Hello Ivy,

You have asked a great question. The “categories” that you are describing are called accounts in QuickBooks. When you set up your business in QuickBooks, it will create a chart of accounts list based on the type of industry your business falls into.

There are 3 ways to record income and expenses in QuickBooks:
1. Create invoices to record sales or enter bills to record an expenses.
2. Connect your bank account to QuickBooks and automatically import all of your income and expenses into QuickBooks this way.
3. Create a journal entry to record summarized totals of all income and expenses.

We have a free QuickBooks Course to teach you how to use QuickBooks step by step. A few of the video tutorials that might be helpful for you are as follows:

How to create a chart of accounts in quickbooks: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/set-up-chart-of-accounts-quickbooks-online/
How to create and send invoices in quickbooks:https://fitsmallbusiness.com/send-an-invoice-through-quickbooks/
How to import banking transactions in quickbooks: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/import-banking-transactions-into-quickbooks-online/

You can access the full course here: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/set-up-company-information-quickbooks-online/

Let me know if you have any other questions. Thank you for reading!

All the Best-
Crystalynn Shelton