to give it a name if I want to I can give it a SKU number so let's just call it a widget okay it's not a sub product so if I have multiple widgets and I want to be able to see them all grouped together I can make it a sub product we can give an initial quantity on hand once you're up and running so when you first set up your QuickBooks you may have to enter a quantity on hand once you're up and running and all of a sudden you decide you're going to to start purchasing a different type of inventory or quantity on hand it is required but it would just be zero okay so you can go through here fill out this information um the reason it's so important that you properly classify inventory items as inventory is it QuickBooks Online will calculate your cost of goods sold and your ending inventory a lot of your less expensive software will not do that so it takes the amount you spend purchasing inventory and it automatically separates that into what is the cost of the goods that we've sold which gets deducted from our income and what is the cost of the inventory that's still sitting in our store which goes on our balance sheet so that directly affects the amount of your net income and so QuickBooks Online will automatically do that calculation for you using what's known as the first in first out inventory method or fifo but in order for QuickBooks to do that you can't just um make purchases and assign them directly to a chart of account it has to go through an inventory item very very important so make sure you set up each one of your inventory items here in the inventory list okay again I cannot stress the importance of that now if you have products and services I highly recommend setting them up they're not as important as inventory but if you have a product or service me that you sell you can come in here and set it up as a service item if you sell the product or service to your customers you can set up a sales price if you purchase this service from say a subcontractor you could click here and you could put the amount that you generally pay for it okay and one last thing I want to point out before we leave the products and services discussion is that these products and services whether it's inventory or whether it's a uh service they get mapped to your chart of accounts so when you go in and you enter an invoice later that invoice is not going to be you're not going to choose an account from your chart of accounts from the invoice you're going to choose an item that item is then mapped to your chart of accounts this is actually really really nice because that means you can really minimize your chart of accounts so you may only need one sales account and then if you're interested in what it is exactly that you're selling you can go look at reports by item type so here if we set up a service item here whatever that might be we can map it to this income account called Revenue if we want to track the sales of inventory and the sales of services separately we can without creating more than one revenue account we simply create the revenue account and we map each of those product or service items to that revenue account so now when we create an invoice we're not going to select Revenue as the account we're just going to select the service item um on the invoice so you'll see when we get the invoices you have a choice you can either charge an invoice directly to a chart of account or you can choose it to an item and then the item will map it to the account and again the big benefit of this is that you have all sorts of reports available by item so that you can get more detail than if you were to not use items and map everything directly to account so for this this service we have both a revenue account so when we sell this service to our customers down here since we're purchasing this from a subcontractor we also have an expense account we can choose so whenever we use this service item in a purchase transaction it will take it to our we don't want purchases since this is a service let's instead put it to something like contract labor right so we purchased a service from a subcontractor anytime we purchase it the expense will go to our contract labor account anytime we sell it the revenue will go to this revenue account and then if you want to know how much profit did I make on this service you can print reports by that service item rather than trying to pick that up out of your income statement or out of your out of your trial balance okay so this keeps your chart of accounts very simplified you don't need a separate purchases and revenue account for each item you want to track separately okay so enough about products and services something to learn more about if you're interested it's a really powerful part of QuickBooks Online so now let's talk about working with customers let's talk about sending invoices as well as printing sales receipts using the UN and using the undeposited funds account so let me share my Quickbooks online with you so here we're at our dashboard to send a new invoice let's go to our new button right that's where we like to initiate our new transactions and go to invoice let's choose a customer um let's say Bridget O'Brien so QuickBooks online populates all the necessary information here we'll go down here provide a service date and we can just use today's date and then let's select the product or service that we provided okay and that's going to be forty two dollars if we want to look at what our invoice is going to look like we can go to print or preview and this will bring us up a preview of what our invoice to Bridget O'Brien looks like okay so if we want to print it and mail it we can print it from here let's close this if we wanted to email it we could select save and send and that would email Bridget a copy of this invoice for our purposes let's just save and close the invoice screen now when Bridget pays us we need to record the receipt of that check against the invoice we just created so one way to do it would be again to go to the new button and give and go to the receive payment transaction we could select the customer and select exactly which invoice or invoices we received payment for but let's do it a little bit differently this time as I said before there's a lot of different ways to get to the same screen in QuickBooks let's go through the customer center so let's go to sales and customers and let's find Bridget's details so here's Bridget click on her name and this gives us the details of all of our transactions with her okay so here we can see the invoice for forty two dollars okay so if we want to receive payment on this invoice we can just click the receive payment button right here so let's hit receive payment this is going to bring up a list of all of the outstanding invoices we have with Bridget this is the only invoice we have so we're going to make sure it's selected and we're going to collect 42 dollars before we do that let's select the payment method so she's going to pay us with a check and now deposit it so we have a couple of choices here if we want to we can actually show this as a deposit made directly to the checking account okay but now if we do that it's going to show a forty two dollar deposit in our check register so we need to think about what's going to physically happen with this check so we're going to take this 42 dollar check if we're going to take it and deposit it by itself into our checking account then we can show this deposit going directly to the checking account however if we're going to combine this check with a bunch of bunch of other checks onto a single check in onto a single deposit slip and make a big bulk deposit of numerous checks then remember our bank statement is going to show the total amount of the deposit it's not going to have any breakdown by checks and so if we were to make this deposit in our books directly to checking account then that's not going to match the deposit total shown on our bank statement so what we want to do is make sure we group checks together into a single deposit that then will match our deposit that's shown on our bank statement that's going to make reconciling our checking account much much easier QuickBooks Online is a little confusing to learn but once you get the hang of it this undeposited funds account is really really slick so we're going to collect additional checks today so I don't want to show this as this single check being deposited I want to hold this check in our undeposited fund so think of this undeposited funds account as like your desk drawer that you're sticking all the today's checks in or maybe it's a paper clip uh you're paper clipping all the checks together for a deposit at the end of the day so that's what our undeposited funds account is it's this holding account for checks until we actually group them together and make the deposit okay so here we go we've received payment now as soon as we do this this is going to offset that invoice right so the invoice has now been paid so even though we haven't put the check into the checking account yet we have received the check and so the invoice has been offset and shown as paid okay now invoices you use that if you're providing a service or product and the customer will be billed and paid and they will be billed later and pay later if the customer pays at the time of service then you don't need to do an invoice it's all one transaction right you provide the service or good they immediately pay there's really no reason to do an invoice instead of an invoice we want to do a sales receipt so a sales receipt records both the income and the cash at the same time so let's do a sales receipt let's go up to New and a new sales receipt so this has all the same information as the invoice plus information about what you did with the check that you received so let's create a sales receipt let's do a different let's do Brian tublin okay so Brian tublin all the information pre-populates now we need to choose how is he paying us he's going to pay us with a check and we're going to deposit that check again we're going to put it into undeposited funds so we can group it with the rest of the checks for today and make one lump sum deposit service date let's just use uh today's date product or service we'll just pick something at random here bathroom sink for 125 dollars so he came in picked up the sink immediately paid we're taking his check and we're putting it into undeposited funds so we can save and close that actually let's look at a print preview of this looks very much like our invoice except that it says sales receipt so we give them this they know they don't still owe us it's not an open invoice this is a receipt for what you've already paid us now when they have an outstanding invoice and they pay us don't issue a sales receipt you want to make sure you take that payment and offset it against the invoice if they want proof of payment then you send them an invoice and the invoice will have the words paid on it so don't issue a sales receipt when you're collecting payments on an outstanding invoice sales receipts are only for if no invoice has ever been issued okay so that is our sales receipt and we're going to save and close it okay so uh now we've collected two items all right we've collected two checks it's the end of the day now we want to deposit those checks how do we do that we're going to go up to new for a new transaction we're going to come over here to other and go to bank deposit okay so here we see our two checks we have a 42 dollar check from Bridget O'Brien and we have a 125 dollar check from Brian those are being added together for a total of a hundred and sixty seven dollars now if you have other checks you want to add that don't go through the normal customer invoice sales receipt system you can add those checks here so perhaps the owner gives you a check they're going to contribute a little bit of money to the business this month this would be where you could enter that owner's check or maybe it's in maybe it's a tax refund or something that doesn't go through the normal income process of the company so you can always add additional funds to your deposit on this screen but right now we're just depositing these two checks for 167 dollars and the key here is if we were to look in our check register the deposit will show as a hundred and sixty seven dollars that can be very easily tied to the 167 dollar deposit on our bank statement again without undeposited funds it would show up as two separate deposits be very hard to tie to our bank statement so let's hit save and close and we've made our bank deposit of a hundred and sixty seven dollars so that's the very basics of how you send invoices receive payments or perhaps receive payments and immediately issue a sales receipt again that's in case there were no invoices sent now let's talk about receiving and paying bills from our vendors uh so we're going to learn how to input an unpaid Bill how to view those unpaid bills and then how to pay bills by check and kind of as a bonus let's talk about how to record an expense without uh recording a bill first so let me share my Quickbooks online with you so uh first let's record a bill so we can go to new and then under vendors we're going to record a bill so a bill is when you receive an invoice from a vendor right but you haven't paid it yet so we're going to enter it as an unpaid Bill and then QuickBooks can be used to help remind us to organize our bills and help us to remind to pay them so if we're going to pay an expense immediately then we're going to enter it as an expense but if we're just entering the bill and not paying it yet that's when we're going to use this bill so let's enter a bill and let's enter it let's say we bought some inventory from one two three plumbing supplies so we select that vendor QuickBooks will fill in all of the information we need now if we put the payment under category this is going to record the payment directly to an expense account now since we're buying inventory as we talked about earlier we don't want to record it directly to an expense account we need to use an item so here let's select the item that we purchase so the piece of inventory that we purchased from One Two Three Plumbing and let's just say we purchased a bathroom sink for uh actually let's choose a different one that one doesn't look like it's completely set up this is like we uh we're buying some of these mirrors we bought a lot of 10 of them okay so 220 dollars two one two three plumbing supplies and let's save and close it so now we owe them two hundred and twenty dollars okay so if we go to our vendor Center expenses and then vendors we should be able to find one two three plumbing supplies One open bill let's look at the detail here two hundred and twenty dollars okay excellent so that's the bill we want to pay looks like there was another bill in there from an earlier exercise but we want to pay this bill for two hundred and twenty dollars now there are ways to pay bills online through QuickBooks but let's keep it simple and let's just pay it with a paper check right now so we can do make a payment or we could come up here and we could click new and pay bills in fact let's do that if we wanted to we could initiate it down here but let's go up here to pay bills okay now we need to find the notice it's got every one of our open bills right so we owe five different four different payments to Cecil's Lock Works okay so we can pay all of these at one time but all we want to pay is the one two three plumbing supplies we're going to click that nope that's the wrong invoice that's the 840 one we went down here we want the 120 one or the 220 one okay so we're going to make this payment for 220 dollars let's hit save and print so now it's going to give us the option to print a check okay and so um so from prior exercises we've we've made payments um that these checks are waiting to be printed but we're just going to print the one check today so let's hit print preview and here is our check and then you'll just need to make sure obviously you have the correct check stock to run through your printer but here is our paper check excellent so that is how you pay your bills in QuickBooks online now um let's go quickly so if you don't receive a bill first if you're just paying the expense immediately there's no reason to run it through a bill you don't have to do two separate transactions you don't have to enter the unpaid Bill and then pay it you can simply record it as an expense so let's go new vendor expense and let's just do the same thing again with one two three one two three plumbing supplies okay and we can uh tell it where we're going to pay it from and let's just say it's from our checking account okay and we're going to pay it with a check and again we can come down here into item details and put what we bought and we'll say we bought 20 of those okay and so 640 dollars now if in addition to this 640 we want to pay this outstanding bill we can add it to the check and have it all just one check so that's what this is doing it's reminding us that we have an 840 outstanding bill with this particular vendor but all we want to pay right now is the six hundred and forty dollars so we can hit save and close and that will record that payment okay so that's how you manage your bills enter unpaid bills pay those bills and also how you can enter expenses directly without going through the bill process so next thing I want to talk about is managing your bank feeds I'm not going to be able to show you a lot of detail in this section because this QuickBooks Online as I mentioned before is really just our kind of sandbox for demonstrating and investigating things in QuickBooks Online you can't set up a fake bank account and so it makes it very difficult to illustrate a lot of the bank feeds activity we do have again those 46 free tutorials we will go into a lot more depth there if you do have troubles but let me show you where to get started and I think it's fairly user friendly so let's go back to my Quickbooks online account and this is the banking the banking center here if you want to get here go to transactions and banking and that brings you here to set up your account you're simply going to go to link account and then from here you'll find the name of your company and then from that point forward it's going to be us different for each bank because each bank has a little bit different uh requirements but you got to make sure you have internet access to your bank before you start this process because what QuickBooks Online does is it uses your login credentials so you'll need your username and your password from your bank's website QuickBooks Online uses that to log in as you essentially and download your activity it'll then maintain that live connection and periodically download activity for you okay that's all there is to connecting your bank a lot of software does this now QuickBooks Online is really really good at doing it I've used other free software that does the same thing but it's not nearly as consistent with the other software I'm constantly having to reconnect Banks QuickBooks Online is really really this is a strong attribute now once those transactions come through you'll get the opportunity to categorize them so on this screen you'll have a list of all of your expenses for review and you can come through here and you can either confirm that this is in fact the transaction that you're talking about or you can give it additional details so here I can categorize it as something else if it was so a lot of times you will have already entered the activity in QuickBooks and then the activity will come through the bank feed and you can match that activity up if it is a transaction you've never recorded in QuickBooks then you can record it right now on this screen so that's the essentials of how the the bank feed works again it's very hard to demonstrate in the sample account because we can't really create a fake bank account so the next thing I want to talk about is how to do payroll within QuickBooks online so I'm not going to show you a lot of the detail here this is a very complicated topic and we do have a series of five tutorials that's part of our bigger series of 46 tutorials that deal specifically with managing payroll so here is my Quickbooks online account so if you're at your dashboard to activate your payroll you go down here to payroll and overview and that'll give you an opportunity to activate payroll within QuickBooks online so your screen won't look exactly like this because we do have payroll activated already um but uh very very seamless you'll be able to enter your paychecks right here everything will automatically flow to your financial statements any time that that your employees enter that can be charged to clients can also be used then to run payroll so it's very seamless if you use QuickBooks and you have employees then you should absolutely be using QuickBooks payroll very very handy please check out those detailed tutorials we have in our free QuickBooks Online tutorials and the last thing to talk about is printing reports in QuickBooks Online so to get to our reports let's go to our left menu bar and click reports and you'll see a lot of reports so I have the basic financial statements um highlighted here so I've got the balance sheet the profit and loss and the statement of cash flows so you can go through here and there are hundreds of reports in QuickBooks Online and any of them that you like and want to refer to often you can place a star next to so for instance balance sheet comparison if I click that star it shows up there okay I don't want that so I'm going to unclick it and it goes away so let's look at our balance sheet now it's going to pull up a balance sheet as of October 26th that is today's date if we like how this is we can simply print it there's a lot of customization we can do just right here if we don't want to show every single bank account we can just click that and compress it we can even compress all of our current assets if we want so you can control the level of your reporting just right here on the face of the financial statement okay other customizations the basic customizations are right at the top here so we have a year-to-date balance sheet um we can show our columns by quarters so if we hit anytime you change that then you need to hit run report okay so here is our balance sheet by quarters we could also instead of the accrual basis we can just hit one button and it prints a cache basis a balance sheet that's really really handy um you know if you give your tax person an accrual balance sheet and they and you have to file Cash basis for your tax return they're going to have to spend time manually converting those to cash numbers with QuickBooks you can print either cash or accrual with the click of a button that is really cool so let's go back to just displaying totals um you could also select a comparison period so let's just compare it to the previous period again make sure you hit run report and it shows us October 26th of 2022 compared to October 26th of 2021. so up here are kind of some of the basic options that you can use if you want to further customize it you can come over here to the customize button some of the features are the same over here but you also have a lot more details so we can format the number uh more detail on the rows and columns some filters for the transactions and a header or footer if you'd like to place a header or footer on the balance sheet so some additional customization options over there once you set all of those we can hit run report okay once you're satisfied with your report if you need to print it just hit your printer button okay and there is going to be your printed report excellent okay so again um yeah all of your reports are basically set up the same way they give you a very nice kind of pre-formatted report you can select basic options here or customize it further here if you've made a lot of customizations that you want to save you can just click save customization give this report a special name like we will call it um my favorite balance sheet okay and we'll add it to our report group I guess I don't have report groups yet so let's just hit save okay and now we should over here in reports have a favorite balance sheet report okay and there it is excellent okay that's how you print reports in QuickBooks Online I encourage you to take some time and go through the reports tons of really useful useful reports so I'm one of my favorites right here unpaid bills this helps you decide who you need to pay gives you all of the bills that are unpaid how far they are past due um coming down to then a total balance of all of your bills very very handy when cash is short and you're needing to decide exactly which vendors need to be paid okay that is our unpaid bills list great so that is uh reports in QuickBooks Online great so again this was our big overview of how to use QuickBooks Online we have much much more detail in these 46 free QuickBooks tutorials here is the link that you need to go to you'll find this video on that home page as well as links to all of these other 46 tutorials that include both screenshots and videos I'll also throw a link below this video in YouTube to get to there if you are just now exploring QuickBooks if you'd like a 30-day free trial I will throw a link in the description to uh to QuickBooks in order to get a free trial as well so I hope this was very helpful to you and I will see you next time my name is Tim with fit small business

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.