Learn QuickBooks 2018

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Intro

Welcome and Overview .......................................................................................................6

QuickBooks Versions ..........................................................................................................7

Chapter 2 – Getting Started

New Features in QuickBooks 2018 .....................................................................................9

Setting Up Your Company File .........................................................................................11

Using Easy Step Interview – Part 1 ...................................................................................13

Using Easy Step Interview – Part 2 ...................................................................................17

My Company Overview .....................................................................................................18

Chapter 3 – Customizing the QuickBooks 2018 Environment

Preferences – Part 1 ...........................................................................................................20

Preferences – Part 2 ...........................................................................................................24

Working with Users ...........................................................................................................26

Chart of Accounts – Part 1 .................................................................................................29

Chart of Accounts – Part 2 .................................................................................................33

QuickBooks Sample File ...................................................................................................37

Chapter 4 – Working with Customers & Jobs

Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 1 .........................................................................39

Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 2 .........................................................................43

Estimates – Part 1...............................................................................................................46

Estimates – Part 2...............................................................................................................49

Invoicing from Estimates – Part 1 .....................................................................................52

Invoicing from Estimates – Part 2 .....................................................................................55

 Invoicing Customers for Products and Services ................................................................58

Receiving Payments ...........................................................................................................59

Creating Deposits ...............................................................................................................63

Creating Credit Memos ......................................................................................................65

Creating Statements ...........................................................................................................67

Income Tracker ..................................................................................................................69

Chapter 5 – Working with Vendors

Working with Vendors .......................................................................................................71

Entering Bills .....................................................................................................................75

Paying Bills ........................................................................................................................78

Creating Credit Memos ......................................................................................................80

Chapter 6 – Working with Items & Inventory

Working with Items – Part 1 ..............................................................................................82

Working with Items – Part 2 ..............................................................................................86

Creating Purchase Orders ..................................................................................................88

Receiving Items .................................................................................................................90

Creating Bills for Items ......................................................................................................92

Paying for Items .................................................................................................................94

Manually Adjusting Items..................................................................................................95

Chapter 7 – Working with QuickBooks Registers

Working with Registers .....................................................................................................97

Downloading Transactions ..............................................................................................100

Creating Entries and Writing Checks ..............................................................................102

Bank Transfers .................................................................................................................104

Reconciling ......................................................................................................................105
Chapter 8 – Working with Loans

Setting Up Loans..............................................................................................................108

Creating Loan Payments ..................................................................................................110

Loan Manager ..................................................................................................................111

Chapter 9 – Working with Credit Cards

Setting Up Credit Card Accounts ....................................................................................113

Entering Credit Card Transactions...................................................................................115

Reconciling Credit Card and Making Payments ..............................................................116

Chapter 10 – Customizing Forms

Form Customization – Part 1 ...........................................................................................118

Form Customization – Part 2 ...........................................................................................122

Layout Designer – Part 1 .................................................................................................124

Layout Designer – Part 2 .................................................................................................128

Chapter 11 – Reports

Quick Reports ..................................................................................................................130

Creating Reports – Part 1 .................................................................................................131

Creating Reports – Part 2 .................................................................................................135

Customizing Reports ........................................................................................................139

Memorizing Reports ........................................................................................................142

Chapter 12 – Working with Sales Tax

Working with Sales Tax – Part 1 .....................................................................................144

Working with Sales Tax – Part 2 .....................................................................................147

Chapter 13 – Payroll

Overview of Using the QuickBooks Pro Payroll Service ................................................149

Working with Payroll Items .............................................................................................151

 Working with Employees ................................................................................................154

Paying Employees ............................................................................................................158

Paying Payroll Taxes .......................................................................................................160

Chapter 14 – The Lead Center

Working with Leads .........................................................................................................161

Chapter 15 – Mail Merges

Creating a Mail Merge .....................................................................................................163

Mail Merge Main Document ...........................................................................................165

Chapter 16 – Budgets

Creating a Budget ............................................................................................................167

Budget Reports.................................................................................................................169

Chapter 17 – Other QuickBooks Features

Searching in QuickBooks ................................................................................................170

Reminders and Alerts .......................................................................................................171

Using the QuickBooks Calendar ......................................................................................174

Memorizing Transactions ................................................................................................176

Importing Lists into a New Company File ......................................................................179

Vehicle Mileage ...............................................................................................................181

Backing Up Company Files .............................................................................................183

QuickBooks PC to MAC Conversions ............................................................................185

Canadian Version .............................................................................................................186

Chapter 18 – Wrap Up

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................187
Learn QuickBooks 2018

Chapter 1 – Intro
Video: Welcome and Overview

Cindy: Hi everyone. Welcome to QuickBooks 2018. My name is Cindy and I’m going to be
walking through each of these videos with you as you go through and learn all about
QuickBooks 2018.

I wanted to give you a brief overview. I just want to give you a shout out as well and say
welcome and tell you a little bit about what to expect as you go through each of these videos.

We’re going to start at the very beginning. So don’t worry if you’ve never used QuickBooks or
you have no clue what you’re doing because I’m going to show you exactly what to do so you
can set it up the correct way. Even if you’re a little more experienced you’ll want to go through
these just to see if there’s something you didn’t know or if there’s a quicker way for you to do
something. You can always learn something no matter how much you think you already know.
So this is growing for everyone no matter what skill level you happen to be at.

We’re going to actually start by talking a little bit about what’s new in QuickBooks 2018 and
then we’ll jump right in and I’m going to have you guys creating your first company file. So let’s
go ahead and get started, get some pen and paper, and sit back and take some notes. If you need
to go back through any of these videos feel free to do that. We’re here for you. If you have
questions just let us know. We’ll be more than happy to answer those for you.

I’m going to go ahead and leave right now and we’re going to jump right over and talk a little bit
about what to expect and then we’ll jump into the next section after that and talk about what’s
new.

Before we actually dive in though I want to talk to you briefly about the different versions of
QuickBooks that are out there because you might get overwhelmed if you don’t know which one
works best for you. And we’ll also wrap up module one here by talking about the online version
of QuickBooks versus the desktop version, so you can make an informed decision when you
decide which one that you prefer.

By the way as we go through here I am going to mention some options that are a little different
in the online version or maybe if it works better on desktop, we’ll kind of talk about that as we
go along.

So why don’t you go ahead and flip over to section two and let’s talk about the different versions
of QuickBooks.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Video: QuickBooks Versions

Cindy: Alright we’re working in module one and we’ve just completed section one where we
went through the welcome and overview portion. Let’s talk very quickly about QuickBooks
versions.

There are different versions of QuickBooks that you have a choice to purchase. Probably the big
one that most people know about right now is there is a desktop version and there’s also an
online version. The online version means that you have to actually go to their website and put in
your username and password and your data is stored out in the cloud on the web there. You can
access it from anywhere in the world and that’s the reason that it’s actually very beneficial. If
you don’t need that though I suggest you stick with the desktop version. It actually has more
options, it actually works a little bit nicer, it’s more user friendly. But it depends on what the
reason is that you need QuickBooks. If you need that remote access go with the online version.
That one’s actually a monthly fee versus purchasing the desktop version one time.

Now with the desktop version there is versions of that and I’d like to go to their website and just
show you some things so you can see what I’m talking about here.

I wanted to show you the comparables with the QuickBooks desktop version. Most people that
are small business owners will go with this QuickBooks Pro and that’s really all that you need.
You can see that you can track income and expenses. You’re going to be able to run reports, do
sales tax, manage bills. You can kind of see all these options here. But notice what you don’t
have. It’s any of the forecasting options and nothing industry specific either. You’re not going to
have the mobile inventory barcode scanning, which is new this year, or you’re not going to have
the availability to the QuickBooks Priority Circle. Notice also that you can only use this for up to
three users. If you go with this one, which they call Premier, notice you can go up to five users
with this one. If you needed more than that notice if you use the Enterprise edition that you go up
to 30 users.

Some other things just to kind of know about this. One thing in the QuickBooks Pro version is
that you’re going to have different lists. You’re going to have a list of customers, a list of
vendors, a list of items that you sell. Each of those lists will hold 14,500 items. That seems like a
lot and it may be to you. But if you happen to need more than that you can flip over to the
Premier or the Enterprise that have over a million in those lists. That would be one reason for
actually going to the Enterprise edition. You can always start with Pro and upgrade to one of
these others if you needed to do that.

The other thing that I wanted to mention here is that when you go to make your purchase you’re
going to see QuickBooks Pro and they’re going to have a real estate edition, they’re going to
have a construction edition, all these different editions. The construction edition is good.

© Copyright 2008-2018 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn QuickBooks 2018

Businesses that are construction companies usually like that edition. But typically what happens
with all the other editions is they actually prepopulate some of the lists for you and then you have
to go in and edit those. They’re going to charge you a lot more money for that too so why do you
need to edit everything in the list if you pay more money to get that list? It’s easier just to set it
all up yourself from scratch.

That gives you a quick overview of some of the different versions and how they work. And let
me say also there is a MAC version. So you might want to think about looking into that as well.

Let’s go ahead and wrap up module one and we’re going to move to module two and this is the
Getting Started module.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Chapter 2 – Getting Started

Video: New Features in QuickBooks 2018

Cindy: Hey there. Welcome back. We’re in module two right now, which is the Getting Started
module. This is section one where I want to talk to you a little bit about the new features that
QuickBooks 2018 has.

Typically when they release a new version they have some enhancements to the software or
maybe they’ve added something that makes it more friendly for the user. They haven’t had any
really big ones in a few years but there are a few this time that I think will be very helpful to
some of you.

Let me go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and we’ll talk about some of those new features.

QuickBooks has several different flavors. One is QuickBooks Pro which is the one we’re
currently using here. And typically most small business owners will end up using this version.
They also have a Premier edition, an Accountant edition, and an Enterprise edition. And each
one might have a few options that another one does not have. For example, if you’re using this
QuickBooks Pro you can have up to five users, whereas the Enterprise edition allows you up to
30 users.

Each one will have some enhancements from the previous version. If you wanted to see where
those new features are you can run a tutorial under Help and you’ll see New Features and you
can go through what’s called the New Feature Tour. I’m going to walk through some of these
with you just so you’ll be familiar with what’s here. And one of the new ones that I really like a
lot is the ability to work with multiple monitors. If I wanted to see QuickBooks on both monitors
that I have connected I would be able to do that now. This will actually work with up to three
connected monitors and they need to be next to each other. Let me show you how to turn on the
multiple monitor option.

If you go up to View on your menu you will see Switch to Multimonitor Mode. And it tells you
that they have to be next to each other and then you’ll see if you had two screens QuickBooks
will show up on the righthand side. Now you can’t see mine obviously but I can tell you that I
see it over on the right there. It’s really, really cool how this works. If you wanted to turn this
back off for some reason go back to View and you can switch to Single Monitor Mode.

The next thing is this option to stay logged in. Previous to this option if a user clicked the X at
the top of QuickBooks and closed QuickBooks then what would happen is they would still be
logged in. So the next morning when QuickBooks was opened you’re still logged in as the same
user. You can turn on an option now, this is in your Preferences. We’ll go through a little bit
later. But you can have QuickBooks log you off every time the user closes or X’s QuickBooks.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Also, there’s an option if you want to keep a user logged on for a certain amount of days you
could do that as well.

Next, they have more secure webmail now. You’ve had the ability for several versions now to
actually send emails through QuickBooks. What I mean by that is if you wanted to email an
invoice, a purchase order for example, then you can email them right from that invoice or
purchase order. Now you have the ability to use some additional email providers that you didn’t
have before. And you have to have an Intuit ID to do this. So make sure you setup yours when
you setup your company file.

QuickBooks now works with Gmail, it works with Hotmail, it works with Microsoft Live, and
Outlook. And you could set those up here in the Preferences.

There’s now a Past Due stamp on your invoices as well. Now we’ve always had a Paid stamp
which is blue and then in recent versions it became green. But now if an invoice is past due it’s
in red. And you can kind of see these here. And this would be where your customization is you’d
have to go into to actually check the box if it wasn’t checked. We’ll talk about how to do some
of this as we go along but just know that you can actually set that up now.

You can also search in your chart of accounts. This is nice if you have a long list of accounts and
you’re looking for a particular one. You’re going to start typing the first few characters of that
name in the Search box and it would look for it for you. So when we get to our chart of accounts
you’ll see how that works.

Also when you’re looking at reports now you’ve got a quick way to toggle back and forth
between the accrual and the cash based. Before you could do this but you had to actually go to
Customize Report to get to that option. They’ve just made it a little bit easier now to flip back
and forth.

Those are some of the basic things you’re going to see in the QuickBooks Pro. I will just
mention a few other things. If you happen to have the Accountants edition or the Enterprise
edition, for example, they’ve got a really great feature for you guys where you can actually
merge multiple vendors. You have the ability to merge two vendors and it’s just a workaround
now. It’s not really an option in QuickBooks. But now if you had up to four and you wanted to
merge them you could. It would merge all the history together and everything. And you’re going
to find that in the Accountants edition or the Enterprise edition. And you’re going to find it up
under the option that says Accountant.

Those are some of the things that I wanted to mention to you that are new features. I’m going to
go ahead and close this. Why don’t we go ahead and start setting up our company file now so we
can get going and you can see how QuickBooks actually works.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Video: Setting Up Your Company File

Cindy: Hi there. I’m glad you’re back. Remember we’re working in QuickBooks 2018 and
we’re down in module two now, which is the Getting Started module. This is section two and I
wanted to talk to you a little bit about setting up your company file and some options you have
before you actually launch into what we call the Easy Step Interview that we’ll go through in
section three. Let me flip over to QuickBooks and I will show you what those options are.

When you first open QuickBooks you’re going to see this screen where it says No Company
Open. If you’ve previously opened a company file you would see it in this list and you can just
double click to open it up. If you don’t see one that you know you have setup in this list there is
an Open option over here where you can just go through and find that file in your computer. This
Edit list will also let you take items off of this list that you may not want to see. For example,
what if it’s a company file that you don’t use anymore and just don’t want to see it in the list
every time you open this window. You can edit the list and remove it.

Here’s where you create a new company file, which is obviously what we have to do here in just
a moment. But I did want to point out these other two options.

There’s another way to open a file that you know is here and maybe it’s not in this list. And
you’ll notice there is an option here that says Restore an Existing Company. Later on we’ll be
talking about how to actually create backup files of your QuickBooks desktop company file. And
if you have one of those you may need to use it from time to time and this is a quick way to
actually restore that file. You won’t be able just to open it up. You’ll have to go through this
restore process.

Also notice that you can open a sample file over here on the right. You’ll notice there’s a
dropdown arrow which will give you several choices of different sample files to look at. If you
don’t know how to do something go and see how they did it in one of these sample files. They’re
all set up the way they should be. This first one is a product based business. It’s actually a
construction type company that we’ll be using later in our exercises. But they hold inventory and
invoicing and all kinds of things like that. And then there’s a service based business, which I
think is Larry’s Landscaping. And that’s more like I said of a service where you don’t really
have inventory.

So go and check those out when you get time and again remember those are set up exactly the
way you want your company file to be setup.

What we’re going to do is create a new company. So you’re going to start by clicking right here
and it’s going to take you to a window here that actually says Let’s set up your business. It does
give you an option to use the Start setup right here, which is very generic. And you’ll also see
these other options down here at the bottom. I just want to point out what these other options are.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

You might have an existing QuickBooks file that you want to go ahead and open. Here’s another
way to open it right here. You might have some data in Quicken that you want to bring over or
some other accounting software package. There’s also an Advanced setup option here. I always
suggest that you use the advanced setup because it’s going to give you more options to setting up
your company file correctly the first time than using the start setup. But you could use either one.

We’re going to use the advanced setup and this is going to launch us into what we call the Easy
Step Interview. And that’s what I want to get started with over in section three. Let’s go ahead
and flip over there and we’ll get started using the Easy Step Interivew.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Video: Using Easy Step Interview – Part 1

Cindy: Alright we’re still in module two, which is the Getting Started module, and we’re going
to go ahead and launch into the Easy Step Interview. This is part one. There are two parts to this
particular section so make sure that you watch each one and then go back through them if you
need to because this is really important. You need to properly set up your company file from the
beginning. Let me go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and we’ll start the Easy Step Interview.

This is your Easy Step Interview and the first thing it asks you to do is enter some information
about your company. You can see that it wants to know your company name and that’s the only
thing that’s mandatory to put on this screen. Notice the little red asterisk to the left. Everything
else here is optional if you want to put it in. I would advise you to set it up though because if
you’re going to send out correspondents to your customers or vendors it’s going to pull from the
street address, the city, all of these fields. So you’ll need that information in QuickBooks.

I’m going to go ahead and plug in a company name. We’re going to say this is ABC Supplies.
And notice if I tab down that it brings down the same name as my legal name. So unless it’s
different you don’t need to change it.

The Tax ID, you can leave this blank if you’d like. The only reason QuickBooks needs this is if
you decided to use the Intuit Payroll service it would need to know your company’s tax ID
number. You’re going to see there are several fields in QuickBooks that are just informational.
And if you don’t need to fill those in then I would leave some of that blank.

The street address is going to be 145, we’re going to say West Florence Avenue. And we’re
going to say this is in Los Angeles, California. And we’ll say the zip is 90001. And then you can
see you can put in your phone, your fax, your email, and your website.

I’m going to click Next at the bottom and go to the next screen where it says Select your
industry. There are many different types of industries in this list. You can see there’s accounting,
there’s auto repair, there’s actually engineering, there’s information technology, legal services. If
you’re a non-profit. Pretty much every type of industry is represented in this list. If you don’t see
the type of industry you think your business is in then go ahead and choose the general product
or service based business from the bottom. There is no wrong answer here. Whatever you choose
QuickBooks is going to go ahead and take that information and create a generic chart of accounts
for you based on all the options from here on out. I’m going to go ahead and pick a general
service based business and I’m going to click Next at the bottom.

This screen asks, How is your company organized? Do not get hung up on which option to
choose. If you happen to be a business that does your own taxes then you will want to go ahead
and pick one of these options. Now when I say your own taxes what I mean is if you’re using
Turbo Tax or some other software program then it would need to know where to pull the
different items in QuickBooks onto your tax form. And that would be based on how your

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company is organized. However if you have an accountant then go ahead and pick Other or
None. And the reason I tell people to do this is because what’s going to happen if you pick one
of these other options, you’re going to be on some screen in QuickBooks and it’s going to ask
you which line on your tax form would like you to pull this on to and you’re not going to have a
clue because you’re not an accountant. Now if you are an accountant obviously you would
choose one of these. But for most of us we’re going to pick Other or None at the bottom.

Here we’re selecting the first month of our fiscal year. It defaults to January. So unless you need
to change that you can just click Next.

And then it says Set up your administrator password. I do want to spend a minute on this because
this is very important. QuickBooks allows you to set up users. What that means is that you have
the ability when you open a QuickBooks file to have the user put in their username and password
in order to gain access to the data file. QuickBooks allows you to have up to five users. Whoever
sets up the company file is the administrator. They have rights to everything. This is asking you
to set up the administrator’s password. This is not mandatory but it’s highly, highly, highly
suggested and I do agree with that. We’re going to talk about users in a later module so for now
I’m going to leave it blank, but in real life I’d probably go ahead and set something up here. If
you don’t you can always go and change it.

Here we’re going to go ahead and click Next and create our company file. And this is kind of
like the Save screen. You can choose to put this anywhere you like. Notice your file name is your
company name. So again unless you want to change that to something else then you just leave it
and click Save over on the right.

What’s happening right now is it’s saving all of the information that you’ve told it and it’s
actually setting up the QuickBooks desktop screen for you. So what you’re going to notice is that
you’re going to see on the left your icons appearing over on this icon bar here. You’re actually
going to see at the top of your screen the company name. You can actually leave the Easy Step
Interview at this point if you’d like. You can see a Leave button. But I would suggest that you go
ahead and finish the interview. It’ll make it a little bit easier for you.

These are going to be customization type options. So let’s go ahead and click Next and it asks,
What do you sell? You can choose services, products, or both. There’s no wrong answer again. If
you decide you sell services this time and later you want to add products you can always, always,
always change this information.

If you happen to be setting up your own company file while you’re watching this video and your
screen is different than mine, remember it’s based on how you answer the previous questions. So
sometimes it will skip a screen if it doesn’t think you need those options.

I’m going to go ahead and choose both in this case and click Next. And now it’s asking me, Do I
charge sales tax? We’re just turning the option on, so I’m going to go ahead and say yes.

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Do you want to create estimates in QuickBooks? Construction is a prime example because they
estimate jobs. If I want to have my kitchen remodeled I’m going to ask the contractor for a quote
or an estimate. I’m going to go ahead and choose yes here and click Next.

This screen asks about using statements in QuickBooks. Some businesses will send statements to
their customers at the end of the month. A statement basically is a summary of everything that
happened with that customer’s account during the month. You don’t have to send these out but if
you’d like to they’re a really great way to send a friendly reminder to your customer that they
owe you money.

Using progress invoicing. This screen actually goes right along with the estimate option because
you have the ability in QuickBooks to actually invoice your customer for a portion of your
estimate. That’s called Progress Invoicing. It will let you keep invoicing until you’ve used
everything from the estimate. Typically if you estimate jobs you will want to use progress
invoicing.

Managing bills that you owe. Bills come in the mail that you have to pay. A lot of people will
actually get their bill out of the mailbox and they’ll put it on the basket on their desk and when
Friday comes they’ll just sort through and decide which ones they’re going to pay. That’s
certainly going to be okay in QuickBooks but what you’re not going to be able to do if you use it
that way is to run reports and see who you owe, how old those bills are that you owe, if they’re
in the 60-90 day category, etcetera. So it’s a good idea to go ahead and put all of your bills in
QuickBooks as soon as you get them in the mail or as soon as they’re emailed to you. I would
say Yes to this option and track the bills that you owe.

Next it asks us about tracking inventory in QuickBooks. True inventory means that you sell
physical items. If I have ten of something and then I sell eight and I have two left QuickBooks
can pop up and remind me to order some more. That’s called True Inventory.

Another term you’re going to hear in QuickBooks is called Noninventory. It might be that I do
want to track the different items that I sell but maybe I don’t keep any in the backroom. It could
be I order them one at a time as a customer requests them. Sometimes you actually purchase
inventory and noninventory items as well. So if you want to turn this on you would say Yes. And
by the way, if you use purchase orders in your business you have to use the Yes option here to
see the purchase order option.

The next thing it asks me about is tracking time in QuickBooks. If you have a service type
business where you invoice customers for the time you spent either speaking to them on the
phone or meeting with them throughout the month this is a great feature to use because it will
allow you to put those individual meetings in there and then pull an invoice based on that.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

If you’re in a business where you do job costing. The time that you or your employees or even
subcontractors spend working on a particular project or job that’s part of your job costing. So
again you would want to turn this feature on.

This next option says, Do you have employees? Now this is going to turn an icon on on the
screen so that in the future if you’d like to use the Intuit Payroll option you can do that. This is a
little misleading right here because it says we have W-2 employees and we have 1099
contractors. 1099 contractors have nothing to do with payroll. Absolutely nothing. They’re
treated as vendors in QuickBooks. We will discuss as we move down in these videos how you
set up your contractors.

I want to go ahead and stop the video at this point and go ahead and move over into part two so
we can continue the Easy Step Interview. So I will see you in a few minutes.

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Video: Using Easy Step Interview – Part 2

Cindy: Okay welcome back. Let’s go ahead and continue talking about how to use that Easy
Step Interview. This is going to be module two and we’re in section three, part two.

We’re on the screen that asks about using accounts in QuickBooks. What’s getting ready to
happen is when I click Next at the bottom it’s going to ask me first to select a date to start
tracking my finances. If you purchase QuickBooks towards the end of the year, let’s say October
for example, it’s up to you if you want to go back to the beginning of January or the beginning of
your fiscal year and enter all the transactions that occur. That could be a lot of work for you, but
remember that the reports are only as accurate as the data that you have in QuickBooks.

Your other option is to start with today’s date or pick a date you’d like to start with. If you were
starting in October I would say get out your September bank statement and its ending date, let’s
say it’s September 30, then use October 1 as the beginning of your QuickBooks file. You can
always enter something prior to that date but it just has to have a date to start with.

I’m going to pick the beginning of the fiscal year and go ahead and click Next.

Here is where it asks you to review your income and expense accounts. Based on how you
answered all of the questions in Easy Step Interview it’s created this generic set of accounts for
you. You can look down this list and if you decide that you use subcontracted services for
example you can check it. If you decide there’s something you don’t need then you can uncheck
it. We are going to spend a little bit of time on this here shortly so you might want to go ahead
and leave it for now and just click Next at the bottom. And it’s going to say Congratulations
you’ve completed the Easy Step Interview.

Now I’m going to click Go to setup. You’re about 85% finished at this particular point. There’s
still some things you need to set up but you could start using it right now.

These are some things that it suggest you go ahead and spend the time to set up. You will have to
add the people you do business with. Those are your customers. Products and services and your
bank accounts. We’re just going to go ahead and use the X at the top of that window and close it
out and that’s going to take us back to our QuickBooks desktop or Home screen.

They also have this new feature tour and we’ve talked a little bit about the new features already.
So if you don’t want to see the tour you can click the X and get out of it and then you’ll be on
your home screen.

That’s pretty much going to wrap up how the Easy Step Interview works.

What we’re going to do now is we’re going to go ahead and start talking a little bit about what
we call the My Company Overview. So I will see you shortly in section four.

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Video: My Company Overview

Cindy: Hey there. It’s Cindy again. We’re still working in QuickBooks 2018. We are actually in
module two, which is the Getting Started module, and we just wrapped up how to use the Easy
Step Interview. There was a couple of things in there that it asked us as far as setting up the
company name and the company address, etcetera, and I wanted to take you into a little feature
called the My Company Overview and show you how to change those things if you need to.

Here’s how you’re going to get to the My Company option. If you go to Company on your menu
at the top you’ll see an option that says My Company. When we went through the Easy Step
Interview it asked us to set up our company name and address, phone, and fax, etcetera and you
can see this is the information we set up. You might need to edit this from time to time. What if
the company moves? Or what if you misspelled something? You can always edit this information
up here where you see this little pencil. If I click on that you can see I can edit that and now I can
plug in any information that I’d like. So if I wanted to add the phone number for example I could
go ahead and do that. All I have to do is click OK and then you can see it’s now changed over
here.

Now if you need to change the legal name and address you can do that the same way. You click
the same Edit option there. You’re just going to come down and click the tab on the left that says
Legal Information and then change it there as well.

If you wanted to change your company identification and that’s going to be your federal ID
number or the social if you’d used that instead, you could actually edit that right here.

There’s also a tab for report information. This is where in the Easy Step Interview it asked what
is the first month of your fiscal year. You can also here put your tax year starting month if you’d
like.

Something else that we talked a little bit about is there was a screen in the Easy Step Interview
that asked how was our company organized and I told you not to spend a lot of time on that
because if you use other software like Turbo Tax then you could tell it which form you use so
that it knows where to pull that information. But again if you’re not using that software and you
have an accountant doing your taxes you don’t need to change this. Put it on Other or None.

The last tab on the left is your payroll tax information and this is just a place where if you had a
tax preparer that does your payroll and you wanted to put in their contact information you could
put that in here as well.

I’m going to go ahead and click OK and we’ll change all of that information right here.

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Over on the right hand side of the screen you’re going to see things like your product name. So
this is where you know which version of QuickBooks you’re using, if you have a license number
and a product number, and if it’s activated.

At the bottom here you’re going to see different things that Intuit can sell you. For example, the
payroll I’ve mentioned. If you wanted to use Intuit’s payroll service you could. You could turn it
on right here and it would walk you through the steps of getting set up. They also have credit
card service available. So if you need a merchant services account you could actually set that up
here. You can order checks from Intuit if you’d like. But remember you don’t have to use the
checks from Intuit. They can actually come from your bank or wherever you’d like to order
them.

There’s some other things over here that you might want to read through. And these are all sales,
like I said. So if you want any of that you can certainly sign up for any of that.

That’s what there is to the My Company Overview. I’m going to go ahead and click the X at the
top and get out of that. And we are going to wrap up section four. Why don’t you join me over in
section five and let’s take time and look at the screen and identify the components of the
QuickBooks environment.

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Chapter 3 – Customizing the QuickBooks 2018 Environment

Video: Preferences – Part 1

Cindy: We are working our way down though QuickBooks and we’re on module three now
which is where we’re going to talk a lot about how to customize the QuickBooks environment.

We’re going to start off in section one here talking about the preferences. There are a lot of
options in QuickBooks that you can turn on or off just to make life a lot easier for you and that’s
kind of what I want to address here in the preferences. There are two parts to the preferences so
you want to make sure you watch this particular section and also part two of this section as well.
Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I’ll show you where these preferences are.

The preferences in QuickBooks are basically just options. There’s a lot of these in here. I’m not
going to have time to look at every single one of these. I’m going to try to address the ones that I
think will be most important for you. Once you’re finished watching the video go back through
and look at all of the preferences and see if there’s some that we didn’t discuss that maybe you
want to change some options for.

The way you’re going to find the preferences is they’re listed under the Edit option on the menu,
down to Preferences.

The way the Preferences window is set up is you’re going to see these groups over on the left.
And typically when you come in it’s under this General grouping. For each grouping on the left
you’re going to see some options under the My Preferences tab and also some under the
Company Preferences tab. So make sure to click both to see all of the options.

I’m going to start with Accounting on the left here and I’m going to click on Company
Preferences. There’s a few here that you will definitely want to consider.

The first one is using account numbers. Let me cancel out of this and just show you something. I
keep saying that the Chart of Accounts is the most important thing in QuickBooks and that’s
listed right here on your home screen. Everything you do in QuickBooks will relate back to one
of these no matter what it is. And we’re going to spend more time in section three talking about
the chart of accounts but for now I want you to notice that the list is set up in alphabetical order
by type. What I mean is if you look, for example, at all these expense accounts right here, these
are alphabetical. Some people like to use what they call general ledger numbers. That’s a number
that refers to each of these accounts. Here’s what it will look like if I go back to the preferences
and turn these on.

I’m going back to Edit, Preferences. Again I’m under Accounting and the Company Preferences
tab. I’m going to check the box, Use account numbers and click OK. And what you’re going to
see now is next to each of these you have what’s called a general ledger number. QuickBooks

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will automatically assign this number. So if you don’t want to use the number it assigns you do
have the ability to edit these by right clicking and choosing the Edit option. And then you can go
in and change that number to whatever you want it to be. But this option turns the general ledger
numbers on.

Let me go back to the Preferences again. I’m still under Accounting, going back to Company
Preferences. And I want to point out this Use class tracking for transactions option. Not all
companies will use this feature but it’s really great if you need a way to break your company
down into sections for reporting purposes. For example, let’s say that your business has a couple
of different locations. You might actually use that as your class list. What would happen is if you
check this box every screen you’re on will have an additional field that says Class. You’ll click
the down arrow and you can pick the class from the list. Right now you can run a report on the
whole company and you can see how the company is doing but you don’t have the way to see
how a particular location is doing. And that would be an option to use for your locations.

Those of you that have the online version you have the class tracking option here but you also
have one called Locations. So you actually have two ways to kind of break yours down.

Another option here that you want to be aware of is the date through which the books are closed.
If you know anything about accounting, in true accounting you close the books at the end of the
month and then you close the books at the end of the year. Here’s what this means. Let’s say I’ve
closed the books through September of this year. It’s now October and I happen to notice a
change that I need to make in a prior period, meaning prior to the end of September. Let’s say it
was a bill you entered twice. You’re not going to be able to go back and just delete that bill, but
you can make an offsetting entry in the current period. That’s the correct way to do accounting.
However you’re going to find that most small business owners who are using QuickBooks they
do not know this option even exists or how to use it so I don’t find a lot of them that actually do
this. But if you’re going to close your books then you’re going to click here, set a date and a
password to close the books through, and that way it will warn you if you try to make a change
in that closed period. You would have to know the password in order to make that change.

Going down the list on the left I’m going to skip all the way down to General and I’m going to
the My Preferences tab.

You definitely want to turn this one here on. It says Pressing Enter to move between your fields.
What happens often is when you set up your QuickBooks file you start typing a transaction, let’s
just say an invoice for example. And when you hit the Enter key you hear a little beep and then
all of a sudden the screen disappears. And you go, “What happened?” What happened is your
Enter key is the same thing as Save and Close. If you’re wanting to use Enter to move back and
forth between the fields you’re going to want to check this box here and then it’ll make life a lot
easier for you.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

A lot of these options are things like do you want it to beep when it records a transaction? You
can kind of see these choices. You may want to choose this one, Automatically recall last
transaction for this name. what that means is let’s say that you wrote a check and you wrote it out
to pay your electric bill. You would have put in the name of your electric company there. you
would have filled out some information in the memo line. You would have chosen an account.
There’s a lot of things that you would have put on that particular check that you’re writing.
Wouldn’t it be nice the next time you wrote a check if you put that same vendor name in it pulls
all the information from the last time and then you just change anything you need to change? It
makes life a lot easier when you’re using that particular option.

Also you want to use today’s date as default. That just means that every transaction will have the
current date on it and you change it if you need to.

I’m going to go down the list on the left, Items & Inventory. When you start making some of
these changes it will ask you if you want to save them. So I’m going to say Yes here. Again I’m
under Items & Inventory and I’m going to the Company Preferences tab.

One of the things that it asked us about in the Easy Step Interview was, Do you actually use
inventory or want to use the inventory feature? If you had said no then none of these options
would be available and you also wouldn’t see icons for those on the home screen. So if you need
those options you’re going to come here and choose them and turn them on. Also if you use
purchase orders this is where you’re going to be turning on the purchase order feature right here.

The next option down on the left says Jobs & Estimates. Notice I’m on the Company Preferences
tab. For those of you who actually work with jobs, construction is a prime example, then you
may want to track if the job is pending, has it been awarded, in progress. You can change the
terminology for these if you have different words that you use.

Also it asked us in the Easy Step Interview if we wanted to create estimates and we could say
Yes or No here to change that. It also asked us about the progress invoicing. Remember if you
create estimates you probably do want progress invoicing.

The next thing on the left here is your option that says Payments.

There’s one quick thing I want to point out and that is this option that says Use undeposited
funds as default deposit to account. What this basically means is that when you’re receiving
payments from a customer it’s going to put the money in an account called Undeposited Funds.
You can actually uncheck this if you’d like it to put it in a different account automatically or if
you want to choose the one you want. We’ll spend more time on that when we get to the module
where we talk about receiving payments from customers. So just know this is here.

I also wanted to mention the online payments option. What happens is if you wanted your
customers to be able to pay you online using their credit card or a bank transfer then you can

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check one of these options. And what you’ll do is if you check one you’ll need to enable what
they call the Online Payments feature from Intuit to do this. Intuit actually has this feature where
you can actually email an invoice to your customer, for example, and as soon as they get it and
they want to pay you they can click right there on that invoice and actually go ahead and pay
you. But like I said, you would need to set that up with Intuit.

The next thing on the left is your Payroll & Employees. In the Easy Step Interview it asked if we
wanted to use the payroll feature. Here’s where I would turn it on or off if I do want to use it and
maybe I said no in the beginning. And there’s a lot of options here that have to do with payroll.
For example, how would you like to see their names listed? Do you want them by last name, by
first name? You can also go set preferences for sick time and workers comp and all this stuff up
here. We’re going to be talking about payroll in a later module so we’ll actually see this then.

The next one you’re going to see is Reminders. All of these you have the ability to be reminded
of. QuickBooks will actually remind you that you have checks to print. It will remind you you
have overdue invoices and you can see this list. The way this works is if you tell it to show you
the list here then what happens is when you actually open QuickBooks there’s going to be a
window that will say you have five checks to print and you have 14 invoices that are overdue and
you have three bills to pay. So it’s going all be on a screen by itself and you would be able to see
the detail at that point too. You can specify as well how many days ahead of time for some of
these you’d like it to remind you.

Going down the list under Reports & Graphs and I’ll go ahead and save those changes.

There’s a few things here just to be aware of. I wanted to point out that reports are run on an
accrual basis automatically in QuickBooks. If you’d like to run them on a cash basis
automatically you can change it right here. There’s also some options to see aging on your
reports. You can also show items by name, description, etcetera on reports. So you might want to
look here when you’re looking for options for reports.

We are pretty much out of time here for part one for the preferences. Why don’t you go ahead
and look over in part two and we will continue.

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Video: Preferences – Part 2

Cindy: Welcome back. We are still working with preferences. So we’re in module three and
we’re on section one but we’re on part two. So let’s go ahead and continue talking about the
preferences and then we’ll wrap up this section.

When we left off we had just talked about reports and graphs. I’m going to go down to the next
one which is Sales & Customers.

There’s a couple of options here that you just might want to be aware of. For example, if you
have a particular shipping method. Let’s say you ship items. Then you might go ahead and pick
it from the list. Let’s say you use Federal Express a lot. And FOB stands for Freight on Board. If
you want to type that in you can as well. It will also warn you about duplicate invoice numbers,
which is great.

Let’s see if there’s anything on the My Preferences tab. And there is something here I want to
mention to you.

I would actually turn on this option that says Prompt for time/cost to add. You’re going to see
that there is an option when you’re on an invoice to actually pull in any expenses you’ve
incurred that you need to turn around and invoice the customer for. We’re going to talk about
how that works when we get into the section where we talk about invoicing.

There’s also some options for sales tax. If you actually charge sales tax to your customers you’ll
want to come in here and turn the feature on by choosing Yes here. You can also set up your
most common sales tax here at the time if you’d like. We are going to talk about sales tax in a
later module as well.

Let’s go on down the list and see what else is here. Let’s go down to Send Forms.

You have the ability to actually send an invoice or any kind of form out to a customer or a
vendor and you can actually email that. This would be the options for that email. So here you’re
going to have the particular delivery method that you prefer. You’re also going to have options
for email templates for invoices for example, that’s its basic invoice. If I happen to choose, for
example purchase order, I’ve got a basic purchase order one here. But any of these that I’d like to
customize I have the ability to do and I would do that by hitting Edit down here at the bottom.
Basically you’ll see it says Dear Name, First, Last, and you can go in and change any of this if
you wanted to type something different here. If you wanted to create your own you choose Add a
Template and then you just create your own that way.

Coming down to Spelling. One of the things that QuickBooks will do for you is automatically
run your spellcheck. You do want to do that. The worst thing you can do is look unprofessional

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by sending out invoices or any correspondence that has misspelled words on it. So make sure
you run your spellcheck. I know it’s a pain but go ahead and run that anyway.

And the last one at the bottom I want to mention says Time & Expenses. I’ll click on the
Company Preferences tab. One of the options that it asked us in the Easy Step Interview was,
Would you like to use the time tracking feature? Remember I told you there’s a couple of ways
you can use this. One, if you’re in a position where you need to track the time that you actually
speak to or spend time with a particular customer so that you can invoice them later this would
be great for that. Also if you do job costing then the time would be part of your job costing,
whatever time you or your employees spend working on a particular job.

All of those options are right in here like I said. These are your preferences. Take time to go back
through them and see which ones work best for you. You may not know initially. It might be
after you start using QuickBooks for a while but then you can come back in and turn some of
these things on or off.

I’m going to go ahead and click OK here and I’m going to close this so that I’m back on my
home screen. That’s all there is right now to the preferences. Let’s go ahead and wrap up part
two here and move over on to section two and talk a little bit about working with users.

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Video: Working with Users

Cindy: Hi there. Welcome back. This is Cindy again. We are still working in module three,
Customizing the QuickBooks environment. We’re all the way down now to section two where I
want to talk to a little bit about working with users.

Right now if you open the QuickBooks file you can open right into the file and start working.
But if you set up users what will happen is when you open the QuickBooks file the user will
have to plugin their username and password to get into QuickBooks. And there are several
different reasons you want to do this. What I want to do is flip over to QuickBooks and talk to
you a little bit about some of those reasons and how to actually go ahead and set up users.

If you remember when we went through the Easy Step Interview one of the questions asked us
about setting up the password for the administrator. And I had a quick conversation with you
then about the fact that even though you don’t have to create users or set up that password for the
administrator it’s very, very, very highly suggested.

Some reasons for doing this would be, if you have users set up then it’s a lot easier to track down
when an error is made, who was logged on at the time, and what they were doing. Not that
you’re trying to get anybody in trouble but it’s just easier to track down errors that way. Another
reason for setting up users would be what if you hire an employee and you want to limit their
access to certain areas of QuickBooks. You’ll be able to do that.

Let me show you how to set up the users and only the admin can do this. So you have to be
logged in as the administrator to add, edit, or set up users.

You’re actually going to Company on the menu and you’ll see an option that says Set Up Users
and Passwords and you want to go over to Set Up Users. Now you have the ability to set up five
users in the QuickBooks Pro version. The administrator that you see logged in here is one of
those users. Since we didn’t set up the password for the administrator when we set up the
company file you would want to go and edit the user here and set up that password.

Let’s say that we want to actually hire a new employee and we want this person just to be able to
pay our bills. So they’re basically going to work in this section here where it says Vendors. I’m
going to go ahead and add a user. What you’re going to do is put in the users name and then
you’re actually going to put in a password for that user. Now just for the video I’ll just use two
letters but in real life you want to have passwords that are eight to twelve characters or longer.
You want to use any combination of letters, numbers, special characters. If you have trouble
remembering something like that maybe try a phrase that works good for you. And also change
your passwords out on a regular basis.

I’m going to go ahead and click Next and then it asks me, Do I want my user to have access to
all areas of QuickBooks, selected areas, or just note if there’s an option for an external

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accountant as well. If you have an external accountant you can give them their own access. They
would not have access to areas that have sensitive customer data. That would be things like if
you have a customer’s credit card in QuickBooks, which I would never advise you to do, but if
you do they wouldn’t have access to things like that. I’m going to give this user access to
selected areas of QuickBooks and click Next.

All the areas it asks about will have the same options. This first one asks about sales and
accounts receivable. I’m going to say no access to that. This one asks about purchases and
accounts payable. Now this is what I’m hiring this person to do so I’m going to give them full
access.

Notice your choices are full access or selective access. If you give them selective access you can
see there’s three choices as far as what underneath selective access you’d like to give them. But
I’ll go ahead and go back to full access and click Next.

I’m not going to give anymore access to my user but notice the areas it asks about. Checking and
credit cards, inventory, time tracking, payroll and employees, sensitive accounting activities. Let
me just tell you what these are if you hear this terminology.

You have some options in QuickBooks like the ability to make a journal entry. A journal entry
allows you to move money from one account to another. Maybe you transfer funds between
accounts. That would be like transferring from checking to savings. I’m going to click Next and
it now says Sensitive Financial Reporting. That’s just the reports that go with those sensitive
financial things that we just talked about.

Here it asks if I want to change or delete the transactions. I would leave this where it defaults.
The top one says, In the areas the user has access to do you want them to be able to change or
delete your transactions? Of course. What if this user realizes she entered a bill twice? She can
delete one of those. Down here it’s asking if she can change or delete transactions recorded
before the closing date. So we’re going to say no there.

Now this one just gives us a summary of how we answered those questions. I’m going to click
Finish. Now you can see that you have two users on the list. Notice the admin is still logged in.
I’ll go ahead and hit Close and show you how this works.

I’m going to log out of QuickBooks. Now if you have users set up you should always, always,
always log out. Don’t come over and click the X. That just closes your file or closes
QuickBooks. Go up to File and go down to where it says Close Company Log Off. And this is
the screen you should see when you open QuickBooks every day. It should also be the same
screen you see when you close QuickBooks.

I’m going to go ahead and double click on my company file. And it’s going to come up and ask
me to put in the username and password. It always has the last person who logged in. So you

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have to drag across that and type in the name of the new user. Then you’ll put in the password
and you’ll click OK and it should let you get into the QuickBooks file.

You’re going to notice that the preferences are set per user. Do you remember earlier when I had
moved this to the top? That was because it was for that user. Let me close this new feature tour
here and let me show you how this works.

When you first look at it you might think, “Oh, I thought I only gave the user access to account
payable?” Let’s say the user was actually working and she decided to click here, for example.
You see it says, You need sales and accounts receivable permission to perform this action. So it’s
not going to let the user into areas they don’t have access to.

I’m going to go ahead and click OK and I’m going to log back out. So I’ll go up to File, Close
Company Log Off. And I’m going to open up the company file again and this time login as the
admin. And because we didn’t set a password I’m not going to put one here. But remember in
real life you need that password.

So that’s how to actually work with your users.

Let’s go ahead and wrap up this section and go over to section three where we’re going to get
into the Chart of Accounts.

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Video: Chart of Accounts – Part 1

Cindy: Hey it’s Cindy again. We are working in module three, Customizing the QuickBooks
Environment, and we’re down to section three where we’re going to talk a little bit about the
Chart of Accounts.

Now this is part one. There are two parts to this video. Make sure you watch both parts. A lot of
what we’ve been doing is setup because you want to make sure that QuickBooks is setup
correctly before you start working so you don’t have any issues as you go along. The most
important part of QuickBooks is the Chart of Accounts. I can’t stress that enough. Every single
thing you do is going to relate back to one of the accounts in the Chart of Accounts. Let me go
ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I’ll show you what it looks like and then we’ll go ahead
and customize it.

We’re here on our home screen and the way you’re going to open the Chart of Accounts is right
here. It says Chart of Accounts.

I briefly showed you this a little bit earlier when we were going through the preferences and I
was showing you how to turn these general ledger numbers on or off over on the left. Just as a
review if you want to turn them on or off you go back up to Edit, you go down to Preferences,
this is going to be all the way at the top under the group called Accounting, you want to be under
Company Preferences, and you can check or uncheck this Use Account Numbers. And then
when you click OK you’re going to see you’ve turned them on or off.

Everything in QuickBooks relates to back to one of these. So it’s very important that you have
them all set up and that they’re set up correctly. What I’d like to do is take some time and go
through this with you so that you know which ones you’ll need to set up and how to choose the
proper type when you set them up. So this might be a good place for you to get your pen and
paper and take some notes.

You’ll notice this list is set up by different types over here. And if you have some types that are
the same, like these expense accounts, they’re going to be in alphabetical order like I said or
they’ll be in numerical order if you have the numbers turned on. But let’s start at the top because
the first type that you’ll want to set up are what we call Bank Accounts. Right now if you wanted
to write a check you don’t even have a bank account to write one out of, so you need to set that
up.

Now when we talk about bank accounts here’s a list of the different accounts you’ll want to
create. Any checking, savings, money market accounts that you have, you set them each up
separately. Some companies have a little petty cash box they keep in the office with $100 in it.
You may want to set that up as a bank account. That’s kind of up to you.

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You’ll also want to set up a bank account if you have a lot of small cash expenditures that go out.
A lot of small business owners will spend cash for things that are legitimate business expenses.
And if you want to track those they have to have some way to get into QuickBooks. I would
actually call those accounts Cash Expenditures.

Also if you use PayPal or if you accept Square or a lot of people are starting to accept Bitcoin
now. All of those are bank accounts. You set them up like you would any bank account and if
you need to move money for example out of PayPal into checking that’s just a transfer. That’s all
that is. But those are bank accounts.

Let me show you how to set up any new account and we’re going to start with the bank accounts
and set up our checking.

You can actually right click anywhere. That’s the easiest way. And here you’re going to see your
New, Edit, Delete, and Make Inactive. I did want to mention that if you didn’t right click, at the
very bottom left of your screen it says Account and here’s the same options right here. I wanted
to point out the Delete option. Any list in QuickBooks, if you’ve ever used an item from that list
even one time you can’t delete it. And that’s because it plays into your numbers. So you really
shouldn’t be able to delete it. But if you don’t want to see it on the list you can make it inactive.
A good example would be a bank account you use for a while and then you close that account.
You can make it inactive which hides it from this list and then if you want to activate it you
could at any time. You would do that by clicking this little checkbox at the very bottom that says
Include Inactive and then they would show up. But let’s go ahead and set up our bank account.

I just right clicked anywhere and I’m going to choose New. And here’s where it asks what type
of account is this and we’re going through all of these, but this is a bank account. Here’s some
more examples like I mentioned of what bank accounts might be. I’m going to hit Continue. And
if you forget and you pick the wrong type on the previous screen they give you another choice
here to pick the correct type.

You can name your bank account anything you want to call it. I’m going to call mine Checking,
but in real life if you wanted to call it the name of your bank or if you wanted to call one
Operating and one Payroll, you can call them anything you want as long as you know what that
is.

This is not a subaccount of another one. I’ll get into that in a little bit. You do have a place for a
description. So if you wanted to say this is the operating account. Someone would have to be on
this screen to actually see this. So that’s why it’s an optional thing.

You do not need your bank account or your routing number in here. Do not fill these in. It’s
more of an informational type field.

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One thing you will need though is the opening balance. QuickBooks has to know what amount of
money to start with and a date. You can always enter something prior to this. And if you don’t
know how much your ending balance is you can always stick a penny in there and change it
later. But I’ll just put $1,000 in there for now and I’ll pick the beginning of this month let’s say.

Now a couple things. When you’re typing in money in QuickBooks you cannot put dollar signs.
It’ll put the comma in for you automatically. You would just type the 1000-period like I did and
then it would populate it for you.

Let’s talk about the date a little bit. What date should you start with? In QuickBooks you’ll want
to start with the beginning of the fiscal year as one choice. Let’s say it’s October and you just
purchased QuickBooks. It’s up to you if you want to go back to January 1 and enter everything
or the beginning of your fiscal year. I’d make it correspond with your bank statement. I’m going
to click OK here and you can see it says I have $1,000 as of 10/1.

Now just a quick little nice thing. If you write a lot of checks you can have it pop up when you
reach a certain check number and tell you to order some more. And by the way if you use checks
you do not have to buy them from Intuit. You can buy them anywhere you like.

You’re going to see all over QuickBooks there are options for Save & Close and Save & New.
Save & Close means save this, close it, and it’ll show you the screen behind this. Save & New
means save this and put me on a new blank one because I have another bank account to enter.
I’m going to Save & Close and you’re going to see that there is a checking account right back
here. Now what this is, just so you’ll know, is if you want to set up bank feeds, meaning you
want to do online banking, they are encouraging you to go ahead and do that now. But we’re not
going to do it right now. We’ll talk about that later.

Here’s your checking account. And you can see that you have $1,000 in there.

Now you don’t need to know this because most of you aren’t accountants but any time you have
a debit, you have a credit for something and just to show you the offsetting entry, it’s right here
where it says Opening Balance Equity and there’s your $1,000.

Let me go ahead and set up a savings account. We’ll go through the same process and I’ll show
you again how this works.

I’m going to right click and choose New. I’m going to choose a bank account and click
Continue. I’m going to call this one Savings and I’m going to come down and enter the opening
balance as $5,000. I’ll go ahead and set it for 10/1 and click OK and then Save & Close. Now
you’ll notice that I have $1,000 in my checking and $5,000 in my savings and opening balance
equity is now $6,000.

By the way if your opening balance equity is ever a negative number that’s an actual picture of
what your books look like so don’t change that.

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Let’s go ahead and talk about the next type which would be your asset accounts. You’ll see
there’s a few of these here.

An asset is something that makes your business more valuable. You might have inventory, for
example. You might actually have property, you might have vehicles, chairs, desks, lamps. All of
those are assets to your business. What you want to do in QuickBooks is set up all of your asset
accounts as big buckets. That means don’t set up one for every vehicle you own. Set up one
called Vehicles. Here’s a list of some common ones that you’ll see set up that you can throw
items into. Remember you want this list to be between seven to ten, no more than that because no
one wants to read a 100 page balance sheet or a profit and loss that’s really long. So make sure
that you keep this at a minimum.

QuickBooks does not do depreciation, just so you’ll know that. And that’s because there’s so
many different ways to do it and that’s where your accountant is going to be very helpful to you.
So make sure that you get with your accountant on how to set up your asset accounts.

You’re going to see two terms in accounting when dealing with assets. You’re going to have
fixed assets which are things you plan to keep long term. That would be the building, the vehicle,
and so forth. And you also have liquid assets which QuickBooks calls Other Current. Those are
things like inventory, for example. You’re worth more right now because you have those chairs
in the backroom but your goal is to sell them and get them out the door. So that’s how your
assets should be set up. And you need those because if you go to the bank, for example, to get a
loan they’re going to want to know what your assets are.

Let’s go ahead and stop the video now. I want you to go ahead and go over to part two with me
and we’ll continue talking about how to set up this Chart of Accounts.

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Video: Chart of Accounts – Part 2

Cindy: Okay. We are almost through with module three. We’ve been talking about how to
customize the QuickBooks environment in this module. This is the second part of the Chart of
Accounts. So I want to go ahead and continue where we left off from part one.

I believe when we left off we were talking about our asset account so let’s move down to the
next type.

Now one type that’s not here I want to mention is your accounts receivable. Accounts receivable
would be any invoices you’ve created that you have not yet been paid for. The reason you don’t
see it here is because there aren’t any invoices in here yet. Once an invoice is created it will
automatically create the accounts receivable account in this list for you. The same thing with
accounts payable, will just show up a little further down the list. Once you enter a bill then
QuickBooks will create the accounts payable account for you. So you don’t need to set those two
up.

The next type are your liabilities. A liability is something the business owes, like a loan for
example. You’re going to hear two terms referred to in accounting. Those are short term
liabilities and QuickBooks calls short term liabilities Other Current like you see a few here.
Those are things you’re going to pay off in 12 or 13 months. A long term liability is something
you’re going to pay off in more than 12 or 13 months, like a five year car note or 30 year
mortgage.

The two that are set up here are my payroll liabilities and my sales tax payable. And those are set
up because I told it in the Easy Step Interview that I do collect sales tax and I do payroll. The
reason these are considered liabilities is because if you think about payroll you actually deduct
taxes from an employees paycheck and you have to forward those pretty quickly. The same thing
with sales tax. You charge a customer sales tax and then you have to forward it. So that is
something that you owe and it’s short term.

Let’s go ahead and set up a car payment so you can see how you would set up a long term
liability.

I’m just going to right click anywhere and choose New. Now this is a little misleading right here
because if you choose their loan option they have here it assumes a short term liability. You want
a long term, remember if it’s going to be paid off in more than 12 or 13 months. So you’re going
to choose that option right down here where it says Long Term Liability. I’m going to hit
Continue and then here is where you can name the account. You can name the account anything
you want. If you want to call it Car Payment, if you want to call it the name of your bank and the
word Loan at the end that is up to you. You’re going to see a lot of times in accounting that
accountants like to name loans notes payable. So I might say something like Notes Payable Auto
Loan. But that is totally up to you what you’d like to name this account. There is a place for a

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description and a place for the account number. Again those are optional. I am going to enter the
opening balance. This means as of the start date of your company file how much money did you
owe on that loan. I’m just going to put in here $5,000 and I’ll go ahead and choose October 1 in
this case and click OK. Notice when I Save & Close I now have a new long term liability and I
owe $5,000.

Something I see often is people will actually make their car payment and they’ll put it to an
expense account down here. Your car payment is a loan. It is a long term liability. Don’t you
want to know how much you have left to pay on that loan? And this is the only way to know that
because this balance is going to come down. Every time you make a payment on this loan make
sure you put it to this account. That’s where the principle is going to go. And then it’ll come
down and you’ll know about where you are at any given time with that loan.

You can set up as many of those as you like. Another one just to think about is sometimes a
small business owner will actually put, let’s just say they put $1,000 into the business to start it.
You might consider it the cost of doing business but you may also set it up as a loan so that the
business can pay you back when it has the money to do so. That’s how you’re going to set up
your liabilities.

The next one I want to talk about are credit cards. A scenario that I see all the time is someone
will receive their Visa statement in the mail and they will enter it as a bill in QuickBooks. That is
not the correct way to do this because what happens is if you don’t pay the entire bill then the
next month when the statement comes in it’s going to say you owe $800 let’s say and $300 of it
was leftover from last time. So you’re going to have this snowball effect going where you never
pay off all the bills and it’s just not the right way to do things. Credit cards should be set up in
your Chart of Accounts this way.

I’m going to right click and I’m going to choose New. Notice Credit Card is on the list. And I’m
going to hit Continue. You can name your credit card anything you want. I’m going to call mine
Visa for now. I’m going to go ahead and put in my opening balance. Let’s say it was $1,800 as
of my start date. And I’ll Save & Close. And now you’ll notice you have a Visa card and you
owe $1,800 on the card. Again you want to be able to look at this and see at any time how much
you have left to pay on the credit card.

Let me just show you something.

If I go back to my home screen for a minute. Do you see this right here, Enter Credit Card
Charges? That was not here before I created that account. The correct way to enter credit card
charges is right here. You enter each charge separately and when you make a payment you go
back and make the payment to the Visa Credit Card account. We’ll spend time on that in a later
module but this is the correct way to do this.

We’ve got a few more to talk about. Let’s talk about equity.

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Think about the word Equity. It means Equal. Any time that you want to move money from one
account to another you might want to consider that equity. Here’s a good example. As a small
business owner you own the business. So technically if you take $100 out at the ATM machine
of the business account to spend it on whatever you’re going to do technically that’s already your
money. You might buy gas, you might be buying some pizza for the kids, who knows. That’s
considered an owner equity, any time you take money out of the business. If you put money into
the business it’s considered an owner contribution. Many times if you’re a very small business
owner and you’re not incorporated then that’s how you would pay yourself through what they
call an owner draw. That would be owner equity. Let me show you how I see this set up often.

Often I’ll see Account New and the type is Equity. And what happens often is you’ll see there is
a name for the main account and then I’ll Save & New and now I’ll set up the contributions and
the draws like I was just mentioning and here’s a good idea of how to use a subaccount.
Contributions is a subaccount of Owner. And let me do one more. I’m going to do draws. And
again that’s a subaccount of Owner. Now when I Save & Close look at how this looks now. It’s a
main account with two subaccounts below. So when you take money out you’re going to put it to
Owner Draw and when you put money in you’re going to put it to Owner Contributions.

Be careful about taking a lot of money out of your business, especially if you are incorporated
because you want to keep your contributions more than your draws. Remember if you’re not
incorporated you do pay yourself through draws. So that’s a little different. But get with your
accountant on this because you don’t want the IRS looking at you because you’re taking all this
money out of your business.

Moving down the list. Let’s talk about Income.

Income is the sale you make for the business. You create an invoice and you make income. You
can just keep the one account if you want or you can have multiple different types of income
accounts, but you don’t want to have too many here.

The next one you see here is what they Cost of Goods Sold. Sometimes you have to buy a
product or you have to buy a service to make a sale for your business. We call that a Cost of
Goods Sold. Sometimes people will put things like that under expenses and that’s okay too. It’s
just where you’d like to see it.

Now the largest type that you’re going to see here will be your expense accounts. And you’ll see
we’ve got a few here but there’s quite a few more you’ll probably want to add. Just looking
down this list I see that automobile, for example. Yes, I can put the gas, the carwash, all of that
under automobile expense, but if I ever wanted to pull out a report to see how much I spend in
gas I wouldn’t be able to do that because there’s no subaccount below. So here’s a good example
of adding subaccounts.

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I’m going to add gas. So I’ll right click on Automobile and I’ll say New. It will be an expense
account because it has to be the same type as the main account. I’m going to call it Fuel just to be
a little more professional here. It’ll be a subaccount of Automobile. And I’ll Save & Close. See
that? And then I would go in if I wanted to and add repairs and maintenance.

Going down the list I’ve got Computer & Internet. There’s Insurance expense. Often businesses
have several different types of insurance. They might have car insurance. They might have health
insurance. They might have all kinds of different insurances, workman’s comp, all of that that
they need to track. And often they’ll put it all under insurance as subaccounts.

You’ll notice there’s Payroll expenses down here. So you may want to put some subaccounts
there if you wanted to add, for example, your fee for the payroll service, if you wanted to add
your fee for the net of all of your paychecks. There’s lots of things you can put under payroll
expenses.

Professional Fees. A lot of times I’ll see the accountant as a subaccount. I will see the attorney as
a subaccount. You’ve got Repairs & Maintenance.

Telephone. I always thought this was weird that telephone wasn’t automatically under utilities.
The way you would change that is right click on Telephone and Edit. This is how you edit an
account. Just make it a subaccount of Utilities and Save & Close.

You also have an account at the bottom called Ask My Accountant. This is where you’re going
to put things that you really don’t know what to do with right now and later you can go and move
them or talk to your accountant about them.

That’s a real quick summary of how you need to set up your Chart of Accounts.

Why don’t I have you go ahead and go over to section four now with me and we’re going to take
a quick look at one of the sample files QuickBooks has. I want to show you that once you get
yours set up what the preferences will look like, what the Chart of Accounts will look like, and
that way you know that you’re on the right track when you’re actually working on setting yours
up. Go ahead and flip over to section four and I will meet you there.

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Video: QuickBooks Sample File

Cindy: We are about to wrap up module three and we’ve been talking in this module about
customizing the QuickBooks environment. I wanted to go ahead and take you into one of the
QuickBooks sample files here in this last section just so you can see how once you get your
company file set up yours would sort of look like this one.

This is the file that we had set up. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to the menu to click on
File and I’m going to choose Close Company Log Off. I think I told you in the very beginning
that here’s where you could open a sample file and these are some that QuickBooks set up for
you so that you could see how to properly set things up or to know which order to do things. I’m
going to use the sample product-based business, which happens to be a construction company by
the way. So you may not use every feature in here but at least it has everything set up.

In the sample file this one’s going to use the date of December 15, 2022. Now when we get this
open the first thing I want to do is just show you real quick a little bit about how the Chart of
Accounts is set up here. I’m going to go over here and click on it and you’re going to see that
this is really how a Chart of Accounts should look. Let me go ahead and just hide this icon bar
on the left so you can see this. They have their general ledger numbers turned on and you can see
they have checking account, savings account like we did. There’s the accounts receivable I
mentioned. Remember that this would be a total of any invoices you’ve created that you have not
yet received. Also here’s one I didn’t mention and that’s called Undeposited Funds. We’ll
actually talk a little bit about that later, but this is money that you’ve actually received from
customers and you have not yet deposited it into the bank.

Going down the list we had talked about all the different asset accounts. We talked a little bit
about credit cards, if you remember that. We talked a little bit about liabilities and you can see
how they have theirs set up. Their payroll liabilities, they’ve got broken out into subaccounts as
well, which is a great way to do this because then you know how much you have to pay in each
of these categories.

There’s some loans like we talked about. They actually have some vehicle loans. This is the
balance due on those loans. Equity. We talked a little bit about equity.

Some terminology. When we did ours in section three, part two we actually went in and set up
Owner and I had you set up subaccounts underneath called Draws and Contributions. And that’s
certainly okay. Here’s some other terminology. Whenever you see Capital Stock like they have
that’s your owner contribution. Or if you see Shareholder Distribution that’s where you took
money out of the business. So that’s the owner draw.

They’ve got several income accounts here. You can see those. Cost of Goods, we talked about
that.

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Then look at this long list of expense accounts. And this is more like how I’d like you to set your
up with all these subaccounts. We did automobile. We did fuel. They’ve got a few more under
there. They’ve got insurance. Here’s a common question. Should insurance be under automobile
or under insurance? It can go either way. It’s just how you want to see it.

You can see they’ve got their payroll expense set up. They’ve got professional fees. They’ve
actually set up their taxes and you can just see all the way down the list. So it looks very similar
to what we did. They just put a lot more accounts in here.

And remember if you don’t know how to do this then I want you to come here and see how they
did it. There’s also a Search up here that we talked about when we were looking at some of the
new features of QuickBooks. So if you wanted to search for one you know is in this list you can
do that.

Let me go ahead and close this. And also on your home screen notice a few things. They actually
have told it that they do payroll. So you’re going to see all of the payroll options are set up here.
Remember if you didn’t do payroll you wouldn’t see those. Or if you said you don’t do purchase
orders up here, for example, you won’t see all that.

That gives you a good idea of how to get your QuickBooks set up correctly before you start
working. We are now ready to start working in QuickBooks and doing some real invoicing and
some payables and things like that. So let’s go ahead and move over to module four and we’re
going to start off talking about working with customers and jobs.

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Chapter 4 – Working with Customers & Jobs

Video: Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 1

Cindy: Hey. Welcome back. We are now ready to actually start working in QuickBooks. We’re
down to module four where we’re going to talk in this module about how to work with
customers and jobs. This is section one and in this section what I want to talk to you about is
how to set up customers and then jobs for those customers. Customers are people that buy from
you. It could be business advice from you. This is where you make the income from your
business. Some businesses actually have jobs for each customer. Construction is a prime
example because they might have a customer where they remodel multiple homes. That could be
multiple jobs they do for that customer. So let me show you how to set those up properly so that
you can track all your customers and jobs.

We’re here in the sample file in QuickBooks. This is Rock Castle Construction. And I want to
show you how to get to a list of your customers and your jobs.

This is your customer center. You can click on it right here but remember you can also get to it
by clicking up here on Customers or if you went to Customers on the menu you could get to it
that way as well. But I’m going to click on the customer center and you’re going to see all the
customers and jobs that they have set up.

Here’s a list of your customers and your jobs. Notice they’re in alphabetical order. This is your
preference of how you want to set this up. If you don’t want them alphabetically, maybe you
have numeric numbers for your customers, that’s certainly okay. But they chose to do it
alphabetically.

You’ll notice underneath a customer if there are jobs you’ll see them right here. Here’s Kristy
Abercrombie and there’s three jobs for Kristy. When you click on a particular customer or job
you can see the balance that they owe you for that entire customer or per job. And this column
over here is where you can attach a file. So if you had some file, maybe a Word doc or some
Excel file that you’d already created related to this you can actually attach it right here. If you
saw I just double clicked where it said Attachment. I can scan my computer and find a file by
clicking here or use the actual scanner and scan a document that I have already. You just drag
and drop them into here. That’s another way to do it if you’ve got it open down there. And then
when you’re done you just click Done and you’ll see it as an attachment right over here, a little
paperclip will show up.

This is the information about the customer, their name and their address, their email. You can see
that Kristy’s email is actually a link. So if I wanted to email something to Kristy from here I
could do that.

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Over here you’re going to see the notes for Kristy. And I’ll show you in a few minutes how they
get there but these are the notes. And if you have any that are here all the time they’re pinned is
what they call it.

And then here’s some reports. Now notice I can also drag this bottom part down a little bit if I
need to see it. But here’s some of the reports I just mentioned if you wanted to run these and
they’re related to this customer.

You can also get a map to Kristy’s address and some directions. This will actually take you out
to, it’s not MapQuest. I think it’s Intuit’s version of MapQuest.

Down here at the bottom there’s a tab that says Transactions. And this is where you’re going to
see every transaction for Kristy Abercrombie in this case. You can see there are payments she’s
made, there’s an estimate they created, there’s an invoice, a check. You can kind of see the list.
If you wanted to go to one of these all you have to do is double click on it and you’ll open up
that particular transaction. This is an invoice that was done for Kristy. I’m going to close it. I’m
not going to use the top X. That’ll close QuickBooks but the one right below it I’ll use to close
that transaction.

When you’re working with transactions you can show all of the transactions. Maybe you just
wanted to see the payments you received from Kristy. You can narrow the list by choosing that
from the list. Or you can go back and show all the transactions. You can filter this list if you
want. If you want to just see this fiscal year, if you want to see just this month you can look
down this list and pick a different date range as well.

Down at the bottom of this list you’re going to see where it says Manage Transactions and
there’s a down arrow. If I wanted at this point to create any of these items for Kristy I could do it
from here. But chances are I’m not going to be on this screen when I’m ready to invoice Kristy
or ready to receive her payment, but it is an option there if you want it.

There’s also a Run Reports down at the bottom. So if you wanted to view a report based on this
information you could do that as well. We call these Quick Reports. So keep that in mind for
later when we talk about reports.

The next tab over says Contacts. This would be any contact you wanted to keep track of related
to Kristy. You can see there’s a couple of them here already. We’ve got Steve and Kristy. If I
wanted to go to the bottom here I could choose to add a new contact or edit the one I’m clicked
on already. So if I edit the Kristy contact, for example, this is what it looks like. I can go in and
put in Kristy’s job title, her first and last name. And any of these fields here I’ll be able to change
what that field represents by clicking from the dropdown arrow on the left there. She’s also set
up as a primary contact. I could set her as a secondary or an additional contact. You can have as
many contacts as you like in this list.

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The To Do’s is the next tab over and I want to show you real quick how a To Do works.

There are different types of To Do’s. I’m going to set one up here. I want to go to the bottom
where it says Manage To Do’s and create a new one. A To Do could be a phone call, a fax, an
email, a meeting, an appointment, or a task related to Kristy. Let’s say that I have to set up a
meeting with Kristy and it’s pretty high priority. Notice she’s already here so unless I need to
change that I don’t need to click the dropdown. And then I can also set the due date for this. So if
I need to set this by the 31st of October, I can also check the box and set a time if I’d like. So here
in the details is where I’m going to say Set up lunch meeting with Kristy to discuss kitchen
remodel job. And then down at the bottom is this particular To Do. Is it active, has it already
been done or is it inactive? And I’ll just click OK. And what you’re going to see now is it’s on
my list here. So if you have a list of To Do’s they can be sorted by type if you like. You might
want to look at all the ones that are active, all the ones that are done, and also you can set a date
range. Once you complete a To Do you can actually just double click where it says Done over
here and that’ll take you here where you can change this to say Done down at the bottom. And
then it has a checkmark there. To Do’s are a great way to keep track of things that you have to
take care of related to this customer.

The Notes is the next tab over and you saw notes up here a few minutes ago. You can actually
add as many notes as you like to this. You just come down to the bottom, click the arrow, and
choose Add New, and this is where you would add a new note. Notice if you do add a note you
can also turn it into a To Do from here, which is really pretty cool. If this is a note that you want
pinned you can check the little box. And basically what pinned means is it’s going to stay here so
you can see it any time you need to.

The next thing you’re going to see is a list of your sent emails. I mentioned to you that in
QuickBooks you can email any form. A form would be an invoice, a form might be a purchase
order. And what will happen is now it will automatically be listed here so if you wanted to go
back and review those at any time you could.

A couple of other quick things just to make note of. Here’s another way to attach a file up here.
And this is another way to edit your customer. If I click there I can go in and edit anything I need
to related to this customer.

Up at the top you have New Customer & Job. This is where we’re going in just a minute to add a
new customer. Also you have the ability to add new transactions. We’ve already seen this down
at the bottom when we were looking under the Transactions tab. Do you remember this list?
That’s what this is. If I happen to be here and I’m ready to invoice my customer I can, but
chances are I’m not going to be on this screen when I’m ready to do that.

I can also print a customer list from here if I want or maybe one that has their transactions as
well.

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The Excel option will let you export your customer list or export the transactions. You can also
import those from Excel or you can copy and paste them from Excel, either one.

And then the Word option. One of the features that QuickBooks has is the ability to do mail
merges with Microsoft Word. This is where you could go and have Word do a merge with
QuickBooks to prepare some of these different letters that you see and they’ll go directly to
Kristy. We’ll be covering some of this in a later module.

And then the last thing you see is the income tracker here, which is going to take you back here
where you can see a list of all of your customers in like a list form. Let me go ahead and close
that because we’re going to look at the income tracker in section nine and spend more time on
that.

That’s a quick overview of how this customer information screen works. What I’d like to have
you do now is go ahead and go over to part two of this section. I’m going to show you how to
actually set up a new customer and a new job so that way when you’re looking at reports you’ll
be able to distinguish the jobs from the customer and it’ll be set up properly.

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Video: Working with Customers & Jobs – Part 2

Cindy: Let’s go ahead and finish up working with customers. We’re working in module four and
this is going to be section one, part two. I want to show you how to go ahead and set up a new
customer and a new job.

You’ll notice right above the customer list it says New Customer & Job. And if you drop the list
down there it’ll say New Customer. The first thing it asks you for is the name of the customer.
I’m going to plug in Tom Allen as my new customer. Notice that I plugged in last name, comma,
first name to keep the consistency with how they did it in this list here.

The next thing you’ll notice is the place to put in the opening balance. Let’s say that Tom owed
me $1,000 as of my company start date. My actual accounting would be correct but I wouldn’t
have any way to go back and see that this was actually three separate invoices that total $1,000. I
like to go back and put the invoices in and leave this blank.

The first tab you see at the bottom is the address info. You’ll notice here it has a place to put in
his company, his first and last name, and some other information. I’m going to say that Tom
works for Smith Brothers and let’s say we plug in his name here. Here’s a very common
question. If I have Tom’s name here why do I need it here? QuickBooks will do mail merges
with Microsoft Word. It’ll pull from these fields, not this field here. So you do want to have that
plugged in. I’ve got a place where I can put in Tom’s job title, his phone, his fax, if he has a
website, those types of things. And these fields can represent anything you want.

You might have noticed as you started typing in his company name and his actual full name that
it populated down here in this Address Details section. This is where if you’re typing an invoice
to Tom it’s going to pull this block onto his invoice. You’ll need to click in here and set it up the
way you’d like to see it. So you’re going to be able to have in Attention: Tom Allen, his address,
and so on and so forth.

If you actually ship items, sometimes you might have a customer that wants a bill sent here and
the shipping of the items to another place. And you can ship it to a new address or you can copy
the existing one over here.

The next tab down is your payment settings. And a lot of these fields are just informational.
Some companies assign their customers account numbers. This is where you could plug that in.
You may also want specific payment terms for this customer. So you can set those here. You can
see that every customer can have different payment terms. Does this customer have a preferred
delivery method? Meaning do they like things emailed to them or mailed? I notice faxed isn’t on
the list. I guess no one faxes anymore. Hmm. There’s a preferred payment method. How does
Tom prefer to pay you? Does he usually pay you with cash? Visa?

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Here’s a place to keep a customer’s credit card number down here. This would be for a customer
who buys from you on a regular basis and they just have asked you to keep their card number on
file and charge it when they purchase something. I would never keep this information in here.
You’re liable as a company if someone gets into your computer and gets this information. So if
you need this just keep it somewhere else.

You can set a credit limit for your customer over on the right. What would happen is if you set a
credit limit and then you invoice them more than their credit limit allows it will pop up and say,
“Hey. They’ve exceeded the credit limit. Would you still like to sell them something?” and you
could do that.

You can also set up price levels for your customers. So if, for example, all of your commercial
customers get a 10% discount then you can choose Add New and set that up and give it a name
like Commercial in this case and it will automatically calculate that for you.

Also if you want to let your customers pay you online you can choose either one of these. Now
we talked a little bit about this in the preferences section. You would have to set this up with
Intuit. But what would happen is when you actually email your invoice to your customer it
would have a place on there that says Click Here to Pay Me and they would click and then it
would allow you to put in this information.

Okay the next tab down says Sales Tax Settings. If you charge sales tax to your customers this is
where you can tell QuickBooks if this customer is a taxable customer or not. If this person is
which tax should they get charged? We’re going to spend a lot of time on sales tax in a later
module, but this is where you would set that up.

And also the resell number. This is designed for, let’s say that I sell chairs in my store and you
sell chairs in your store. You can apply to your state for a tax exempt certificate. Meaning when
you buy them from me you don’t have to pay sales tax. And this is a place where I could just
keep that information in case I get audited.

The next tab is additional info. If you’d like to categorize your customers notice they have
commercial and residential customers here. Maybe you have sales reps in your organization. You
can track which sales rep works with this customer.

And these fields that you see over here, usually this is blank in QuickBooks because you create
these yourself. You come down here to Define Fields, you type in the name of the field you’d
like to create, and then check off if you want that field to be available when you look at
customers, vendors, or employees so you don’t have to set it up three times.

The last tab is your Job Info tab. Now when you’re setting up a customer that doesn’t have
anything to do with the job so you wouldn’t use it here. But this would be if it was a job the
description of the job, the type of a job if you have job types, maybe the status of the job, the

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start date, projected end date, and the actual end date. Those are the things you’ll need to set up
when you create a new customer.

I’m going to click OK and see if Tom Allen is in the list. And there he is right there.

One thing I’ve noticed in here, it doesn’t put him alphabetical automatically. What you’d need to
do is click the heading right above the names. So click the word Name and it resorts the list for
you and you can see him down there alphabetically.

Let me show you how to add a job for Tom. I’m clicked on Tom and I’m going to drop the list
down and I’m going to say Add Job. And all you do here is give your job a name. I’m going to
say it’s a kitchen remodel job. You really don’t have to fill in anything else here unless some of
this happens to be different. You see it pull the information from the actual customer. I’m going
to click OK and now you’ll see it’s indented underneath Tom indicating there’s a job for Tom
Allen.

That’s how you set up customers and jobs.

Oh, one more quick thing. When you go back to Customer & Job you can add multiple
customers and jobs at the same time. You’re basically going to click here and then it’s going to
let you type in all the information about this customer and/or job all the way across. If you had
this list already in Excel you could copy and paste this and that’s how you would add multiple
customers and jobs. It does not add their transactions, only the actual customer information. I’m
going to close this and now we’re finished setting up customers and jobs.

What I’d like to do now is we’ve got customers set up so now we can actually start estimating
jobs. Let’s go over into section two and I’ll show you how to create estimates.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Video: Estimates – Part 1

Cindy: Alright. Welcome back. We’re working in module four and in this module we are talking
about how to work with customers and jobs. We’ve already gone through in section one and set
up some customers and a job for our customer. Now I want to go through and show you how to
create estimates for your customers.

An estimate is basically a quote for a job. Estimating is just QuickBooks terminology.

Construction is a prime example because if I want to have my kitchen remodeled I’m going to
ask the company to give me a quote or an estimate on how much it’s going to cost to do the job.
All companies don’t use the estimate feature. And if you don’t that’s okay. It won’t be here if
you told it in the Easy Step Interview that you don’t use it. But if it is here and you don’t want to
use it just go straight over to the Create Invoices.

We’re going to go ahead and start with the estimate feature.

The first thing I want to point out is when you’re in this window you’re going to see this gray
area over on the right that just gives you a summary of customer information. Once I pull a
customer in like Tom Allen, for example, it’s going to show me any transactions already created
for Tom over here on the right. And if I wanted to edit one of those or go to them I could. If I
don’t want to see this I’m going to use this arrow and hide the history.

I’ve pulled in Tom Allen. Now when you’re using the job feature you want to always, always,
always click the job and not the customer. If you click the customer what’ll happen is when
you’re looking at reports sometimes it will say Other and you won’t know what that means.

What if I’m here and Tom Allen has actually asked me to give him a quote on a sunroom? I
don’t have sunroom in my list. I’ve not set that up yet. One of the really cool things about
QuickBooks is I don’t have to go back to the customer center, set it up, come back here. I can do
it right from here. I can either choose Add New or in the case of a job I would probably do this.
I’m going to delete the kitchen remodel and leave the colon. That’s important. You leave the
colon. And then I’m going to type the name of my new job which is a sunroom. If you forget that
just look over here. It says Customer:Job. Set it up the exact same way. When you’re finished hit
the Tab or Enter key to leave the field and it will say Sunroom is not in the list. Would you like
to add it? I typically Quick Add Jobs. If it’s a new customer I go through the set up process and
put all their information in. but I’m going to quick add. And now if I look at the dropdown I’ll
always have two jobs for Tom Allen.

If you’re using the Class feature here’s the list that you can pick from. Remember try to be
consistent. If you’re going to use it use it on all of your transactions so you get accurate reports.

This is a list of different templates that I could use for this estimate for Tom Allen. In a later
module we will talk about customizing these or adding your own.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Here’s the date of the transaction. You can change that to any date that you would like. And
here’s the estimate number. What happens in QuickBooks is there are many features that are
automatically numbered, like checks, invoices, estimates, and they’re all going to start with
number one. You wouldn’t want to send this out with number one because they would know
they’re the very first customer. So if it’s your very first estimate or invoice you’re creating just
put in some number and then it will number sequentially after that for you. If you like to have the
letters of the alphabet in your estimate then you can certainly type those in as well.

You can see also it brought in the information that I had typed in when I set up the customer. If
you happen to be looking at this and you say, “Hey. His zip code is wrong” or you want to
change something here go ahead and change it. And what will happen is when you’re finished
and you go to the bottom and you Save & Close down here it’s going to pop up and say, “Do you
want to change this permanently in Tom’s record?” And you’ll say Yes and that’s the quick way
to change it.

Now down here at the bottom if you click underneath where it says Item in that first line this is
where you’re going to start listing out the different items that you’d like on your estimate. Now
this is a list of items they have in the practice exercise. We’ll be setting up our own items in a
later module. But I want you to notice a couple things real quick and that is that items can be
different types of things that you do. It could be a service. Like you can see some of these are
services they provide. It might be an actual inventory part, a physical part. It might be what they
call noninventory. And you can just see there’s different types in this list.

What we’re going to do right now is we’re going to say that we’re going to charge for framing.
You’ll notice it brings in a description and all the information about framing on this line. If I
wanted to change this description or keep typing I can type as much as I want because this will
word wrap all day long.

Here is the quantity. Let’s say I’m going to charge for ten of these. And it pulls in the $55
because I had that in a setup. But let’s say I want to charge him $50 this time on this quote
because he’s a new customer. I can override that as a one time thing.

This is the unit of measurement. What that means is that if this is an item I sell by the foot, by the
yard, by the case I could have set up a list when I set up the items called Unit of Measurement
and it would have those items on the list and I could pick the one I want from the dropdown.

This is the markup column. You can mark an item up a dollar amount or a percentage. Let’s say
that I want to mark this up 30%. I’m going to type that with a percent sign in there and when I
tab through it will do the calculations for me.

This non means that for sales tax purposes this item is not taxable.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Now I’m going to add one more line here just to show you how this works. I’ll put in an
inventory item this time. This company sells wood doors and I’ll pick an exterior wood door.
Let’s say that I’m going to charge for two of these and I want to mark this up a dollar amount. I
want you to notice in this case that it has a markup there for me automatically which I’m going
to type over. But the reason the markup is there is because when this item was setup they put in
on average they buy it for a certain amount and on average they sell it for a certain amount. And
if you’ve done that it assumes the markup for you. But because I’m going to put in 1,000 I’m
going to override that and you can see it does the calculations for me.

Now I know you’re wondering about this markup and about the item. The customer will never
see this. And they’re also not going to see the item over here. I’ll show you a preview here in just
a few minutes.

You can add as many items to this as you want. Even if it goes past this line it’ll keep going
forever pretty much.

Down at the bottom it shows you the subtotal, the amount of the markup, if there’s sales tax
you’ll see that amount, and then a grand total here at the bottom.

Over on the left you have a place for customer message. These are things like “Have a nice day.
Thank you for your business.” They’ve got a couple set up. You can see that if you wanted to
add your own you could click Add New and create one. I’m going to go ahead and say “Please
sign this to indicate your approval”.

Also right below that is a place where you can put a memo and that’s really just for you to know.
It’s not going to show up anywhere on this estimate. And also you can see here is the customer
taxable and again that has to do with sales tax. So if you had set that up in the customer setup it
would have pulled automatically.

Let’s go ahead and do this. I’m going to have you go ahead and go over to part two of this video
and then we’re going to go to the top here and talk a little bit about these tabs.

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Video: Estimates – Part 2

Cindy: Alright. Welcome back. We are still talking about setting up estimates. We’re in module
four, Working with Customers & Jobs. This happens to be section two and it’s the second part of
section two. Let’s keep going with that estimate we’re creating.

Now that you have your items listed that you’d like to use on this estimate let’s look at some of
your options you have at the top of your estimate screen.

The first thing I want you to notice is this is the main tab and you have a ribbon below with some
options. And the first options happen to be the Find options. Let’s say you’re looking for an
estimate and you just can’t find it for some reason. You could use the left arrow to go to the
previous estimate or the right arrow to go to the next estimate. Keep in mind that everything in
QuickBooks is in date order. So you may have entered one prior to this and maybe backdated it
so it wouldn’t necessarily be the previous one. If you’re still having trouble finding that estimate
click this Find option and then you can type in some of this criteria to search and find an estimate
that you might be looking for.

The next option you’re going to see is the New option. This is the exact same thing as Save &
New that you see at the bottom of your screen way down here. And what Save & New basically
means is go ahead and save this estimate that you’re currently on and give me a new blank
estimate to fill out.

Next one over is Save. If you happen to be working on this for a while and you just don’t want to
lose the data that you’ve got in here go ahead and hit the Save button as often as you like and it
will save it. You also have an option if you click the down arrow to save this as a PDF file.

This Delete option allows you to delete this estimate. You can also create a copy. What if you
needed another estimate very similar to this one? Just create a copy and then go ahead and make
those few changes that you would need and it makes life a lot easier.

This Memorize option we’re going to talk about in a later module. But just to give you a quick
overview of what it means. If you have some sort of repetitive transaction and you don’t want to
have to remember to enter it every single month then go ahead and memorize it and let
QuickBooks do this for you.

Mark as Inactive is the next option over. And basically what happens with this is if you have a
transaction you’ve put in and you want QuickBooks to basically keep it on record but to kind of
ignore it and not pull it in to reports then you can mark it as inactive. If you do that then when
you’re ready a little bit later on you can mark it as active again and then it will pull onto reports.

Let’s take a look at the Print option next because here’s where the preview is that I wanted to
show you.

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You can always click to zoom in or out here. You’ll notice it’s very plain looking. It doesn’t
have the company logo, mine doesn’t have a telephone number. Those are all things that when
we get to the module where we talk about customizing templates we’ll be able to do. Right now
what I want you to notice is that there is no item here. The customer will not see the items that
you set up. Also notice they won’t see the markup column. So that way if you want to mark
something up a certain dollar amount or percentage your customer is not going to see it. At the
bottom you have your subtotal, sales tax, and total. That’s pretty much how this is set up. So like
I said, later on we will go through and talk about customizing your templates. For now I’m going
to hit Close at the top and go back to Print for a minute because I want to show you that you can
also go through and print the estimate for an envelope. I could also save this as a PDF file from
here if I wanted to.

The next option over is the email option. You have the ability to email any form over to your
customer if you’d like. And an estimate is an example of a form. If you had multiple estimates
that you wanted to send to your customer and you just wanted to send one email all you have to
do is check this little box that says Email Later right up here on each of the estimates you create
and then when you’re ready to email them come over here and choose the option that says Batch
and that will send them all at once.

The next thing over says Attach a File. If you have some files that are already in your computer
or you want to scan one at this point you can attach it and send it with this estimate. You might
have seen that option under Email. It says Estimate and Attach Files. That would send these
attached files. The way this works is when you click on this you can either go to your computer
and search for that file you’ve already created or if you have a scanner you can go ahead and
scan it now or you can drag and drop if you’ve got your file over in Outlook or in a folder in
another window possibly. You could just drag and drop it right in here.

I’m going to click Done at the bottom. I can go ahead and create an invoice at this point but
chances are that I’m not going to be on this screen when I’m ready to invoice my customer. So
you’ll see this is actually on your home screen as well.

Just to tell you what Start Project is, Intuit sells another software package called Mavenlink. And
it basically helps you manage your projects. If you’re familiar with Microsoft Project as an
example, this is just their version of it. They do have a free, I believe it’s a 30 day free trial.
You’d have to click here and go look at it, but then you’d have to pay for it after that.

The next tab over says Formatting. Here’s another way to preview the estimate. These options
here and then this one, what they allow you to do is customize the template. And I mentioned
we’re going to be doing that in a later module. So I’ll leave that for now.

Make sure you run Spellcheck when you’re done. It’s very interesting that people will run
spellcheck when they write letters in Microsoft Word for example or sometimes in an email. But
the worst thing you can do is send out some correspondence to your customers from QuickBooks

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

with misspelled words. Then you don’t look very professional. So make sure you run your
spellcheck.

The line you happen to be clicked on, let’s say I’m on the wood door, I can insert a line above it
if I like or go ahead and delete that line or copy the line. Once you copy it you can go down to
any other line and you’ll be able to paste that line in. So that way you don’t have to type it twice.

The Send/Ship option. You do have the ability like I mentioned earlier to go ahead and do mail
merges with Microsoft Word. This is where those options would be. And then you have the
Reports tab. And these are just some quick reports that you can run that are not just about this
customer but about all of your estimates for all the customers. You might do an estimate versus
actual, a price list. You can see these different reports. When we actually get into the reports
module we’ll go through each of those so you can see what they look like and what they show
you.

That’s pretty much your options there. The main tab is actually going to have the more common
things that you would be using. All of these you’re going to see when you go to invoices as well
and some other screens in QuickBooks.

That gives you quick overview of how estimating works in QuickBooks. What I’m going to do
now is Save & Close this at the bottom and I’m going to save my changes I’ve made. Now if I
wanted to go back to that estimate, yes I could click Estimates and hit the Previous button. But a
quicker way that I found is to go to the customer center and when you’re clicked on your
customer you’ll see your estimate right here. I can just double click and go right to it and there it
is.

That’s going to wrap up estimates guys. Let’s go ahead now and I’m going to Save & Close it
and I’m going to have you flip over to section three so we can talk about now creating invoices
based on these estimates.

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Video: Invoicing from Estimates – Part 1

Cindy: Now that we’ve actually created an estimate for our customer when we get ready to
invoice the customer QuickBooks makes it really easy because we can actually pull in either a
percentage of that estimate or we can pull in certain items that were on that estimate. Let me go
ahead and show you how to create an invoice for your customer based on an estimate you’ve
already created in QuickBooks.

One of the things we talked about was the fact that if you’re actually in an estimate you can
come up here and create an invoice right here in this estimate. But chances are you’re not going
to be on this screen when you’re ready to create that invoice. I would do it right here from the
home screen. You’ve already created your estimate. The next thing on the flowchart is to create
invoices.

The first thing I want to point out is that this looks very much like the estimate window did so
you’ll have a lot of the same options. Go ahead and pull in your customer and your job and you
should get this available estimates window that appears. This is a list of all of the estimates for
Tom Allen Sunroom that have not been pulled in all the way into an invoice. So even if you had
an estimate with one penny left on it it would show up in this list. If you don’t get this window
go back and double check that you pulled in the exact same customer and job that you had on the
actual estimate itself. Often what people will do is they will pick the customer on the estimate
and not the job and then they try to do it correctly here and there’s no exact match.

What I’m going to do is select the estimate I’d like to pull from and click OK. This is what we
call Progress Invoicing. Remember we turned that on in our preferences. Here I can do a couple
of different things. If I wanted to go ahead and pull in 100% or everything that’s on that estimate
into this new invoice I’m creating I could do it right now. I could create an invoice for a
percentage that I choose or the third one lets me create an invoice for selected items or different
percentages of each item. Here’s what that means. I’ll choose that one and click OK.

These are the two items that we had on our estimate. I can go to each item and tell it that I’d like
to pull in three of the framing and maybe one of the wood door. Or I prefer I might say of the
three of the framing and a certain percentage of the wood doors and that’s okay. However you
want to do it. You can type either in the quantity or the percentage field. I’m going to go ahead
and click OK and now it’s pulled in exactly what I asked it to.

If I wanted to add something to this I could. I can just go ahead and click on the down arrow and
go ahead and pull in whatever I’d like from this list. They have a delivery charge that I’d like to
pick so I’m going to go ahead and choose it from this list. And I’ll say I’d like to charge one of
these at $100. So you can keep adding as many lines as you like to this.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

If you wanted to put some generic text in here, you don’t need to put anything under the item.
Just go ahead and type in the description area and you can type all day long anything you want.
This will word wrap.

Also this is not the last line down here. You’ve got as many lines as you need to put in this
particular invoice.

Let’s go ahead and look around the edges of the screen and see what we’ve got.

First of all we’ve talked about our customer and job so let’s go over and look at the class. Make
sure if you’re using the class feature that you use it consistently. That way you’ll be able to run
accurate reports on classes. This is going to be the template they’re currently using for our
invoice and we’ll talk in another module about going in and customizing this.

This is the date that’s pulled onto our invoice. I can change this date to anything I’d like. I’ll go
ahead and pick the 27th of December. And it also has the next invoice number. You can choose
any number you like and it will number the next one sequentially.

Here is the Bill To information we had set up for our customer. And if you wanted to set up
some Ship To information for this one time only you can certainly do that by typing it in the list
over here.

Our customer has terms set up of net 30. If I decided to change this I could do it right here and
notice that it will default as the due date to 15 days from this date right up here.

If you needed to put in a customer message you can just choose it from this list here and if you
wanted to create a new one you choose Add New.

There is a place for a memo at the very bottom left and you can type anything you like in there.
That’s really just more for you to know.

This customer is taxable as far as sales tax is concerned. And this is the particular sales tax item
that they will be charged.

You’ll see it gives you the total of the sales tax, the total, any payments that had been applied,
and the balance due right down here at the bottom.

Now let’s go back up to the top and check out our main tab and see if there’s anything new. You
should be familiar with most of these already. We’ve talked about how to search. You can use
the arrows or the Find option. You know how to create a New, in this case an invoice. Here’s
your Save option. So if you wanted to just save this invoice or save it as a PDF you could do
that. Here’s your Delete option to delete this invoice and also make a copy.

We also talked a little bit about memorizing. If you needed this invoice to be in here every month
on the first of the month, for example, then you could create it and then memorize it.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Here’s your mark is pending. Remember that if I click this box it now says Pending Non-Posting.
That means that the invoice is in QuickBooks but it will not show up in reports until you go
ahead and mark it as final. And you’ll notice once you do this that it just says Invoice now.

Here’s where you can print your invoice. Let’s go ahead and preview it so you can see what it
looks like at this point. It’s very generic. You can see that it’s got all the information. Like your
company name, the word Invoice, but a lot of this you’d probably want to change. We’re going
to be able to do that when we get into talking about customizing our templates in a later module.
So I’ll just close that.

We did talk a little bit as well about batches. If I wanted to print the batch, meaning I create
several invoices and print them all at the same time. I’m going to actually check this little box,
Print Later, and then I could come and print the batch. Same thing with the email. If I wanted to
email a batch I could do that. You could also from here print your packing slip, shipping label,
and envelope if you needed to.

Here’s where you could attach a file. It could be that you’ve received some bills from your
vendor and you want to just attach them to this invoice. Whatever it might be you can go through
and actually attach them here so you don’t have to go look for them outside of QuickBooks later
on.

Now here’s something new I do want to talk to you about, Add Time/Cost. You may be in a
business where you accumulate different expenses during the month that you want to remember
to turn around and invoice the customer for at the end of the month. Instead of keeping all those
receipts or remembering what to invoice your customer for QuickBooks will do that for you.
Every time you have an expense, let’s say you used your credit card and made a purchase or if
you actually wrote a check, for example, there’s going to be a field that will ask you who is the
customer and the job. And if you have chosen the customer and job and checked the little billable
box next to it then what happens is when you come in here next time to invoice Tom Allen
Sunroom you can click this button, Add Time/Cost and you can pull in any time, expenses,
mileage, or items that you need to and it will just actually pull it right on to this invoice and that
way you can invoice the customer. So it’s a great little feature if you need that.

Here’s where you can also apply some credits. Now we haven’t talked about how to create a
credit memo yet but once you do create one this would be where you could come to apply it to
this invoice.

I want to go ahead and stop the video here because we’ve got several more things we need to
look at. Let’s go ahead and move over to part two and we’ll continue talking about invoicing
from estimates.

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Video: Invoicing from Estimates – Part 2

Cindy: Hey there. Welcome back. We are going to go ahead and finish up Invoicing from
Estimates in this section. This is module four, Working with Customers & Jobs. And we’re in
section three, part two.

When we left off we had just talked about the apply credits option. So let’s go ahead and go over
to the button that says Progress.

Now I can’t actually click on this right now to show you what it does, but if I had saved this
invoice already then it would show me the progress of that invoice. It would show me that it
started with an estimate, we’ve actually invoiced so much of it, and if I had any payments
applied or had deposited the money I would see that here as well.

The next one over says Receive Payments. If I’d received a payment from a customer for this
particular invoice then I would be able to go ahead and receive it here. But chances are I’m not
going to be on this screen when I’m ready to receive that payment. So I’d probably do it from the
home screen.

Here you can create a batch. What this allows you to do is if you have multiple customers that all
need to get the exact same invoice, maybe they’re each going to pay a third, for example, then
you can actually create a batch here and send it to those multiple customers.

Here’s where you can refund or credit your customer. Let’s say you have a customer who’s paid
this invoice in full but they’ve returned one of the wood doors and they want to get a refund.
This is where you could click to actually do that and it would walk you through the process. You
could also create a credit memo here if you wanted to and use it for a future invoice or for this
one at some point.

Let’s move over to the formatting tab. A lot of these options are going to be talked about when
we talk about customizing your template for this invoice. So we’ll be using these and then also
this one here.

Here’s your preview. We’ve already talked about previewing from the main tab. Here’s your
spellcheck. Make sure to run your spellcheck so that you look professional. And then we’ve also
talked about these. The line you’re clicked on, if you’d like to insert a line above it you can do
that, delete a line, or copy a line.

Let’s see what’s under Send/Ship. If you happen to be shipping items, you can actually ship right
from here. You can actually go ahead and set up your FedEx shipping, for example. You could
go down and say Schedule a FedEx Pickup and it would go right to the FedEx website and you
could login and go ahead and schedule that from here. Pretty cool how that works. Same thing
with UPS. And you saw the United States Postal Service was on that list as well.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

These here have to do with mail merges with Microsoft Word that we’re going to get into a later
module.

Under Reports there’s a few things just to be aware of. You’re going to have a quick report that
you can run and that’s going to be for this customer and this job. Transaction history, again if I
wanted to see all of the estimates related to this or all the payments related to this invoice I could.
I could also look at what they call a Transaction Journal. And it basically just shows you a
journal format. Everything that happened as far as with this invoice, estimating, payments,
etcetera.

These reports here aren’t about this particular invoice but they’re going to be about invoices in
general. So if I wanted to see all the open invoices, maybe my sales by customer, or average days
to pay I could look at those as well.

That gives you a quick overview of invoicing.

Let me go ahead and Save & New at the bottom and now that particular invoice is actually
saved. Now I do want to show you real quick some reports that you’ll want to look at when
you’re looking at invoices. We’re going to do reports in a whole different module but for now
I’m going to click on Reports on the menu, I’m going down to Customers & Receivables and I
want you to notice the Open Invoices. This particular report is going to show you any invoices
you’re created that have not yet been paid. You’ll notice that Tom Allen’s invoice is not on the
list because of the date. Always check your dates when you’re in a report. I’m going to change
this to the end of the month, for example, and as soon as I click in the report that will refresh it
and you’ll see there’s Tom Allen Sunroom.

Now let me flip back over to Create Invoices for a minute and go ahead and create the last
invoice for that particular estimate. I’m going to pull in my customer and my job. Here’s my
available estimates window. I’m going to choose the estimate I’d like to pull from and click OK.
This time notice the first option is a tad different. It asks if I’d like to create an invoice for the
remaining amounts of the estimates. I’m going to do that. So I’ll click OK and now you’ll see
that everything that wasn’t yet pulled in has been pulled in.

I’m not going to add anything to this one. I’m just going to go ahead and change the date. I’ll
change it to December 30th and then I’ll click Save & Close at the bottom. And now if I look
back at open invoices you’ll see the two invoices I just created for Tom Allen Sunroom.

If you happen to be in a report and you see that you want to change something or look at it you
can double click anywhere on that line and then in this case I needed to go ahead and change my
class so that it’ll be consistent for reporting purposes. Once I Save & Close it’ll ask me to record
the changes and then I’ll see those changes in my report.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

That’s a quick overview of how invoicing from estimates is going to work. Let me just mention
one more quick thing.

If I go back to home and let’s say I want to create an invoice that has nothing to do with an
estimate. All I’m going to do is go ahead and choose Create Invoices, pick my customer and job
from the list. Even if Tom Allen Sunroom comes up again with this available estimate then all I
have to do is cancel out of that and go ahead and create the estimate for whatever I needed. I’ll
go ahead and get out of this one and that is going to be it for this particular video.

Why don’t we go ahead and move over into section four and we’re just going to talk about doing
some generic invoicing for customers and services.

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Video: Invoicing Customers for Products and Services

Cindy: Okay we’re working in module four where we’re talking about customers and jobs.
We’ve just completed the section on invoicing from estimates. We did part one and part two.
Let’s talk very briefly about invoicing customers for products and services not related to
estimates here. And this will be section four.

There are going to be those times when you want to create an invoice for your customer and job
and it’s not related to an estimate in QuickBooks. All you do is go straight to the Create Invoices
and pull in your customer and your job. If the available estimate window appears you just cancel
past it and then fill out the rest like you normally would. I’ll go ahead and change my date and
then I’ll add any items that I’d like.

Let’s say in this particular case I’m going to invoice for repairs and I’ll say I want to invoice for
five of these at $40 an hour. And let’s say I pick one more. Let’s go ahead and say that we’re
going to pick installation. I’ll do four hours and we’ll leave it at $35 in this particular case.
Nothing has changed as far as what you see at the bottom of the screen or any of your options at
the top. You just go ahead and make sure you make everything look the way you want it and
then you go ahead and Save & Close.

If you wanted to double check your open invoices I still have it open on the left. Notice it says
Refresh Needed. As soon as I click on it it’s going to update the report for me. And now you’ll
see I have that third invoice and you can see it down here at the bottom. And that’s really all you
need to do. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a physical product you’re selling or if it’s a service. It will
be in that dropdown list and you’ll be able to choose it.

Now that you know how to invoice customers let’s go ahead and move over into section five and
I’ll show you how to receive payments from customers once they decide to get around to mailing
you a check.

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Video: Receiving Payments

Cindy: Okay now we get to the good stuff. We get to talk about receiving payments from
customers. This is actually going to be module four, Working with Customers & Jobs. We’re in
section five, Receiving Payments.

Once a customer pays you, you need to go ahead and put that in QuickBooks. You want to do
that so that you can actually clear off those invoices the customers already paid you for. Notice
on your home screen the next option on the flowchart is Receive Payments.

The first thing it asks you to do is pick your customer and your job from the dropdown list.
You’ll notice that once you do that that it’s going to tell you the balance that customer owes you
for that job and also it will list down here at the bottom any open invoices.

Now one little caveat to something I’ve been telling you. I keep stressing that when you’re
working with customers and jobs always, always, always pick the job. One little exception would
be what if the customer paid you for two jobs on the same check, for example? Then you could
choose his name and it would list all of the invoices down here and that would be okay in this
particular instance.

It doesn’t matter how the customer paid you. Whether they gave you a check, they used the debit
card, they paid you with PayPal, it just doesn’t matter because you’re going to enter it on this
screen.

The next thing it asks you is what is the payment amount? I’m going to say $3,439.75 because I
want to show you what happens if a customer over or underpays you. If that’s the situation you’ll
see down here this little option. In my case it says there’s an underpayment of 5₵. I have a
choice to leave it on their account and hope they’ll pay me for it later or go ahead and write it off
at this point. I’m going to leave it on their account as an underpayment right now.

The next thing you’ll notice is you need to put in the date of the payment. And that’s the date
you actually receive it. And then you have a place where you can put in a reference number, a
check number, etcetera.

Over here is where you can tell QuickBooks how the customer paid you. And depending on
which one of these you choose then this option changes. See how now it says Check Number
because I chose the check option.

Let me tell you a couple of other things here. If you choose credit or debit, for example, it’s
going to bring up this screen. Now you don’t really need to put this information in because
unless you’re going to sign up with Intuit Merchant Services account then this really doesn’t
mean anything to you at this point. But if you did sign up with it you could go ahead and put

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

their card number in, their expiration date, and so forth. Right now it’s just for me to know that
that’s how they paid.

You’ve got an e-check option. And under More they’ve got Mastercard and Barter set up. Let me
just mention Barter real quick. Even if you’re bartering this service you want to go ahead and
choose the Barter option and go ahead and clear off the invoice in QuickBooks.

If you have a new payment method you want to set up you go ahead and click here and then you
can set up any payment method you’d like. So let’s say it was PayPal, for example. You would
just type it in and then you would go ahead and tell it the payment type, whatever type you
wanted. Maybe you used their PayPal debit card. Who knows. But you go ahead and click OK
and then from now on that option is going to be on this dropdown list if you need to choose it.

Now I want you to notice that it is assumed my customer was paying all of the first invoice, the
remaining money went to the second invoice, and then to the third invoice and so forth. You
want to be really careful here because this may not be how your customer wants you to apply the
payment. And you don’t want to get in a situation six months later where you and your
customer’s books don’t match. If the customer said something like, “Pay half on the first one and
half on the second one” you make sure they’re checked off and you just come over here and type
whatever amount they paid per invoice here. It’ll remember what’s left and keep it on this list for
future reference.

Let’s go up here under the main tab and see if there’s anything new. You already know what a
lot of this is. Let me just mention the print for you because it’s a little different here. When you
print you’re actually printing the payment and this is what it will actually look like. It’s just what
they call a payment receipt listing, the payment and each of the invoices that it paid.

If you wanted to attach a file here you could. Just like we’ve talked about with some of your
other forms. It could be that you had to scan a bill from your vendor. You could go ahead and
scan it and attach it here if you like.

And I skipped over the email, but just like with printing you can actually email the payment and
this would be their receipt basically.

Here you can look up a customer and an invoice if you want. If you had the particular invoice
number you could type it in. If you wanted to search by amount, by customer, you can certainly
do that.

The unapplied payments it’s just going to uncheck everything. Here’s where you would apply
discounts and credits, so if you had a discount you’d given your customer. The way that would
work is you remember the terms we talked about when you set up customers? One of those terms
could have been 2% 10 net 30. If that was the case and they’re taking their discount you would

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

go ahead and click here and apply it. Same thing with a credit memo. If you had issued them a
credit memo they could be using it here.

Occasionally you might get a bounced check and this is a way to record that bounced check.

Let me go over to Reports and see what we’ve got. We’ve got a quick report that we can run and
that’s basically going to show the customer and this received payment here. You can run the
transaction history. We’ve talked about that. A good way to look up all the invoices that this
payment was actually applied to was to go to this transaction history. And as soon as I saved this
I’d be able to do that. We talked about the journal a little bit.

If you want to look at Process Payment Receipts, this is basically a printable receipt that you can
actually send to your customer. And you can also view your open invoices.

These reports here are for all customers, not just the customer you’re on. So any time you see the
separator like that these would be for the customer you’re on and these are for all customers.

Now under the Payments tab the only thing they have is the Add Credit Card Processing. This is
where you’ll be able to actually purchase the Intuit Merchant services if you’d like.

Here is a really good question before I save this. Where does this money go? Let me just show
you something. I’m going to go back to my home screen for a moment and back to the chart of
accounts. If you remember way back we talked about this account called Undeposited Funds.
This is all of the money that you’ve received from payments from customers but you have not
yet put in the bank. And that’s where the money is going to go as soon as I save this. You would
see this balance actually go up.

I want to show you something that if it confuses you don’t even worry about it because this is an
option that you can do with your payments. Let me go ahead and Save & Close and I’m going to
go ahead and go back to home real quick and I’m going to open the Preferences, Edit
Preferences, and if we go down to the Payments, Company Preferences. I’m going to uncheck
this Use Undeposited Funds as default deposit to account. Now when you uncheck this box it
does make you close all of the windows and you don’t really have a choice there. so I’ll go back
to home and I want to go back to that payment that I just received. I’m actually going to go to my
receive payment window. I’m going to make it a little bit bigger so we can see it. And see if we
can go back to previous and find it that way. Did you see this right here? You didn’t have this a
few minutes ago? What this allows me to do now is if I don’t want to put it in Undeposited
Funds then I can choose to put this directly into my checking account if I like and that means I
can skip the next step of making the deposit. I am going to keep that at Undeposited Funds for
now. And if you have two checks from two customers that you’re receiving then you’ll want to
make sure they’re in Undeposited Funds so that you can pull in one deposit that would match
what you have at the bank. But I wanted you to see that option so that you know it’s available if
you’d like it.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

I’m going to go ahead and Save & Close and I want to show you one more quick thing. Let me
go ahead and pull up that report again that shows your customers and receivables, open invoices.
If you notice now, let me go ahead and change my date so I can see Tom Allen. Notice the
sunroom. Now I had three invoices earlier, but notice now that two are gone and the last one is
here where he owes 5₵. So that’s how open invoices works.

Now that you’ve received payments let’s talk about how to actually take those payments and put
them in the bank and make a deposit. Why don’t you flip over to section six and I’ll join you
shortly.

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Video: Creating Deposits

Cindy: We are all the way down on section six where we’re going to talk about creating
deposits. You’ve actually invoiced some customers, you’ve made some money, they’ve made
some payments to you, and now you need to go and actually put that money in the bank. So let’s
talk about how you go through and actually do that. This section is section six in module four,
Working with Customers & Jobs and we’re talking here about creating deposits.

Once you receive payments from customers you’ll want to record that money in the checkbook
register by making a deposit. And the way you want to do this is you want to go straight to the
record deposits option. Now before I click on that I want to point out something that I see all the
time that is wrong and why it will really throw everything out of whack.

Often people will receive their payments, then they’ll go over to this check register right here to
put their deposit in. Now this is what the check register looks like. It looks just like your
checkbook. If you went to the next available line at the bottom you could start typing and often
people will put the deposit amount here, which is correct, but this is where they get in trouble
when they’re picking the account that this goes to. They’ll either pick an income account from
this list which would double your income, so do not do that, or they will look for accounts
receivable. And you’ve already been there, done that so that would be wrong as well. Plus
remember you have money sitting in undeposited funds, so we need to take that out.

So here’s how you’re going to actually record those deposits. Back on the home screen go all the
way to the end of the flowchart and record deposits. This three means you have three sets of
money sitting in undeposited funds waiting to be brought over into a deposit.

Here are the three and you’ll see one of these is the one we did, Tom Allen Sunroom, and these
are in here for the exercise. You want to check off any that you’re going to put in this deposit. If
you only put in the first two in this deposit then don’t check that third one. You can come back
and do that one later. But it needs to match the actual deposit that you make at the bank. I’m
going to go ahead and check all three and click OK. And now you can see it’s brought all of
those up to my deposit slip for me. This is what would have been the correct account right here.

Let’s say you wanted to add something to this. What if you got a rebate from your office supply
store? You could actually put Received From and put the store name if you wanted. And over
here I’d probably pick something like Office Expenses or Office Supplies. That’s probably the
account you use to begin with when you purchase these items. What if it was something like
you’re the owner of the company and you want to go ahead and put some money into the
business? Then that would be that Owner Equity that we talked about. In this case they call that
capital stock. So you do have the ability to put other money in here. Just make sure it’s not all
income because everything you deposit is not income and then that makes it taxable if you did
put it in that way.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Some things you’ll want to check. Check the Deposit To account. Often when people will call
me and say, “I know I made that deposit and I know I put it in QuickBooks but I can’t find it”
they’ve just put it in the wrong account. That’s very common.

The other thing is to check the date on your deposit. Make sure it has the correct date and there is
a place for a memo. It brings in the word Deposit automatically but you can edit that to anything
you need.

You’re going to notice also at the bottom that it says Cash Back Goes To. Now you know as a
business you can’t keep cash back from a deposit. But as a sole proprietor you could. If that was
the case you would pick the account that you were going to use the money for, you would have a
little memo field, and you could say that you want to keep $20 and it would deduct it from this
deposit subtotal here.

Back up at the top, here’s how you’re going to go back and forth between your deposits. You’re
going to use your Next or Previous options. Here’s your Save like you’re familiar with. And let
me show you a couple of things you can print. You can print a deposit slip which will look like
this. Just preview it here. Or you’ll be able to go in and print the deposit summary, which will
look like this. This is probably the one you want. It just shows you basically a listing of each of
the items that are in this deposit and the total.

Alright. You can also go look at the history. Now we don’t have any history right now because I
haven’t saved this, but if I do then I can see all of the payments that went into this particular
deposit. And then from there I could trace back to the invoices or back to estimates if I needed
to. I could also attach a file here if I needed to do that as well.

Now my total is $5,879.75. I’m going to click Save & Close and that’s how you make a deposit.

Before I turn off the video let me go back and look at my checking account over here and see if
it’s in there. And there it is right there. The reason it says Split is because there are three checks
in that one deposit and it can’t list them all three in this one field. You could always double click
where it says DEP right here and go in and look at that deposit. The blue line just means it’s
postdated. That’s all that means.

That’s how you’re going to put a deposit in. Let’s go ahead now and flip over to section seven
and I’ll show you guys how to create a credit memo.

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Video: Creating Credit Memos

Cindy: Okay welcome back. We are working in module four where we’re talking about
customers and jobs. All the way down now to section seven where I want to show you how to
create credit memos.

There might be times where a customer returns something they’ve already purchased and you
have to actually issue a credit memo or give them a refund. Often what happens is you just need
to issue a refund to clear off an invoice. So we’ve got several different scenarios there. And let’s
go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I’ll show you how to create those credit memos.

If you remember in our case our customer Tom Allen still owes 5₵ for that sunroom invoice. I’m
going to come over here and click on the Open Invoices just to remind you. There’s the sunroom
and there’s the nickel that he owes. We’re going to actually create a credit memo to zero that out,
but remember it could be that your customer’s returning something and they want a refund or
some other scenario.

If you’re on the home screen and you’re following the flowchart come right over here to this odd
one that says Refunds & Credits and click right there.

The first thing it wants to know is who is your customer and your job you’re trying to create the
credit memo for. I’ve pulled in Tom Allen Sunroom. At this point a lot of times people will say,
“Well why didn’t it just bring in the 5₵?” Well it doesn’t know that’s what we’re trying to credit.
We’re going to have to tell it that.

I’m going to come over to the class feature and pick my class. I’m going to change the date on
my credit memo. And then it’s numbered the next one sequentially. Now I’m going to come
down here where the items are and in this case we’re trying to wipe out some bad debt basically.
And they’ve actually got bad debt set up in this list. So I’ll go ahead and choose it and notice it
brought in a description, Bad debt or right off amounts. Now I can add anything I want to this. I
wouldn’t be necessarily mailing this to my customer. This is more of an internal type credit.

The quantity will be one and it would be for 5₵. Make sure that this says Nontaxable because if
it happens to be on tax for some reason you’re going to be crediting more than 5₵. So just be
careful of that.

If this was a physical item, so let’s talk about inventory for a second. Let’s say that you sell
chairs in your store and a customer purchased a chair and they paid for it in full. That took it out
of inventory and the customer doesn’t owe you anything. If they bring it back you want to put it
back into your inventory. If that’s the case you want to make sure from the dropdown that you do
pick those chairs from this list. That’s how it’s going to get back into your inventory. You would
go ahead and put in the amount that you’re going to give them back for that chair. And when
you’re done you’ll be able to give them a refund.

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Now if you look right up here it says, Use credit to give a refund. If I was giving a refund I
would choose this option and it would ask me information like who was the customer and job?
Are they getting a check? Are they going to be bartering this? The account the money is going to
come out of and then their address and the memo and things like that. If you filled this out and
clicked OK it would automatically go to your checking account and actually remove that money.
But if it’s just a credit like we’re doing I can use this credit to apply to an invoice. Notice this is
every invoices that’s open. If it sees an exact match it’ll check it off and all you have to do is
click Done. Now let’s say I didn’t even recognize this was here and I just went down to the
bottom and said Save & Close. Then it’s going to pop up and ask me again, Do you want to use
the credit to give a refund or use it to apply to an invoice? So any of that would work. I’m going
to apply to an invoice, make sure I have the correct one checked off, and I’m going to click
Done. And then as soon as I’m finished I Save & Close and that is all I have to do.

Let me go back up here to this Open Invoices. Notice Refresh Needed. It’s made a change. And
Tom Allen shouldn’t be here anywhere because he’s totally paid in full. And you’ll see he’s not.
That’s really all there is to creating credit memos.

Why don’t we go ahead and do this? Let’s go ahead now and go over to section eight and I’ll
show you how to create statements.

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Video: Creating Statements

Cindy: One of the things QuickBooks allows you to do is to send out a statement to your
customers. Most businesses that do send them will send them at the end of the month. And a
statement is just a gentle reminder to the customer that they owe you some money or just
whatever happened with your account that particular month. Not every business will send them,
but if you do it’s nice to know how to do them. This is going to be section eight of module four,
Working with Customers & Jobs, and we’re talking about creating statements.

You’re going to access your statements from the home screen and you’ll see the option right
here. Remember I said that statements typically go out at the end of the month. So you’ll want to
check your dates. If you’ve got transactions in December make sure the last day of December is
you statement date and the period would be December 1 through December 31. Now typically it
will default to that if you’re at the end of the month but always check those dates.

You’re going to have a lot of options here. When you’re working with customers you can say
that I want to send a statement to all of my customers. You might just have a few you want to
send it to. In that case you can pick multiple and then choose by checking off the ones you’d like
to send to.

If you want to send it to one customer you can choose that one customer. And when you send a
statement to a customer make sure it goes to the main customer and not the job in this case
because you want to how all the jobs for that customer.

If you’ve got customers of types, if you set up the types when you did your customers, you can
pick residential or commercial like they’ve got or preferred send method. Do they want these
emailed, mailed? And you can pick your customers from any of these choices.

Now over on the right this has to do with the actual template itself. If you want to show all the
individual items on your statement you can do that because right now it’s just going to show
there’s an invoice for a certain amount, a payment for a certain amount, etcetera. You can also go
down and say don’t print them if they have a zero balance or if they owe less than $5, didn’t
have any activity. You can kind of see those choices there.

Let me go ahead and preview so you can see what a statement looks like. Now this is just the
very first one. You saw it went through and did all of my customers. But you can see it’s very
generic. It’s got my company name over here. It says Statement. You’ll see it lists everything
from the end of last month, which is your balance forward, all the way down to the end of the
current month. At the bottom it’s got how much is currently due, how much is in the 1 to 30 day
category, 31 to 60, and all the way across. And that’s basically what a statement is. Now I’m
going to hit Close.

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There’s another option here that said Assess Finance Charges. If you have decided that you’d
like to assess a finance charge on customers who still owe you money, if they’re past due, you
could have set those options up in your preferences. And at this point when you assess it will
give you a list of anyone who meets that criteria. You would check off those people and then you
would say Assess Charges and it would actually create a separate invoice for those charges and
then they would be on that statement as well.

So you’ve got a lot of options here with your statements. Notice you can print them out, you can
email them. But that’s pretty much how statements work.

I’m going to go ahead and hit Close and then we have one more section in this particular module
that I’d like to look at and that’s the Income Tracker. Why don’t you go ahead and head over to
section nine and I will meet you over there.

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Video: Income Tracker

Cindy: Welcome back. We are on the last section of module four. We’ve talked about working
with customers and jobs and now we’re going to talk about the income tracker that QuickBooks
has. QuickBooks lets you have the ability to create and process your sales in a file all in one
screen instead of having to go to a single screen for each activity. Let me show you what I mean
by working with the income tracker.

The way you’re going to get to the income tracker is you’re going to the menu and you’re going
to click on Customers and then you’ll see the Income Tracker.

The Income Tracker allows you to see all of your sales in one place. So if you needed to go
through and process some things or you needed to print several at once or receive some
payments you can do it all on this one window instead of having to go to separate windows on
your home screen to do some of this. Let me show you what you’re seeing here.

First of all I can see that I have 21 open invoices and they total this $93,007. I can see I don’t
have anything overdue and then this is what was paid in the last 30 days. I can add a couple of
more filtering options to this by going up to this little wheel and I can show the estimates if I like
and also the time and expenses. And that way when I click OK you’ll see there are a lot more
transactions here.

Now for each of these if I want to filter, let’s say I just want to see the estimates. I can click on
that particular box and now I see just the estimates. If you wanted to take filters off come over
here where it says Clear/Show All and you just click on that and then you’ll see everything
again.

Some more filtering options that you’re going to have are going to be right here on this line. First
if I want to see a particular customer and job I can choose them from the list and that way I don’t
have to see everyone. It could be that if I want to see just a particular type I can. So I might just
see just the estimates, just like we saw up here, or the status. And the status would be anything
that’s been paid, it’s open, it’s overdue. And also I can look at these by date range if I prefer.

Now if I wanted to work individually with a particular line item, let’s say this first one Tom
Allen Sunroom. The first thing you can do is you can double click on it and you will go to that
particular transaction if you need to. And that way if you make a change you can save it and
you’re good to go. But I can also do some things all the way to the right where you see this
action column. Here I can choose to convert this estimate to an invoice, which we’ve already
done, but you can see the choices here. I can mark it as inactive, print the row, or email the row.
Your options will be different here depending on what type of transaction this is. If this is an
invoice, for example, and let’s say I’m on this one, I’m going to have an option here to receive a
payment where I couldn’t do that on an estimate.

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The other thing you can do as far as batch actions are concerned is if you have more than one of
these selected you can go to the bottom where it says Batch Actions and you can see here that I
can batch an email, basically send an email to everyone here. And invoices all that’s going to do
is just pop up and let you print them. But again you’d be printing all of them.

You can also manage your transactions here. So if you need to edit a highlighted row or you
receive payments for some of these you can certainly do that as well. So you can see your
choices here. It just lets you do things on one screen versus having to go to an individual window
every time you want to receive a payment or some of those other options we talked about. So
make sure you check that out before you actually wrap up section nine.

I’m going to go ahead and close that. And we are done working with module four which was
Working with Customers & Jobs. Let’s get ready now and talk a little bit about vendors. So if
you want to meet me over in module five, section one we’ll start talking about vendors.

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Chapter 5 – Working with Vendors

Video: Working with Vendors

Cindy: Hi there. Welcome back. We have made it all the way down now to module five,
Working with Vendors. We spent a lot of time in module four talking about working with
customers and jobs and that’s the accounts receivable portion of QuickBooks. This is going to be
the accounts payable portion of QuickBooks.

In this first section I want to start talking to you a little bit about working with the vendors, how
to get them set up so that once you get ready to enter bills and pay bills and do other things in
accounts payable that your vendors are already there ready to go. Let’ go ahead and flip over to
QuickBooks and I’ll show you how to go ahead and start working with your vendors.

Let’s go ahead and look at how the vendor center is set up. You can get to the vendor center a
couple different ways. You can click here which is probably the easiest way to do this, but you
can also go to Vendors on your icon bar right here if you’d like or you can use Vendors under the
menu and you’ll see the Vendor Center right here. Any of these take you to the exact same place.

Your vendor center looks just like the customer center did as far as how it’s set up. The first
thing you’re going to see on the left is a list of all of your vendors. And they have been set up in
alphabetical order, which is probably the best way to do this. You’re going to notice that unlike
customers vendors all stay on the same level. They’re not going to have any sublevels
underneath.

Here I can see each vendor, the balance that I owe that vendor, and I can see if I need to attach a
file or if there’s one already attached here. An attachment would be something like a bill that I
received that I want to keep track of and I could just double click where this paperclip is and go
into computer and find that file or go ahead and scan it from here if I wanted.

I’m currently looking at the active vendors. Notice if I wanted to look at all the vendors I could
or just the ones with an open balance or go in and create my own filter if I wanted to.

The vendor that you’re clicked on you’re going to see the information about that vendor over
here. Name, address, phone number, email. I also have the ability to put notes in here for
vendors, just like we could for customers. And these are a couple of reports that I could run
related to vendors.

This is another way to attach a file. And then this is the way you edit a particular vendor. Now I
usually just double click on the vendor if I want to edit them. But you can also use this to do the
same thing.

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You’ll see the same thing here at the bottom that we had with customers. You can see your
transactions, you can see your contacts, you have the To Do’s, the notes, and any sent emails.
And again for all of these if you wanted to add or manage anything in this list you just go to the
bottom where it says Manage Transactions and then you’ll have different choices depending on
which one of the tabs you’re clicked on.

If you want to add a new vendor just come up to this button that says New Vendor and choose
New Vendor from the list. The first thing you want to do is put in the name of your vendor.
We’ll say in this case it’s Melcer Plumbing. And then you’ll want to fill in the rest of the
information. Now here’s the field for the opening balance that I told you I don’t use. If I owed
my vendor $1,000 as of the start date then that’s fine. I could plug that in and my numbers would
be correct, but I wouldn’t be able to go back and look to see that was multiple bills that I owed
that totaled that $1,000. So I usually just go put the bills in that I still owed.

This is the Address Info tab and we’re going to plug in some address info. So we’ll put in our
company name again. We said Melcer Plumbing. And if you have a contact person there that
you’d like to send letters to or correspondence to you may want to plug in his or her name here.
Remember that when you do a mail merge with Microsoft Word it pulls from these fields not this
field. So the more you have pulled in the more personal information it can pull into whatever
you’re sending out.

As for the address details you want to make sure that you have the address plugged in here of
your vendor. That way if you’re going to send a check, for example, or you’re going to have
Word do a merge and create some envelopes for you that are addressed you would have that in
here.

The next tab is your Payment Settings. Now notice what happened in this case is I did not have
my zip code in here so QuickBooks pulled up this Edit Address Info window so I can go ahead
and plug that in. And that’s a good thing because that way if you forgot then it reminds you.

Payment Settings. Here I have a place to put in the account number that my vendor may have
given me. I can also put in any terms that the vendor has given me. And how do they want their
check printed if you’re going to print checks to them? Over on the right you can set up a credit
limit with that vendor. If you decide to purchase something that exceeds the credit limit
QuickBooks will pop up and tell you and then you’ll have a chance at that point to go ahead and
still make that purchase or get out of it at that point.

You might also set up billing rates. And what this has to do with is let’s say that each time this
vendor does some work for you they have a set hourly rate. Or it could be there’s a custom flat
rate. You just choose whichever one would apply in this case.

The next tab over is your tax settings. Now this is a very important tab to be aware of. If you
remember way back when we actually set up the company file itself in the Easy Step Interview I

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said to you that subcontractors are not employees. You don’t deduct taxes from them so that
means they’re responsible to send you a bill and you pay them per that bill. If you’re
subcontractor needs to get a 1099 at the end of the year this is how you would set them up. They
would be a vendor and they’d be eligible for a 1099 and then you can put in their tax ID number
here. Now obviously if they’re not eligible then you would uncheck this, but if they are this is
how QuickBooks is going to know who to print the 1099’s for.

The next tab over is your Account Settings. You can prepopulate this with a couple of different
accounts so that any time you pay this vendor those accounts populate at the bottom of your
check or at the bottom of your credit card expense.

And then you have the Additional Info tab here. It could be that you track the different types of
vendors you have. Also if you have fields that you’d like to set up that are vendor related go
ahead and click on Define Fields, create those new fields, and if it’s checked where it says Use
for Vendors then it will show up over here in this list.

I’m going to go ahead and click OK and let’s see if our vendor is in the list. And there’s Melcer
Plumbing right there.

Now a couple of things you’ll be able to do when you have your vendors in here. You can set up
multiple vendors at the same time if you’d like. Up here where we put in new vendor there’s an
option that says Add Multiple Vendors. What this lets you do is see all of your vendors in a list
format and if you wanted to add some you could go to the very bottom and you could actually
type them in. You can see how you can type on the very last line here if you wanted to. Now
once you click here it might give you some of these time saving tips. You just kind of click OK
past that and type these in. You can also copy and paste these, if you had a list of these in Excel
already. You would want to make sure that your columns were set up exactly like you see them
here and then you could actually paste them from Excel if you wanted to.

I’m going to go ahead and close out of that. A couple more quick things you just need to be
aware of here. Here’s your new transactions. So if you needed to pay a bill from here, for
example, you could, but chances are you won’t be on this screen when you want to do some of
these different types of transactions. You can print a list of your vendors if you wanted. You can
also send your list over to Excel. So you can export that list or import that list if you wanted. And
then here’s where you would do some of the features from Microsoft Word. If you wanted it to
prepare an envelope or a letter, that sort of thing to your vendor you could do that right here.

Now let me mention the Bill Tracker real quick. Just like with customers you can see a list of all
of your purchase orders. If you wanted to see any that are unpaid, any bills that are unpaid, any
overdue, things like that you can see them right here in this list. For each one of these you’re
going to have an action you can take related to the particular one you’re clicked on. And also
you’ll have some batch actions. So if you had multiple ones selected you could go to the bottom
and you can go through and pay bills or close purchase orders, things like that in a batch.

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I’m going to go ahead and close the bill tracker. And that gives you a really good idea of how to
go through and set up your vendors or edit them if you need to do that.

Why don’t we go ahead now that we know how to do this and start entering some bills so you
can see how it works once you have your vendors already set up.

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Video: Entering Bills

Cindy: Okay welcome back. We are in module five, Working with Vendors. We’ve already
talked about how to go through and set up your vendors. Let’s talk now about how to enter bills.
This will be section two, Entering Bills.

Entering bills is actually pretty simple to do. You’re going to use this Enter Bills option.

A lot of people do not enter their bills. They will just throw them in a basket on their desk and
when it’s time to pay bills they’ll sift through and find the ones that they’d like to pay and then
go ahead and pay them. Your accounting will be correct in QuickBooks if you do that but you
won’t have the ability to run reports and see who you owe that’s over 30 days old and that sort of
thing. So it’s always to your advantage to go ahead and use the Enter Bills feature like we’re
getting ready to do here.

I want you to notice quickly that it defaults to a bill but occasionally a vendor will send you a
credit. All you do is just change this from bill to credit or vice versa.

The first thing it asks you is who is your vendor. We had just set up Melcer Plumbing so we’ll
use them. And if you have terms with that vendor then you’ll want to make sure they’re chosen
here. Now if I’d set those up in the vendor set up it would pull those automatically.

This date over here and this due date are very important dates. The bill date right here is the date
they have printed on the bill that they sent you. It’s not the date you went to the mailbox and got
it out and decided to put it in QuickBooks. It’s the date they have on their bill. And the reason for
that is because the due date is going to default in this case to 30 days from this date. This is the
most important date however right here. So if it said it was due on the 28th you make sure it says
the 28th there.

Reference number is just their invoice number. Remember your vendor calls it an invoice on
their end. You call it a bill on your end. You do want to plug those in because if you’re having to
go back and look through a little bit later it’s a lot easier to pull it out based on the reference
number or their invoice number.

The amount due is going to be the total of the bill. And you also have a place here to put a memo
in. This could be anything you want to say about this particular bill.

You’ll notice you have two tabs at the bottom. You have Expenses and Items. And you can put
this $125 broken down into as many accounts as you want or you can split it between the two
tabs if you want. Let’s say that $100 of this is job materials and we’ll also say on the next line
down that the $25 was for a shipping or freight and delivery charge in this case. So see how I can
go back and put the exact amount of money next to each one of these accounts that I would like?

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Over to the right it has a place where you can put in the customer and the job and you definitely
want to do this for your job costing purposes. If you don’t do this and you want to pull job cost
reports this won’t pull onto those reports. So that’s very, very important.

Also notice this little checkbox that says Bill. Let me refresh your memory on what this is. If you
recall when we were working with invoices I actually showed you that you have an option that
says Add Time/Cost right here. If you have an expense in here like the bill we’re entering now
and if it has a little checkbox where it says Bill To checked then that expense would show up in
this window. And when I get ready to invoice my customer I can just check it off and click OK
and pull it into an invoice. And that’s a great little feature that you can use to help remind
yourself to invoice customers for things you’ve purchased that you need to turn around and make
sure that you get paid for.

If you’re using the class feature you want to make sure you use it consistently, again so that
reports are accurate. And that’s really all you need to do to enter a bill.

Now let’s look at what’s up here on your main tab. You’re familiar with a lot of this already.
You know how to find, you know how to use the New feature, there’s your save, your delete,
create a copy, and memorize. All print is going to do is print basically the transaction itself. So
you’re probably not going to be printing a lot of bills.

You can attach a file. So if you wanted to actually scan the actual bill that came in and attach it
to this you could.

We’re going to talk about purchase orders in module six so we’ll kind of hold this. And you can
also enter some time related to this. For example, if you have an employee that was working on
this particular job and you wanted to enter a time related to that you could from here. We’re
going to see time in a later module as well.

Clear Splits would basically clear all this out and I’d have to put it back in. Recalculate.
Sometimes when you’re working with these different amounts of moneys in different line items
they need to be recalculated so they come out to the exact $125 and that’s what this would do.

You could also pay the bill from here, but chances are you’re not going to be on this screen when
you’re ready to pay this bill. You’d probably do it from the home screen, but you could.

You do have some reports back here if you wanted to look at those. You’ve got some quick
reports you can run. These have to do with a particular vendor. There’s a transaction history. So
if you wanted to see if this bill had been paid and if it was actually related to some other
transactions in here you could. And you’ve also got your transaction journal that we talked about
that just shows you the timeline of all the transactions related to this bill.

These reports over here are not just for this vendor. They’re going to be for all vendors. So when
we get to reports we’ll be looking at all these different reports that are in QuickBooks.

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That’s basically all there is to entering a bill. I’m going to go ahead and hit Save & Close at the
bottom. And because I changed my terms over here QuickBooks is asking me if I want to change
those permanently in my vendor’s record. I’ll just go ahead and say Yes so I don’t have to pick it
every time. And now that bill is entered.

I do want to show you one quick thing. Let’s flip back to the vendor center. If I’m clicked on
Melcer Plumbing you’ll see there’s the bill right there. and I want to run a report real quick just
to show you unpaid bills and how they look in a report.

I’m going to go up to Reports. This time I’m going to look at Vendors & Payables and then I’m
going down to Unpaid Bills Detail. This is a list of all the bills that I have not yet paid even if I
owe a penny. Now let me change the date because I don’t see mine. Now if I go down this list
here’s my Melcer Plumbing right down here. So make sure for bills that haven’t been paid you
run an Unpaid Bills Detail.

That’s really all there is to entering bills. Why don’t we go ahead and flip back to the home
screen and I will see you over in section three where I show you how to pay that bill that we just
entered.

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Video: Paying Bills

Cindy: We’re still working in module five and we’re talking about working with vendors in this
module. We’re all the way down to section three now, Paying Bills. We’ve already learned how
to enter your bills. Now let’s talk about how to go through and actually pay those bills.

When you get ready to pay your bills what I don’t want you to do is either use the Write Checks
window or the Check Register and type it in. The reason for that is because you still have an
open bill sitting out here and if you go that way to pay it it doesn’t know there’s an association
between the two. So the bill will still stay outstanding. Follow your flowchart and go all the way
over to Pay Bills.

This is a listing of all the bills that you owe. Even if you owe a penny you’re going to see it in
this list. There are different ways to look at this list. Currently I’m looking at all the bills but
notice I could show only ones due before a certain date if I wanted. I can also filter this list.
Right now I’m seeing all the vendors, but if I just wanted to see a particular vendor, for example,
I can filter the list and show just that one.

If you do choose one and you want to go back to see all the vendors you choose All Vendors at
the top of the list. They’re also sorted by vendor, which is a good way to do it because then you
keep all the ones that are alike together.

I want to go down and pay Melcer Plumbing. So I’m going to choose it and notice once I check
it off it assumes I’m paying the entire $125. Let’s say that the vendor has said they’re going to
credit you the $25 for the freight charge. That means we’re just going to pay $100 in this case.
So I’m just going to type that right over here.

There’s one place in QuickBooks where you can’t double click to go to and that’s here with the
bills. I can’t double click on Melcer Plumbing and have it take me anywhere. So in that case I’ll
go down here to where it says Go To Bill if I want to look at it or make a change and then Save
& Close.

Here’s where I would set the discount if they gave me the terms of 2% 10 net 30 as an example. I
would go and tell it what amount I’m taking. And also if I have a credit I could set it here, but we
don’t have one issued yet so we’ll come back and do that in a little bit.

This is the date of my payment. I’m going to go ahead and change that to January the 12th. This
is the method. Did I pay them with a credit card or a check or online banking? If I have check
chosen then it shows me a list of all my bank accounts here. If I choose credit card it shows a list
of all my credit cards over here. So you decide what the method is and choose the correct one.

If I leave this on to be printed that means that I can go down here to pay selected bills and then
pay as many as I want. And when I’m finished I can print them all at once. If I choose Assign

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Check Number it’s going to bring up a screen that’s going to ask me what is the check number.
I’m going to go ahead and choose that option and say Pay Selected Bills and here’s where I can
put in whatever I want in that check number field. Maybe I put in the word Debit. Maybe I used
my debit card to pay for it. But whatever I put there it’s going to be shown in the register in that
field. I’m going to click OK and it’s going to say that that one is done. Would I like to pay more
bills? Or if I click Done I can just get out of that window.

Now I’m going to go ahead and show you in the check register how it dumped that payment into
the register for me.

If I go down this list there you go. See how it says Debit Melcer Plumbing $100 and the correct
account was Accounts Payable. So there’s a lot of times you’re going to stay out of this register.
We are going to come back and go through the register in a little while.

I’m going to go back to home and that’s pretty much how you’re going to pay your bills.

Let’s go ahead and go over into section four and I’ll show you how to create a credit memo for a
bill and then how to apply that. And then we’ll be done with Working with Vendors.

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Video: Creating Credit Memos

Cindy: Okay this is the last section in module five. I want to show you how when you’re
working with vendors to create credit memos.

Sometimes those vendors will send you a credit and you need to apply it to an invoice and you
need to know how to do that so that you can clear all that out when you’re looking at reports.

The way you’re going to create a credit memo from a vendor is go back to Enter Bills and just
choose Credit here at the top.

Let’s say that Melcer Plumbing is issuing us a credit memo for the freight charge. What we’re
going to do is go ahead and put in that credit memo number that they have on their side and then
the credit amount. And we’re going to say it’s $25. Now notice it brought in both account lines
from the last time we used Melcer Plumbing. All you want to do is use the one that has the
freight charge or if you wanted to delete the others you could. It doesn’t hurt anything to leave
them there. But here’s something that often happens. Do you see how I clicked down this blank
line first before I put the $25 up here? If I don’t delete that what happens is when I go to save it
it’s going to give me an error message and tell me it’s not in balance. So what I have to do is
make sure I delete the whole line. A quick way to delete the line is if you’re in the line hold
down Control and hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Sometimes under the main tab you will
have a Delete button but you don’t have one like in this case. So Control-Delete anywhere in
QuickBooks will delete that entire line.

I’m going to go ahead and Save & Close and now the credit memo is actually in there. Now if I
look over at the unpaid bills detail I should see when I look down at Melcer Plumbing a credit
for $25 and a bill for $25. Even though I don’t owe anything this is still not complete because
they’re not attached to each other. They shouldn’t be in this report at all if they’re zeroing each
other out. Here’s how you do that.

I’m going back to the Pay Bills. I’m going to find in the list Melcer Plumbing. And notice it says
that I owe $25. As long as I’m clicked on that line I can go down here to Set Credits. See how it
tells me there’s one credit available for $25? I’m going to set credits, make sure the correct bill is
checked off I want to apply it to, and then click Done. And that is all that I have to do. I’m going
to go ahead at the bottom and Pay Selected Bills. And of course there’s nothing to pay. It’s just
entering it in QuickBooks. And then I’ll just say Done and that’s really all I have to do.

If I look at Unpaid Bills Detail now it’s not going to be on the list anywhere because it’s totally
credited off.

That’s how you’re going to work with vendors and then actually entering your bills, paying
them, and doing the credit memos. Why don’t we go ahead and move over now into module six

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and we’re going to talk in this module a lot about purchase orders, working with items, and that
sort of thing. I’ll see you shortly.

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Chapter 6 – Working with Items & Inventory

Video: Working with Items – Part 1

Cindy: Okay. We are now starting module six. And in this module we’re going to talk a lot
about working with Items & Inventory. If you remember when we were actually creating our
estimates we actually chose two items. We chose framing which was a service we provide and
we also chose a wood door, which was a physical part, like an inventory part. So I wanted to
show you how all of this works. Let’s go ahead and get started. This is going to be module six
and this is section one, Working Items – Part 1.

To get to your list of items you’ll want to go to your home screen and right over here you’ll see a
button that says Items & Services. This is a list of all the items set up for the practice file. I
wanted to show you that when you have items created they’re going to be one of multiple
different types, like you see in this column here. What happens is if you have multiple items set
up of a specific type, like service for example, then if you look over at the name they’ll be
alphabetical. If I look at my inventory parts down here these will be alphabetical, all the way
down the list. If this ever get out of order go ahead and click on this word Type right at the top of
this column and that’ll resort it and put them back in alphabetical order by type.

Some of you may end up with six or seven items total. Some of you may end up with thousands.
It just really depends on what you do in your business.

Let’s talk a little bit about these different types.

The first type that you see here are service items. And think about a service you provide at your
business. Remember when we created our estimates we actually used framing. That was a
service we provide our customer and we charge by the hour. If you think about inventory down
here, we had actually used a wood door exterior when we set up our estimate way back. That’s
an inventory part. And you’ll notice with inventory that you can also see the quantity that you
have on hand. The way that this number changes is when you sell inventory, that means if you
put it on an invoice, for example, it will be deducted from this number. If you actually purchase
this particular item it will be added to this number. Inventory is going to get off. That’s just how
it is. You do have the ability to go in and edit the quantity you have for your inventory and also
the value.

True inventory means that you sell chairs and you have six of them in the backroom. You’d like
QuickBooks to let you know when you get down to a certain number so that you can order some
more. That’s true inventory.

If you notice the next type down is noninventory. Those are physical things that you might use in
your business but you don’t really track how many of those you have. You can actually run

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reports and see how many you purchased or how many you sold but you really don’t care to
track that you have six in the backroom, that sort of thing. That’s what noninventory is.

Also right above the noninventory, I skipped one, there’s that inventory assembly. Just to tell you
what that is, if you have a particular type of inventory product you need to make a bigger
inventory product in your business you can create what they call an assembly.

Below the noninventory you’re going to see the other charges. Those are miscellaneous type
things. Like in this exercise they have a freight reimbursement, they’ve got a delivery charge,
they’ve got a permit. You can kind of see those.

Below that you have subtotal. Now subtotal is a great little feature because if you add a couple of
different line items to an invoice and let’s say you want QuickBooks to subtotal just that little
section you’ve just done. You can add subtotal as the next line down and it will subtotal those for
you.

Group. Let’s say that you have four different house plans in your business. There are a lot of
different items that would go into each of those house plans. Every time you quote or create an
estimate for one of those plans you might be pulling in thousands of those items. It might be a lot
easier if you set up a group. You can tell the group which items belong in the group and then that
way when you’re on an estimate and you want to actually pull in all those items you just pull in
the group name and it’ll populate all the items for you. And you can edit those after they’re
prepopulated. So that’s a great little feature if you need to put a lot of different items in that are
consistent across the board sometime.

Discount. You do have the ability to add a discount to an invoice, for example. And also a
payment. Those are two different items you’ll be able to pick from. Later when we talk about
sales tax you’ll see that this is where the sales tax items are set up and the sales tax group.

That gives you a quick overview of the different types of items that you could set up in
QuickBooks. What I’d like to do now is set up a service item and then we’ll do an inventory item
just so you can get a feel for how this works.

Now I could go to the bottom where it says Item, click the arrow, and there’s my New, Edit,
Duplicate, and Delete. I could also right click anywhere and there’s New as well.

I’m going to go ahead and start with a service item.

Here’s where you tell QuickBooks what type of item this is. And I’m going to choose service in
this case and I want to say that we’re going to set up an item called Trash Removal. Trash
Removal let’s say happens to be a subitem of another item I have called Subs.

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Let me briefly tell you what unit of measurement means. If you have something you sell by the
foot, by the yard, by the case you can create that list that you can pick from. We call that a unit
of measurement. And by the way this has to be turned on in the preferences to begin with.

Here’s the description that’s going to pull onto an invoice automatically so you can put anything
you like in there. If you have a flat rate that you charge for this, let’s say we charge by the hour
and it’s $25. If it’s different every time just leave it on zero and then you can populate that when
you’re actually invoicing your customer.

Tax code. This has to do with sales tax. Typically a service you provide is a non-taxable sale.
You don’t charge sales tax on it. Whereas an inventory part you would.

Now here’s the most important thing in this window. Which account do you want this to point
back to when you actually put this on an invoice? Now you can go down the list and pick
anything but notice that income is where you want this one to go. And one thing I’ll show you
when I get back to the list is that most of these items point back to an income account. That’s
important to know because if you’re running reports and they just don’t look right it might be
that it’s pointing back to the wrong type of account. I’ll just pick this Trash Removal income
account and click OK.

You can see now that I’ve got Trash Removal here. It’s a subitem of another item called Subs
and I charge $25 for that.

Pretty easy to set that up. Right?

Alright let’s look at an inventory part because there’s going to be a few more fields that you need
to fill in for inventory.

I’m just going to right click anywhere and go to New and this time I’m going to choose
inventory part from the list. Let’s say that I want to set up an exterior doorframe. I’m not going
to make it a subitem of another. You do have a place where you can put in the manufacturers part
number. This is really more for your convenience so you don’t have to look it up every single
time you order this particular item.

Here’s your unit of measurement like we talked about. And I want you to notice the bottom of
the screen. The way this is set up is you have your purchase information on this side, that’s when
you purchase it, and you have your sales information on this side, that’s when you sell it. If you
buy this from Lowe’s let’s say and they have a particular description they use then you can plug
it in here and if you sell it and you want a different description on your invoices you can plug
that I over here. So these two can be the same or different. It’s kind of up to you.

This cost over here has to do with on average what do you pay for this when you purchase it? It
doesn’t mean that the last time you bought it it was $250. It just means that on the average. And
then on this side when you sell it, when you put it on the invoice how much do you charge for it?

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This is your cost of goods sold account. That means that if you have this doorframe in the
backroom that it’s going to be part of your cost of goods sold when you purchase it and it’s
actually going to be your inventory asset when you actually have it in the backroom.

If you had a preferred vendor, someone you like to buy this from on a regular basis you could go
ahead and plug that in here. You can always leave it blank if you don’t happen to have one. And
then income account, and here’s the keyword, Income. We’re going to go ahead and put this
back to, we’ll just put it to materials income. But again this is the most important thing on this
screen here.

Here’s your sales tax code. So obviously if it’s inventory you’re selling it is going to be taxable.

I just mentioned that when you have inventory it belongs in your inventory asset account. So
don’t try to change that. It just means your company is worth more right now because you have
those items in your inventory.

You do have a reorder point minimum. So what that means is that if you get down to two let’s
say you can tell QuickBooks to pop up and tell you to purchase some more so you don’t run out.
You’ve also got a max, meaning maybe you don’t want to get over ten of these, and QuickBooks
will warn you so you don’t get too many in the backroom.

How many you have on hand means how many are in the backroom right now. Let’s say there’s
five. And then it will give you a total value. Now it calculates this total value on this cost here
times how many are on hand. And then that’s as of whatever date you’re setting this up in your
company file.

That’s what you have to set up when you’re setting up an inventory part. I’m going to go ahead
and click OK and now you’ll see that you have five exterior wood doorframes and they’re set at
$350 when you invoice your customer.

I want to go ahead and stop the video here because there is a part two to this. Why don’t you go
ahead and jump over to part two and we’ll keep talking about how to actually set up our items.

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Video: Working with Items – Part 2

Cindy: We are in module six, Working with Items & Inventory, and we just talked how to set up
a service item and also how to set up an inventory item. Let’s go ahead and finish talking about
how to set up some of those different item types here in this second part of section one.

One of the things I wanted to mention to you is that if you have a specific part type, let’s say an
inventory part like this doorframe, I’ll just double click on that to edit. Notice I can’t change the
type. So if I decided at this point it’s really noninventory what I’d need to do is make this
inactive and then go back and create the part correctly.

Let me go down and show you a little bit about noninventory parts. Let’s say that we take this
appliance. I’m going to double click on that. I can change a noninventory part to an inventory
part. It just doesn’t go the other way like I mentioned.

The one thing you’ll see that’s missing when you have a noninventory part is the line at the
bottom where it asked you is this an inventory asset? How many do you have on hand? All of
that because it’s not inventory. You’re not tracking how many you have in the backroom. But
really everything else here is the same as if it were an inventory part.

I want to mention your other charges. Here’s bad debt. And we had seen that earlier when we
had received a payment and then we wrote off that extra money as bad debt. Notice the type here
is an other charge. Again I can change an other charge to one of these that you see in the list.
This is how a bad debt item would be set up if you need it. Make sure that you have the item
name, whatever you want to call it, but the account, this is the important part, the account needs
to go back to an expense account called Bad Debt.

Alright let me cancel out of that. Let’s see what else is here. I do need to talk to you a little bit
about subtotals and groups.

I’m going to double click on Subtotal just so you can see how this one’s set up. Make sure the
type is a subtotal type. And again you can call it anything you want but Subtotal is a good name
for this particular one.

Now let’s look at a group. We’ll look at this BOM.

I told you that a group basically is a way of having one item name you can pull onto an invoice,
for example, and it will prepopulate several additional items underneath it here. That way you
don’t have to pick all the items individually that go into this particular name. you would just
click down at the bottom and add all the items that are part of this group you’ve just created. And
this could be thousands. It just depends.

Let’s see what we have left. Discount. If you set up a type as a discount like you see here then
you specify the discount amount that you’d like to give when you put this item in.

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The next one down is Payment. I personally do not put payments on invoices, but you can.
That’s what this is designed for. So if you had someone that had an invoice for $1,000 and they
gave you a payment of $300 you could set that up. The type would be a payment. Notice if you
do this that you want to tell QuickBooks if you want to group this with other undeposited funds
or to go ahead and deposit this directly to one of your bank accounts. I don’t use this because
think about this. I invoice a customer for $1,000. They give me a $300 payment and I put that on
the actual invoice. If I’m running a report I’m never going to see that there was an invoice for
$1,000. I’m going to see that there was an invoice for $700. I like to see the payment and the
invoice separated so I know exactly what’s going on with their account. But you can do it if you
need to.

The last two things at the bottom that we’re going to talk about in depth in another module is
your sales tax item and your sales tax group. We’ll leave that for later. But that gives you a really
good idea of how to work with your items here.

You also have something new in 2018 that we discussed earlier and that is if you want to search
through your list here for a particular item you can. It’s not a big deal. We just didn’t have it
previously. Let’s say I’m looking for lumber and I go ahead and put that in here. Then it will go
and actually find it for me in this list if I had it. And there you go. See how it filtered my list for
me? You would just hit Reset to show the whole list again.

That’s your quick overview of how items work. What I’d like to do now is take you over into
section two and we’ll talk about how to create purchase orders.

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Video: Creating Purchase Orders

Cindy: Alright we’re working in module six where we’re talking about items and inventory.
And we’ve already gone through and talked a lot about how to set up your items and how to set
them up as different types. Let’s talk now about how to create purchase orders.

There will be times when I want to purchase items and I want to go ahead and order them from
my vendor. I need a way to track all those orders and that’s what we call a purchase order.
You’re going to see that purchase orders are considered non-posting. So that means that if you
order something and it never comes in it doesn’t really affect your books in any way unless you
run specific purchase order reports. Let’s go ahead and go over to QuickBooks and I will show
you how to create a purchase order.

Let’s say that we’d like to order five more of those exterior doorframes. Let’s go see how many
we have currently.

I’m going back to my items list. Here’s my exterior doorframe and I have five right now. I want
to order five more so I have a total of ten. I’m going back to the home screen and here’s where I
would choose the purchase order option. Let me briefly just mention if you don’t see the
purchase order icon here it’s because when you went through the Easy Step Interview to set up
your company you told QuickBooks that you do not track inventory. If you wanted to turn it on
from here you can go up to Edit on your menu, go down to Preferences, make sure you’re on the
category Items & Inventory on the left, and you want to be under Company Preferences. If you
have all of these checked here and you click OK then you’ll see this appear and you can go
ahead and use it.

I’m going to click on Purchase Orders.

The first thing it asks me to do is pick my vendor that I’d like to order these from. Now if I go
down this, let’s see, they have a couple of different material vendors we could purchase from.
And let’s say in this particular case that we’re going to purchase these from Patton Hardware
Supplies. If you’re using the class feature make sure you use the class. We’re going to use the
remodel class. And you can have this drop ship to a particular customer and job if you like. But
if it’s just put in the office in the backroom then you don’t need to do that.

Now let’s come down to where the items are because here’s where we’re going to pick the item
that we’re wanting to order. And in this case remember it’s an exterior doorframe. It’s going to
pull in the description for us automatically and I want to get five of these. Notice it pulled in the
rate of $250. Well let’s say that we’re getting five of these because they happen to be on sale and
we just want to have them in the backroom. Let’s say they’re $200 this time. If this is for a
particular customer and job I can choose it here, but if it’s not it’s just to have in the backroom I
don’t need to choose one. Here’s the unit of measurement. And it also has the amount over on

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the right. I can add as many line items as I like to this. If I happen to be ordering something else
from the same vendor I can add it on this same purchase order.

Up at the top, some of these you’re already familiar with. You know how to search. So if you
were looking for a particular purchase order you could use the Find functions here. You know
how to create a new one already, how to save this, and also how to delete it. Here’s create a copy
if you needed a second one very similar to this. And then there’s a memorize we’re going to talk
about later on.

Here’s our print options. I’ll preview this so you can see what it looks like. And you can see it
says Purchase Order right here and it’s very generic.

Here’s your print and your email later if you need to do that. Here’s where you attach a file. And
then here’s where you create an item receipt. Now this is the next thing we’re going to be doing
in our flowchart, but I could do it from here if I happen to be on this purchase order. I can also
select items that are on that receipt, but we haven’t done it yet.

Under the Formatting tab, these are all the same options again you’re familiar with. You can
preview this, you can actually manage the template where you go in and change the look or if
you want to add your logo, columns, etcetera. Here’s your spellcheck. Here’s where you insert,
delete, copy, align. And then you have your report. So if you wanted to run a few reports on this
particular vendor you could or on just purchase orders in general. One to just be aware of is open
purchase orders. These are purchase orders you’ve created but you never receive the items from.

There’s really not much at the bottom other than a vendor message. If you wanted to type
something in there you could. And remember if you email this to your vendor they could see that
message. And a memo which is just for you to see. And it has a total at the bottom.

All you’d have to do now is go ahead and send this to the vendor and Save & Close and just wait
for it to actually come in.

That’s pretty much how purchase orders work. Remember they’re non-posting, just like
estimates. So that means if it never comes in it doesn’t really affect any of your reports so to
speak. You’d have to run specific purchase order reports to see different things about purchase
orders.

The next thing in our flowchart is the receive inventory icon. Let’s go ahead and go over to
section three and I’ll show you how to receive that inventory.

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Video: Receiving Items

Cindy: Normally what happens in the process is once you create a purchase order then the actual
items arrive at your company and you have to go ahead and receive those into QuickBooks. I
want to show you how to do that now. This is module six, Working with Items & Inventory and
this is section three, Receiving Items.

Before we actually receive these items let me show you if we go back to the item list that we still
only have five of those exterior doorframes. That’s because all we’ve done at this point is order
them. We have not received them into QuickBooks to put into inventory. That’s what we’re
going to do next. Notice the next item on the flowchart is Receive Inventory.

There’s a down arrow next to this one because this can go one of two ways. You can actually
receive the items or the inventory and the bill’s actually the box or in with the items. But more
than likely it goes the bottom way where you receive it and there’s not a bill. There’s usually a
packaging slip and later they send you a bill. Let’s choose the bottom option. And this is what
they call an Item Receipt.

The first thing you want to do is put in your vendor. Because we have purchase orders that are
open with this vendor we’re going to get this message telling us that we have open purchase
orders. Do you want to receive against one or more of these? Yes, you do. That’s how you clear
out the purchase order.

This is going to be a list of all of those open purchase orders. Make sure you choose the correct
one and click OK and it’ll bring all of your items in.

I want you to notice that it brought them in under the Items tab and it also brought in the quantity
of five. Now what if the vendor actually sent you four of these because one is on back order?
Then you’d just change the quantity to four and it remembers there’s one left and you repeat the
process when it comes in.

You do have the ability up at the top here to use some of these same features you’re already
familiar with. Though a couple of things that might be new are the Select PO. What if you pulled
in the wrong purchase order? Then all you do is uncheck this one, check the correct one, and
click OK.

The other thing you can do is if you want to show the purchase order you can go to the very
bottom here where it says Show PO and then your purchase order appears. If you make any
changes to it that’s fine. Once you Save & Close they’ll be reflected on everything in
QuickBooks.

You can also clear the splits. That would actually clear everything out if you had splits in here,
but we don’t. And also if you need a calculator you’ve got this recalculate. And that would be if

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you have more than one line in here and you needed to recalculate all the amounts for some
reason so they equal $1,000.

Under the Reports tab you can run some quick reports on Patton Hardware Supplies and these
purchase orders. And these over here are for all vendors, not just the vendor you’re clicked on.

That’s pretty much how the item receipt works. Let’s click OK and I should at this point have ten
of these in my inventory. Let’s go back and look at the item list. And now you’ll see that I do. I
have ten. So that is one way that items get into your inventory.

Now that we know how to receive our items what happens next in the flowchart is the bill comes
in the mail to pay for those items. So let’s go ahead and go over to section four and I’ll show you
how to create that bill.

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Video: Creating Bills for Items

Cindy: Now that you’ve received your items into inventory it’s time to go ahead and put the bill
in. So at some point you’re going to get a bill and you’ll have to enter it in QuickBooks. I want
to show you how to do that here in section four. We’re talking in module six about working with
items and inventory and this is section four, Creating Bills for Items.

What you want to do is when the bill actually comes in the mail follow your flowchart across
where it says Enter Bills Against Inventory.

The first thing you want to do is put in the name of your vendor, and again ours is Patton
Hardware Supplies, and it’s going to bring up any what they call Item Receipts for this particular
vendor. If you want to use the receipt date for the bill date you can do that or you can change it
when you get in. It doesn’t really matter. But you’re going to pick the particular item receipt
you’re trying to receive the bill against and then click OK. And here’s the one we ordered the
five exterior doorframes.

Since this is the actual bill that we receive the first thing you’ll notice is the amount is probably
going to be a little bit different because they’re probably going to have a delivery charge or
something like that added to this. Let’s say that this was $1,025. Always check the date on your
bill. You want to have the date that they have printed on the top of their bill. If your terms are set
at net 30 then this due date is going to reflect 30 days from this date. But make sure the date is
absolutely correct. That way when you run reports it’s got the right bill due date on it.

Reference number is their invoice number. We talked about that. You also have a place if you’re
going to take your discount that you can put the discount date and if you need to put a memo at
the bottom you can certainly do that as well.

Now here’s what we need to do down at the bottom. $25 of this total was for a delivery charge.
We need to put that under our expenses tab. Let’s go down on this list and find our delivery
charge. We’ll choose Freight & Delivery. And that’s going to be $25. Remember if you’re
putting this to a job make sure you pick the customer and the job over here for job costing
reports. If you don’t need to pull this on to an invoice later on you can uncheck this little
Billable. Also if you’re using the class feature make sure to use that.

I’m going to go back to the items for a second and make sure everything looks good. If I wanted
to put this to a job I would make sure that I did that from here. It looks like everything looks
good here.

There’s nothing really new up top. I’m going to click the Main tab and you’re familiar with all of
this. We talked about this when we were talking about paying bills in module five. That’s pretty
much it. I’m going to Save & Close and it will always tell me This transaction is linked to others.
Are you sure you want to change it? That’s because it’s linked to an item receipt which was

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linked all the way back to a purchase order in the beginning. I’m going to click Yes and now this
is part of my accounts payable. If I wanted to look and see I’ll go back to Unpaid Bills Detail
over here on the left and I’m going to look down the list and see if I can see Patton Hardware
Supplies and there it is right there.

That’s going to be how bills work when you’ve gone through and created a purchase order and
an item receipt.

Let’s go ahead and talk about how to pay for those items over in section five.

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Video: Paying for Items

Cindy: We’re in module six, Working with Items & Inventory. We’re all the way down to
section five now, Paying for Items.

We’ve actually gone through a whole process of creating a purchase order, receiving some items,
and then we put a bill in for those exterior doorframes. Now let’s go ahead and pay for those
doorframes.

We’re going all the way back to Pay Bills. We’ve already gone through this window so we won’t
spend time on this but what I’m looking for is Patton Hardware Supplies. Remember it was
$1,025 and I see it right there. I’m going to check it off and let’s assume we’re paying the entire
bill. All we have to do is make sure everything at the bottom is correct. We’re going to pick our
payment date, make sure we have the correct method chosen, and then we’re going to make sure
it’s pulling it out of our checking account in this case, and we’ll just say Pay Selected Bills. It’s
going to give me a chance to put something in that check number field. If I wanted to put the
actual check number in there I could. Or if I paid for it with a debit or the credit card I could put
that in there as well. But now that bill is paid. I’m going to click Done. And just to make sure
I’m going to flip back to my checking account over here and look at the bottom for Patton
Hardware Supplies and there it is. Notice it came out of my accounts payable account and it is a
bill payment, indicating I did this correctly.

That’s all there is to paying for your items. It works just like it does for paying any other bill.

Let’s go ahead and wrap up module six with section six, Manually Adjusting Items.

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Video: Manually Adjusting Items

Cindy: We’re getting ready to wrap up module six where we’ve been talking about working
with items and inventory. This is section six where I want to show you how to manually adjust
items.

Inventory is a great example because what’s going to happen is even though QuickBooks will
move things into or out of inventory based on sales or purchases you’re going to have to
manually change that sometime because your account is going to be off. And I want to show you
how to do that in QuickBooks.

Let’s go over to our items and services. Notice when I look at the exterior doorframe that it says
I have ten of these. Let’s say I’ve gone in the backroom and counted and I really only have eight
of these. So I need to adjust this to reflect the correct number.

The easiest way to do this is go to the bottom of your screen and you’ll see an option that says
Activities. When you click the down arrow use the very last choice, Adjust Quantity of Value on
Hand.

The first thing you can do is tell it that you’re adjusting the quantity, the value, or both. We’ll do
the quantity. And also pick your adjustment date. The adjustment account that you want to use is
going to be your cost of goods sold. You can see there’s one here for inventory adjustment. What
actually happens when adjusting entries you use the related income statement account would be
the cost of goods sold. So make sure you’ve got that on cost of goods sold.

Reference number. It’s going to number the next one sequentially. And if this pertains to a
particular customer and job or class you could fill those in as well.

I’m going to go down to where the items are type in Exterior Doorframe and it popped up there
and it says I have ten on hand. Now we know there’s eight so we’re going to say our new
quantity is eight and when I tab through it tells me that that’s a difference of minus-2. I can add
another one if I want to or I can just go ahead and Save & Close this when I’m done. If I go look
now I have a quantity of eight.

That’s the quick way to adjust your items or your inventory. One little thing that might be helpful
if you’re going to go in the backroom and count, there’s a report, if you go up to Reports on the
menu, under Inventory that says Physical Inventory Worksheet, right here. This is a great one to
print out because you can see it tells you how many you have on hand right now and a blank line
so when you do your physical count you can write in what the actual count is and then come
back and adjust them all at once if you need to. That’s a physical inventory worksheet.

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That’s really all there is to adjusting your inventory. This is actually going to wrap up module
six, Working with Items & Inventory. Let’s go ahead now and move over to module seven and
I’ll show you how to work with QuickBooks Registers.

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Chapter 7 – Working with QuickBooks Registers

Video: Working with Registers

Cindy: We are all the way down now to module seven where we’re going to talk a lot in this
module about the QuickBooks banking activities. There are a lot of features that are related to
banking in QuickBooks. For example, working with the registers, if you need to do bank
transfers, reconcile. Those are all features that are called Activities in QuickBooks related to
banking. Let’s go ahead and get started in section one and I’ll show you how the registers work.

In QuickBooks you have registers for a lot of your different accounts. Let me go to the chart of
accounts. When we went through the chart of accounts, I don’t know if you paid much attention
but they had a column that says Balance Total over here. Any of these that have a balance you
can double click and go to that particular register. So this is the checking account register. If you
went down and saw some of these accounts that do not have a balance, pretty much anything
from income down does not have a balance. If you’re on the line and you double click anywhere
you run a report. That’s one way to get to any of these registers you’d like to get to. Maybe
you’re trying to get to one of your credit card registers. You just double click on it and there’s
that register.

Let me go back to the home screen. There’s another way to get to some of your registers and
that’s right here where it says Account Balances. If you happen to be here and you want to open
your checking register double click on Checking and there you are.

One more thing you’re going to see is right here it says Check Register. If you use this feature
it’s going to ask you which account would you like to use and you only get a choice to use your
bank account. But if you’re trying to get into checking that is another way to get into it.

All of your registers are going to be set up the same way. It looks very similar to a register you
might have in your desk drawer. You’re going to see that for each transaction you can put in the
date of the transaction. If there’s something you want in the check number field. This could say
the word Debit, this can be blank, it might say ATM. It’s whatever you decide to put in that field.
This is your vendor name. This is the amount of the payment or if it’s a deposit it goes over here.
And on the second line you’ll see this is your chart of accounts. So this is where you tell it which
account this transaction goes back to.

A little term to keep in mind is this. QuickBooks calls anything that comes out of the checking
account a “check”. So even if it was ATM transaction, even if you use your debit card it’s
considered a check. It’s going to be on this payment side here. Anything that went in obviously
is a deposit. So even if it was a credit to your account it’s considered a deposit. Now in the online
version they have some different terminology. They actually have the ability to put in checks but

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you’ll also have the ability to put in expense. It shows up the same way in the register under this
Payment column.

You’ll notice that in the checking register here there’s a blue line. That just means anything
below it is postdated. Once that date comes around that line will move down or it will disappear.

You’re going to notice that for each of these transactions there’s a different word right in this
section and that just tells QuickBooks what type of transaction it is. Notice these are paychecks
that I’m pointing to currently. Here’s one that says Check. That tells me that someone either
typed that transaction on this last line or they went to the home screen and used this Write
Checks feature.

And a little thing I’ll point out real quick, often people will say to me, “I entered a bill and I
know that I paid it but it still shows up as being unpaid.” I mentioned to you earlier that you
don’t want to enter bills and go over and write a check because there’s no association between
the two. And this is how I know that. If I’m in the checking register and I see Check that’s how I
know that someone just wrote a check, just like here. If it says Bill Payment that’s how I know
they paid it correctly and went through the flowchart.

Something else I want to point out is way over here to the right you have this column that has a
checkmark in it. If you see a checkmark in some of these don’t uncheck them. These are
transactions that have been reconciled. Also don’t put a checkmark in a blank one because again
that’s something that hasn’t been reconciled. Both of those will screw up your reconciliation.

If you wanted to search for something in the register you could. Notice there’s a Go To right here
at the top. You can look through any of these fields. You might look for payee, you might look
for an amount of money. Let’s say I was looking for an amount of money and I was looking for
$962.13. If I use Next I’ll go down and you can see it found one right down there. If I use Back it
will go up. If this was not the instance I was looking for I would just hit Next or Back again and
it would keep searching for me.

You can go up and print the register. You have to put a date range in. They’ll just print each of
the transactions for you.

You can also edit the transactions you’re clicked on from here. Now a couple of things you can
do. You can actually double click right here and that’ll take you into the item. And if you wanted
to edit it you could or you can hit Edit Transaction. Again it’s the one you’re clicked on.

Here’s a quick report that you might want to run and it’s going to be based on the particular
account that you’re clicked on. And it’s going to be based on the particular transaction that
you’re clicked on.

And then we’re going to talk about downloading transactions over in section two. So we’ll hold
that.

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A couple of other things just to notice down at the bottom. Right now you’re looking at two lines
in every transaction. Notice there is a checkbox where you can say one line. This is just a
preference. If you want to see it all on one line across or would you rather see the two lines?

You also have this Splits option. If you notice when you’re on a single transaction like this one
here you can only put in one account from the chart of accounts and there’s nowhere to put in a
customer and job or if you needed to put in a class. If you hit the Splits then you can go in and
put as many line items as you want in that transaction. You can come over and put in the
customer and job, also the class, or make it billable if you need to do that. You can just close
when you’re done and then you’ll see it here in the register.

The list is sorted by date. You probably want to keep it that way, but if you needed to sort it by
the amount you could or by the date and order entered. You’ll see there’s different ways you can
sort this list.

You want to stay out of the register as much as possible as far as typing is concerned. And here’s
what I mean. You probably saw that when we actually made a deposit earlier we actually went
through all of these steps on the home screen, all the way across. And remember we made sure to
go through Record Deposits this way. If I had done that then the deposit will dump into the
register automatically. Here’s one right here we did. The same thing with when we entered a bill
we went through and paid it this way and it dumped it into the register. If I go back to checking
the ones that say Bill Payment, these are the ones that were done correctly. If you see one that
just says Check, I think we saw one earlier on this list, that means that someone either typed it on
the last line down here at the bottom or they went back to the home screen like I said and they
used this Write Checks feature. Both of those just go right into the register. If you type
something here and you record it at the bottom it ends up being a check if you open it up. Or if
you go into that Write Checks window it will end up being in the register. So it’s the same thing
either way.

That gives you a quick overview of how your register is going to work. What I want to do now is
I’m going to close this and talk to you a little bit about downloading transactions from the bank.
Let’s go ahead and go over into section two.

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Video: Downloading Transactions

Cindy: We are working now in module seven where we’re talking about QuickBooks banking
activities. This is section two where I want to just briefly talk to you a little bit about
downloading transactions from the bank. This is always a very touchy subject because people
think that it’s so easy to download from the bank and everything’s done for you and that is not
correct. If you’re not careful this will screw up everything in QuickBooks. I want to show you
how you would set this up and some of the pitfalls with actually using this.

Before I actually go and show you where to set this up I want to just briefly tell you a little bit
about some of the things that can happen when you download from the bank.

Remember that when you’re actually creating invoices and receiving payments and recording
deposits there’s a whole process you went through for doing that so that it came out correctly.
Let’s say that you download from the bank and it says that there’s a deposit of $1,000. Your
checking register over here is going to be correct. It’s going to have the right number. But here’s
what’s going to happen. When you look in the check register and you see a deposit the way we
had done it correctly was we actually had put it in and the money’s came from undeposited
funds. When you download from the bank it doesn’t know that. It just knows there’s a deposit
for $1,000. And what it’s going to do is in the account field it’s either going to put something in
automatically or it’s going to allow you to tell it where to put it. And you’re not going to think
undeposited funds. You’re going to think income or accounts receivable and it’s going to end up
just screwing everything up.

The same thing with bills. Remember we talked about if you put a bill in and you want to go
ahead and pay bills this way so it dumps into the register. If you’ve done that it’s already in the
register. When you download from the bank it’s going to want to put it in a second time. There’s
just all kinds of screwups that can happen when you’re downloading from your bank into your
checking register.

Now I do find that it works really well for credit card charges. I know we haven’t really talked
about those yet but typically with credit card charges that’s just something. There’s no bill in
here. There’s not really an invoice. It’s just something you just straight charge. And that works
out really good. But for your checking account it’s probably going to give you a problem.

I do suggest that if you want to try it that you do it for a period of three days to a week. Don’t
download six month’s worth because you will not be able to clean that up.

Let me show you where to go if you wanted to download from your bank. Now you can actually
do this in two places. You can go to your bank and it will have an option to download into
QuickBooks. A lot of banks now are only letting you download into QuickBooks online. So you
may want to choose to do it from here and see what happens.

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I’m going back to my checking register and in here you’ll see an option to download
transactions. What’s going to happen here is the first time you do this you’re going to have to
add an account and set up all your bank accounts. It’s going to ask you for your username and
password so that it can connect with the bank. What’s going to happen is if you’re clicked on the
bank account you want to download from it’ll give you some information like the balance in
QuickBooks right now and then you’ll have this option over here to download transactions. This
would only download any transactions you have not yet downloaded. They’re going to appear in
this window down here and what’s going to happen is you can check off the ones you want to
pull over. You’ll also be able to go in and change the accounts at that particular point or add a
memo, whatever you’d like to do before you actually click the button to go ahead and add it over
into QuickBooks.

I’m going to see if any of these, like this one has seven transactions waiting to be added. I’m
going to click on the transaction list and here’s what happens. These are all of the transactions it
says have not been downloaded into QuickBooks. If you want to download them you check them
off over here and then you can type in any of these fields but notice there’s no account number
on most of these. You’re going to have to choose that. And this is where it’s going to be very
important if you use this feature to get the correct accounts in here. You’re going to be able to
choose your classes from here. And then also if you want to select an action over on the right
they’ve got some different things you can do here as well. If there’s something you know you’re
never going to pull in you’re going to choose Ignore and that way it won’t pull it in ever. And
also if you know that there’s a transaction already in QuickBooks or you see it here just choose
Match to Existing and that way it knows that there’s already one in there.

All you’re going to do is once you get all that done, you’re going to go ahead where it says Batch
Transactions and you’re going to add or approve these or if there’s some you’re ignoring you’re
going to go ahead and say Ignore and they would be removed from this window and they’ll be
over in your QuickBooks checking register. That’s all you do.

I’m going to go ahead and close that out. But like I said, go ahead and only do a couple of day’s
worth just to make sure it’s going to work out for you because you don’t want to screw up your
whole bank account if you download six month’s worth.

Alright let me go ahead and close all of this stuff and get back to my home screen. We are
actually going to go into section three and talk about creating entries and writing checks.

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Video: Creating Entries and Writing Checks

Cindy: Okay we’re in module seven and we’re all the way down to section three, Creating
Entries and Writing Checks in QuickBooks.

You have the ability if you just want to write a check for something, it’s not going to pay a bill,
for example, you can just do that. And you can record it actually in the register or you can go
through the write checks feature. And I just want to go through those with you real quick.

We just got through talking about the registers in section one. I want to go back to the check
register and I want to show you that if you wanted to just enter something quick you could. You
enter it on the last line down at the bottom. I’m going to go ahead and put in the date. If it’s a
check number, notice it will assign the next number sequentially. But let’s say I used my debit
card. Then I can use something like the word Debit or whatever little code you want for that.
Some people just leave it blank.

Let’s say this is my electric bill and it’s going to Cal Gas and Electric. Over here what I’ll do is
put in the amount of money and then make sure you have the correct account chosen for this. If
you have a memo you’ll want to plug that in, maybe something like your account number with
them. But notice I don’t get the ability here to add two lines, if I needed to have two lines in my
chart of accounts. I don’t get to put if I need it to go to a customer or a job. That’s certainly okay
if I don’t need it to do that. All I need to do now is record it and it’s going to be in the register.
And you can actually see right here. If I double clicked where it says CHK here it takes me into a
check. So it actually did create an actual check for this, even though we used the debit card.

I could have actually done this from my home screen and I could have gone through this write
checks feature here.

Let’s say that I go ahead and make it to Cal Gas and Electric again. I wanted to show you that if
you have open bills in here for a vendor it will pop up and ask you if you want to go to the bill
pay feature and pay it that way, which would be correct if you have a bill in here. But let’s say
you didn’t for some reason. You can continue writing check and it will just put you on this check
screen. Again, you would want to check all the information up here at the top. You’d put in the
amount of money. And you can see now that I have some additional fields if I wanted to put in
an extra line for my accounts, if I wanted to separate this between items and expenses I could do
that, put it to a customer or a job. But I’m just going to go ahead and Save & Close and now that
one’s in the register as well. Let me go back and look at it. I didn’t change the date so it’ll be on
the 15th. But here it is right here.

So my point is that when you’re entering a check you can do it in the register or you can go
through the write checks feature to do this. It’s pretty simple.

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That’s really all I wanted to tell you about creating entries and writing checks. Let’s go ahead
now and go over into section four and I will show you how to do a bank transfer.

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Video: Bank Transfers

Cindy: We are in module seven where we’re talking about some of the banking activities in
QuickBooks. We’re all the way down now to section four where I want to talk to you briefly
about how to make transfers from one bank account to another in QuickBooks.

It’s super easy in QuickBooks to transfer money from one account to another. You’re not going
to be able to do this on your home screen. You need to go to your menu and click on Banking
and then you’ll see an option that says Transfer Funds.

First set the date for your transfer. And if you’re using the class feature you want to go ahead and
put it to a class if it applies. Then you’ll tell it to move money from one account into another. So
I’ll say from savings to checking. I’m going to transfer $5,000 and I’m going to click Save &
Close. This message basically is saying that if I don’t check this little box here this is only going
to happen in QuickBooks, not actually at the bank. And that’s fine. I’m going to click OK.

Now let’s go check it out. We’re going to go to the check register, I’m going to open checking
here, and let’s go down and look and see if we see it, and I do. There it is right there. Notice
there’s my $5,000.

I’m in the checking account so the flipside of the entry is my savings account. I could have typed
this down on the last line if I knew how to do this properly. But that’s what it looks like if you
have a transfer. That’s really all there is to this.

I’m going to go ahead and close this. We’ve got one last thing we want to do in this particular
module and that is we need to go ahead and reconcile this checking account.

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Video: Reconciling

Cindy: We have one more thing to cover here in module seven. We’ve been talking about the
banking activities in QuickBooks. We need to actually go through and talk about how to
reconcile your checking account at least but you can reconcile any bank account this way. Let
me go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and we will reconcile our checking account.

What happens is at that bank you’re going to get a statement every month for your checking
account. You’re also going to get a statement for your credit cards and some of your other
accounts as well, but we’ll deal with checking right now.

Once you get that you’ll want to go ahead and reconcile it. Now I’ve had people say to me that
they don’t reconcile because they look at it every day, they go online and look at it. You still
need to reconcile because this is where you’re going to see if you and the bank actually match.
Here’s where you go to reconcile.

The first thing you want to do is choose the account that you’re going to reconcile. Now we’re
going to do checking but notice it could be my credit cards, it could be any of these other
accounts.

The statement date, that’s going to be the ending date on your bank statement. Then it’s going to
pull in the beginning balance. Now notice you can’t change this. Last month’s ending is this
month’s beginning. So this should be the same number. If you know you reconciled last month
but you come in this month and this is not correct what you want to do is go down here to this
Locate Discrepancies and it will actually pull you a report on anything that you changed since
you last reconciled. Common things that happen is you check or uncheck one of those things in
the register that I mentioned. You also may have deleted something that was already reconciled.
It will pull that into the report and tell you.

You also need to put in your ending balance. Now I don’t know what it is right now so I’ll put a
penny in there and come back and change it later.

There is a place to put any service charges. Maybe you had an NSF fee, who knows. Or if you
have an interest bearing account you might plug that in as well. The account for an interest
bearing account would be Interest Income. And I’m going to click Continue.

The way this screen is set up is any checks or anything that came out of the bank account is
going to be on the left, anything that went into the bank account is going to be on the right. Your
job is to check off whatever is on the bank statement. If it’s not on the bank statement don’t
check it off.

It doesn’t matter if you do deposits first or checks. I just do deposits because there’s fewer or
them but it really doesn’t matter.

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I’m going to go down and check off all of these deposits. What should happen is when you’re
done it will tell you at the bottom here how many deposits you checked off and what the total is.
That number should match the total number of deposits on your bank statement. If it doesn’t you
need to figure out what’s wrong.

Now occasionally you’re going to have one that happened on the last day of the month that
might clear next month. You just leave that unchecked if that’s the case. But keep an eye for
things that look really old. If it’s December and you see something in here from July then you
need to figure out what’s going on with that July one.

We’re going to do the same thing over here with our checks and payments. Now you know that
all of these don’t clear every month. People hold checks, they get lost, just different things
happen. This is a really good place to see if you’ve entered something twice or if something
actually has the wrong amount. Let’s say this Hopkins Construction Rentals was $300.01. You
just open it up. You’re going to change this to the 1₵ and then you’re going to Save & Close.
And when you’re done it will be reflected here. So it’s a good place, like I said, to see if you’ve
made a mistake.

When you’re finished checking off your checks and payments look down here and again this
should match your bank statement. It says I have five checks and payments and they total this
amount of money.

Here’s how you know if you’re balanced. See this difference down here? That should be zero. If
it’s not zero you’re not in balance. Now I’ll tell you in my situation I didn’t know what the
ending balance is so I’m going to change that. Do not do this in real life. This is called Force
Balancing and you’ll balance but it’s not going to be correct. But you’ll see now that I’ve put in
my ending balance the difference is zero.

If you were out of balance, let’s just say a penny, and you wanted to reconcile it anyway you
could. I’m going to go ahead and click Reconcile Now and it’s going to say Congratulations
you’re balanced. It’s also going to give me a chance to print these reconciliation reports. You
probably do want to print these even though it doesn’t make you because what happens is if you
ever had to rebuild your file you would actually have those transactions you could go back and
look at.

I want to display both of these to show you what they look like. The first one that comes up is
my reconciliation summary. Now I’m going to go ahead and close that but this is what the
summary looks like. It just says I have six checks and payments that cleared and they total this
amount of money. This is how many deposits cleared. If I close this I’ll be able to see the actual
detail and that’s going to show me every check that cleared and then the total, every deposit that
cleared and the total, and also the uncleared ones down here at the bottom. You can see where
those can be very helpful if you have to rebuild your file.

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That’s really all there is to reconciling. Just make sure you do it. I reconcile my bank accounts, I
reconcile my line of credit on my bank accounts, and also my credit cards.

That’s going to wrap up module seven where we’ve talked about banking activities. I want to go
over now to module eight and we’ll switch focus and talk a little bit about working with loans.

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Chapter 8 – Working with Loans

Video: Setting Up Loans

Cindy: Welcome back. We’ve made it to module eight now and in this module we’re going to
talk a little bit about working with loans. You need to know how to properly go in and set up
your loans in the chart of accounts, you need to know how to go ahead and create any loan
payments, and then I want to talk to you about the loan manager because it will make it a little
bit easier sometime if you need QuickBooks to break out interest and expenses for you. Let’s go
ahead and go over to section one and talk about setting up loans.

Let’s go back to our chart of accounts and just briefly go back over the loans again.

In accounting remember there are two terms that we’re going to use when we’re talking about
loans. We’re going to be using what we call short term liabilities and also long term liabilities. A
short term liability is something that you’re going to pay off in twelve, thirteen months. Whereas
a long term liability is going to be something that’s going to be a little longer than that, like a
three year loan or a five year car payment, that sort of thing. You want to make sure you choose
the correct one when you’re setting the loan up.

When we look down here at the long term liabilities they have it looks like they have several car
payments as an example. They’ve got a loan on the van it looks like, the utility truck, the pickup
truck. And this is the balance left on that loan. Any time that you make a payment towards the
loan you should put it to one of these accounts that you’ve set up. Don’t put it to an expense
account. Your car payment is not an expense. It is a liability to your business.

I’m going to open up the van here just to look at how they have theirs set up. And you’ll see that
they actually put them in as bills. And what they did is they put a certain amount of money goes
back to the actual loan itself and they have a certain amount that goes back to the interest. So
whether you’re writing a check or you’re setting up a bill it doesn’t matter. Some of it’s principle
and some is interest.

Now here’s the thing. QuickBooks does not know how to break down principle and interest. You
would have to manually type these numbers in. Most of the time what people do is they’ll just
put the entire amount back to the main account, to the loan itself, and later they’ll go back and
check and see how much the interest was and come back and edit the payment. So just remember
that QuickBooks will not know this. You’ll have to actually set this up yourself.

Now I’m going to go ahead and close that. And I’ll close this as well. Let’s go ahead and create a
new vehicle loan. I’m just going to right click anywhere and go to New. Because I want it to be a
long term liability I’m not going to choose loan here because that makes it a short term. I’m
going to come down from this list and pick long term liability and click Continue.

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I want to go ahead and give this a number. I’ll go ahead and say $23,300 and we’ll plug in an
account name. Now I copied this just to keep it consistent, but let’s say this is the Office Vehicle.

Alright, the next thing we want to do is we want to go down and tell QuickBooks there is an
opening balance. Now if it’s a brand new vehicle you’ll want to plug in the amount of the loan
that you’ve just taken out. But remember that if you’re plugging this in after you’ve made
several payments this needs to be the balance as of when you’re putting this in QuickBooks. I’m
just going to say it’s $35,010.24. And I’ll just choose as of my start date of December 1 and click
OK. And then I’ll go ahead and hit Save & Close. You can see now that that’s how much money
I owe on the office vehicle.

Now what I need to do is show you how to actually make some payments towards this vehicle.
Let’s go ahead and go over into section two and I’ll show you how to create loan payments.

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Video: Creating Loan Payments

Cindy: We are working in module eight where we’re talking about Working with Loans. This is
section two and I want to show you how to go in and create a loan payment using your actual
register or you can actually use the write checks window. Let’s go ahead and flip over to
QuickBooks and take a peek at that.

When you go to make that payment you can put it in the register or you can use the write checks
window. I’m going to start with the check register and open the checking account. I want to type
it on the last line at the bottom. Let me go ahead and change the date. In the check number field I
can put anything I want or leave it blank. I’ll put in the name of my bank, the amount of the
payment, which is $500, and now it’s time to pick the account.

What I want to do here is go back and find the loan itself. That was the office vehicle. There’s a
place for a memo as well. If I wanted to put in the fact that this is the January payment I could do
that. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and hit Record. Notice nowhere in
here did it let me break down how much is principle and how much is interest.

If I go back to that check and open it up, now notice right now it has the account as the loan for
the office vehicle. I’m going to open it up. If I had gone to the home screen and typed in the
check then it would look like this. And here I can go ahead and say that some of this is interest. I
would want to make sure again that it’s set up like this where I have an interest expense account
and loan interest is a subaccount below. Now granted at this point you may not know how much
is principle and how much is interest but at least set it up so that later you can come back and
edit this.

Now if I Save & Close, then when I look in my checking account instead of having that one
account there it’s actually going to say Split because it’s split amongst two different accounts.

That works great if you want to manually type in how much is principle and how much is
interest. But let’s say you want QuickBooks to do this for you. There is a little feature called the
Loan Manager that I want to talk to you about and that’s over in section three. Let’s hop on over
there and I’ll show you how the Loan Manager works.

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Video: Loan Manager

Cindy: We are working our way down through module eight, Working with Loans, and we’ve
made it down to section three now where I want to talk to you about the Loan Manager.

I’ve told you that just writing a check QuickBooks is not going to be able to tell you how much
is principle and how much is interest on your loan. If you use the loan manager however it will.
You’re going to see that when I show you the loan manager it’s almost as if Intuit bought a little
program somewhere and incorporated it into QuickBooks. It looks like it doesn’t even really
belong. But you’ll see it’s really a nice little feature and I’ll show you how it incorporates with
QuickBooks.

You won’t be able to access the loan manager from the home screen. You’ll have to go up to
Banking on the menu and you’ll see the Loan Manager on the list.

While the loan manager is loading I want to explain to you what this is. This is going to be a
place where you go in and you add a loan to the loan manager. And then you can actually make
payments and then you can take those payments and put them over in QuickBooks in your
register. So even though we set up the loan in the chart of accounts it’s not set up in here. That’s
why we’re going to add a loan.

You have to have the loan set up in the chart of accounts first because you have to be able to pick
it from this list here. Now you’ll see it brought in the current balance. Then you’re going to pick
the lender. We’re going to pick Bank of Any City. You’re going to pick your origination date.
And then you’re going to pick the original amount of the loan. Let’s say $40,000. Also you’ll
want to pick the number of months or if you want this to be years or weeks you can change that
as well.

I’m going to click Next and now it asks the due date of the next payment. Let’s say the due date
is going to be January 31st. And the payment amount is $500, and this includes principle and
interest. Your next payment is number one. So if this was an existing payment you were setting
up you would make sure that the next number is the next payment number.

This is a monthly payment but notice I could make it weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly. And if it
has an escrow payment I’m going to choose Yes here and fill in the information about the
escrow.

It will alert me ten days before the payment is due as well if this little box is checked. Let’s click
Next and see what else is here.

Here I can set the interest rate. Let’s say that it was 3.5% and it’s compounded monthly. I could
compound it by exact days. The payment account means when I make the payment which
account does it come out of? I’ll say checking. You want to make sure you have the interest

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expense set up. That’s going to be the loan interest account we’ve talked about. And if you have
bank service charges then you’ll want them to come out that account as well.

Now that I’ve filled in the information I can click Finish and that loan is now set up.

You’re going to see down here information about the loan that we just set up and then you’ll see
the payment schedule. This is going to show you each month of the loan, where the principle is,
the interest, and so on and so forth all the way to the very end. That’s kind of cool how that
works. Right?

You’ve also got a place for the contact info. So if there’s someone particular at the bank that you
need to speak with when you have a problem you can actually contact them.

If you needed to edit the details of the loan you can see the edit option right over here. Or if you
want to remove the loan you can do that as well.

Here’s how it’s going to work. Whenever you’re ready to put that payment in QuickBooks
you’re going to come over here where it says Setup Payment and then you’re going to fill out
this information. This is a regular payment. It could be that it’s an extra payment. Here’s all the
information you set up about which lender it is and the bank account. And here’s it’s got the
principle and interest broken down. You can edit those if you need to. Also if you had to add any
fees or charges you could. And if you need to put a different payment number over here you can
do that too.

Where it says Payment Method you can say write a check or enter a bill, either one. And then
you just click OK. And here’s the check that it threw over into QuickBooks. You just edit the
information, make sure you have the right date of the payment, things like that, and once this
looks good all you have to do is Save & Close. See how it broke out the payment for you?
Principle and interest? I’ll go ahead and Save & Close and it will ask me if I want to record my
changes. Yes. And now it’s in the register. If I go back home and look in my checking account
I’ll see it in there and it should be at the very bottom and it is. There’s the Bank of Any City and
if I double click I will see there is my check.

It’s pretty neat how that works actually. Even though it’s not actually an official part of
QuickBooks it works really well.

That’s how the Loan Manager works. Now that you know how to set up loans and how to make
payments and things like that let’s go ahead and talk a little bit in module nine about how to
work with credit cards.

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Chapter 9 – Working with Credit Cards

Video: Setting Up Credit Card Accounts

Cindy: Well we’ve made it all the way down to module nine now and this particular module I’m
going to talk to you about how to work with your credit cards. These are credit cards your
company uses to purchase items for the business. It has nothing to do with accepting credit cards
from customers. You need to make sure you know how to set up the credit card accounts
correctly so that you can see how much you owe at any given time. We also need to go through
and talk about how to enter the credit card transactions so they’re set up correctly and then how
to reconcile it and make a payment towards that particular card. Let’s go ahead and flip over to
QuickBooks and I will show you how to work with credit cards.

There’s a couple of things that I want to mention I see frequently that are incorrect and I want to
make sure that you are not setting your credit card charges up any of these two ways.

One of the things I see very frequently is that people will receive their credit card statement in
the mail and they will enter it as a bill. Let me show you why this will not work. I’ve actually
gone over here and set one up just to show you what happens. Your credit card statement comes
in the mail and it is there so that you can tell if you and the bank match. That’s all that a
statement is for. You can make a payment towards your statement at that point but it’s not a bill
that you have to pay. What happens is let’s say you receive your credit card statement and it says
the total you owe is $1,000 and let’s say you put $1,000 right here. What that means is that you
have to find $1,000 worth of expenses down here so that you can Save & Close this because
remember this has to match exactly the amount that’s due. At this point you would be okay but
here’s where the problem comes in. Let’s say you save this and you make a payment towards it
of $700, meaning you still owe $300. Next month when the statement comes it’s going to say
you owe $300 plus whatever you charged that month. Let’s just say it’s $800. Let’s say you put
in this second bill and you put up here it’s $800 and you start trying to break out your expenses
down here. This is where you’re going to have a problem because it will let you enter $800
worth of expenses but remember $300 were already broken out on that first bill that you entered.
Now you’re doubling your expenses. And if you had the same situation this month then it would
go on and on and on and just snowball. This is not the correct way to enter credit cards. The only
time this will work is if you pay the full bill every single month, no exceptions. But even if you
do this it’s really not the way to do credit cards.

Let me go back to home for a moment and mention that here is where you would enter each of
your credit card charges. You would enter them individually and then you would tell it which
account that particular charge goes back to. If you don’t see this at all that’s because you don’t
have at least one credit card account set up in your chart of accounts.

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The other thing I see people do frequently is they won’t set up a credit card account but they will
go and somehow try to put the expenses in. You need to set this up as a credit card account so
that you can track all of your cards and see how much you owe on each card, like you see
they’ve done here.

Let’s go ahead and set up a visa card. I’ll just right click and choose New. Notice Credit Card is
one of my choices. And I’m going to hit Continue. I’ll give it a number and then I’ll just call it
Visa. If when you’re entering this visa account you have a balance you’ll want to enter that here.
But if you’re starting with zero you just Save & Close.

This is letting me know that I can set up my online banking if I need it to download, but we’re
not going to do that right now. We’re just going to look back here and see the visa card and you
can see that there is no balance currently on the card.

This is the correct way to set up your credit cards. For each of these you will have a register. I’ll
just use the QuickBooks credit cards. You can see here each of the transactions and if they’ve
been reconciled.

Let me go ahead and close this. That’s the correct way to go ahead and set up your credit cards.
What I’d like to do now is have you move over into section two and we’ll enter some credit card
transactions so you can see how it all comes together.

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Video: Entering Credit Card Transactions

Cindy: We’re working in module nine and in this module we are working with credit cards.
We’ve already gone through in section one and set up a credit card account. Now I want to show
you now to enter some credit card transactions and have them go into the correct expense
accounts and the correct credit card account.

Here’s where you enter each credit card charge individually.

The first thing you’ll want to make sure of is that you have the correct credit card account chosen
from this list. It also will default to a purchase. Occasionally you may have a refund or a credit
and you can choose that option right here.

Let’s say that we bought some office supplies at Staples and we’ll say it was $140. You’ll want
to make sure down here that you have the correct expense account chosen to break this down. If
you wanted to say that $95 was office supplies and maybe printing was the rest of it you could
do that. You can break this up into as many accounts as you like.

I’m going to hit Save & New at the bottom. Let’s say now that we decided to go have something
to eat and let’s say we went to the Olive Garden. It was $35.36 and this would be for Meals. One
more. We’re going to Save & New at the bottom. After we went to Olive Garden we decided that
we’re going to go to Staples and return some of those office supplies. So we’ll need to choose
Refund or Credit here at the top. We’ll return $50 wroth of office supplies. That gives us three to
work with here.

At the top under the main tab you know how to find, so you know all of these, you know how to
attach a file. Let’s talk about the Download Card Charges. We’ve already mentioned this a little
bit when we were talking about actually downloading from the bank back over in module seven.
And I told you that it is a good idea to download your credit card charges. You can do it from
here or if you wanted to go to your bank’s website you could do it from there as well. If you’re
going to download you don’t need to enter these separately like we did. If you need to clear your
splits that would just clear the totals out of here so you can recalculate. And you also have some
reports here. Make sure you run these expenses by vendor detail or if you wanted to run some of
these quick reports or transaction history reports you could do that as well.

I’m going to go ahead and Save & Close and I want to show you if I go back to the register in the
chart of accounts, those three should actually be in there. Here’s my visa. I’m going to double
click and now those three are in the register. See all the credits over under the payment side
here?

What we’re going to do now is we’re going to go ahead and move over into section three and
talk about reconciling your credit card charges.

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Video: Reconciling Credit Card and Making Payments

Cindy: Okay let’s go ahead and finish up module nine, Working with Credit Cards. This is
section three where I want to show you how to reconcile your credit card statement when you get
it in the mail and how to make a payment towards that credit card.

The last thing that happens in the credit card process is that your statement arrives and you need
to reconcile it just like you did your checking account.

I’m going to click on Reconcile and for the account I’m going to pick Visa this time. Remember
to check the statement date. That should be the statement date reflected on your statement that
you have. And also if you reconciled last month then this beginning balance would be last
month’s ending balance. Remember if you know you reconciled but it’s not correct this time go
down to this Locate Discrepancies and it will tell you whatever you’ve changed since you last
reconciled. You’ll then want to put in an ending balance. And I’ll come back and change that in a
moment.

You do have a place here for any finance charges that you had. The account that you would use
is going to be finance charge. And you’ll want to set it up this way. They’ve got an account
called Interest Expense and you can see that as a subaccount underneath they have finance
charge and loan interest. I’m going to pick the finance charge and click Continue. Here you’ll see
everything that we charged and here are any payments or credits. Remember you’re job is to
check everything off that’s on that statement.

You’ll want to make sure that your difference is zero down at the bottom. Now I need to go in
and change my ending balance because I didn’t know what it should be. And remember do not
do this in real life. You want to get this ending balance from your statement. But I’m going to
plug it in and go ahead and hit Continue and you can see now that I’m balanced. If you weren’t
balanced for some reason look over here and see if your payments equal what’s on your
statement. And also if your charges and cash advances match what’s on your statement. And one
of those would have to be off in order for this difference to not be zero. Since it’s correct I’m
going to hit Reconcile Now.

Here’s something a little different than when we reconciled the checking account. Now that
you’ve got all the transactions reconciled you can choose to do one of two things. You can write
a check now to make a payment or enter a bill and pay it later. Entering a bill this way does not
mess anything up because it’s going to actually put everything to the visa account and then you
can change it if you decide later you’re not going to make a full payment. I’ll choose write a
check now and click OK and what’s going to happen now is there’s my check. Before I look at
the check it brings up this select reconciliation report. We looked at these when we were looking
at reconciling our checking account. This is going to show me my summary or my detail of

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everything that cleared on this particular reconciliation. I’m just going to close for now and look
at the check.

This is a regular check. So just make sure that the money’s come out of the correct bank account,
you’ve got the correct pay to the order of, and if you’re not paying the entire amount just plug in
what you are paying. It will remember the rest so that you can come in next time and follow the
same exact procedure.

Something really important I want you to notice. Look at the account. This does not show all the
items and the accounts they went back to, like office supplies and meals. We’ve already been
there, done that. Any time you want to show a payment on the credit card statement you’re going
to have to show it going back to the actual visa credit card account. That is so very important
right there.

I’m going to click Save & Close and that’s going to complete that process.

If I wanted to go back and check it I can go back to the chart of accounts, I can find my visa and
double click and now I’ll see my payment there. That’s really all there is to it.

I’m going to go ahead and close that and that’s going to actually wrap up this module, Working
with Credit Cards. It’s time to really change focus now. We’re going to go into Customizing
Forms over in module ten. So I will meet you over there.

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Chapter 10 – Customizing Forms

Video: Form Customization – Part 1

Cindy: Hi there. Welcome back. We are working in module ten now and we’re going to talk in
this module about how to customize your forms. Remember that a form would be an invoice or a
purchase order. Those are good examples of a form. We might want to go into those forms and
rearrange the columns, add a field that’s not there, change a few things as far as how it prints, all
that’s customization and you can really customize this to look any way you want. Let me go
ahead and start off by showing you how to customize your forms. This will be section one and
there’s going to be two parts to this, so make sure you watch both parts.

Let me go ahead and start off by showing you exactly what we’re talking about when we’re
talking about customizing forms. We’ll use invoices as an example. I’m going to click on Create
Invoices.

Do you see this list of templates right here? You have the ability per invoice to choose the
template you’d like to use on that invoice. There might be one you want to create that’s similar
to one of these or maybe you want to create a brand new one, maybe you want to edit one of
these. That’s what we’re talking about is this list right here. Depending on which one of these
templates you pick you might have different fields that appear or you might be able to rearrange
the columns. There’s just a whole bunch of things you can do.

If you go up here to List on the menu here’s where you see Templates.

This is a list of all the templates in QuickBooks. You can see the invoice ones we just talked
about. There’s some credit memo templates, sales receipts, purchase orders, statements,
estimates, and sales orders. Down at the bottom of this screen on the left you’re going to see the
templates and there’s an arrow there where you can choose some of these choices. Here’s where
you could create a new one, edit one, or delete one. You can’t delete one if you’ve ever used it.
You can make it inactive right here so it doesn’t show up in the dropdown, but if you’ve used it
you can’t delete it. You could duplicate one and that way if you need another one similar to this
you can make those few changes that you need.

I wanted to point out the import and export option as well. Sometimes people will tell me that
they have an estimate or an invoice already in Excel that they like. Well you can just import that
into QuickBooks. And the same with exporting. You might export something out to Word or
Excel.

I also want to show you this Download Templates option. Intuit has several that you can choose
to pull in that are free. You’ll notice if I come over here and click Invoice, for example, there’s a
ton of them that show up. All you have to do is click Download if there’s one you like and it will
download it into the existing list of templates.

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Let me go ahead and close this window and I’m going to close this as well because chances are
you’re not going to be on this screen when you want to edit or create a new one. So let’s do it
actually from the invoice window like I had pulled up a second ago.

Where you’re going to go is to the tab that says Formatting and you’re going to be using these
buttons right here. Let’s start with Manage Templates.

These are the current ones that are in QuickBooks. What you’ll want to do is copy one that’s
very similar to a new one that you want. I’ll choose this Rock Castle Invoice and choose Copy at
the bottom and now you can see there’s a new name in the list titled Copy of Rock Castle
Invoice. I’m going to change the name of it over here to whatever name I’d like to call it. I’ll say
My Invoice and then I’ll click OK.

The next screen is where you’re going to see now that you’re doing the basic customization for
My Invoice. If you wanted to go back to the Manage Templates window you click right here. But
let’s move on down to Use Logo.

If you click there then it’s going to take you into your computer and you can search for any logos
that you might want to use. I’ll use this cute little koala bear right here. And there it is.

Next I can change the color scheme. Now black is probably the best color but just to show you if
you choose green and apply the color scheme notice everything is green. Lines, text, everything.
I’ll go ahead and put it back on black and apply that color scheme.

I can also change the font for any of these. When it says Title it’s talking about the word Invoice
right here. Company name and address. That’s going to be this. And the labels are the words Bill
To, Ship To, Terms. Those are labels for each of the fields. For each of those I can go in and
change the font.

Down here at the bottom the things that are checked are already on so you can see the company
name and address is already turned on. You might have a tendency to click Phone Number
because you notice that your phone number is not here. But what happens is notice how
QuickBooks put it in as an additional field somewhere on your screen. And you would need to
go and move that.

Here’s an easier way to make this show up. I’ll uncheck Phone Number. Notice there’s no phone
number underneath my company address. If I choose to update information then I can go in and
add a phone number to the bottom if I’d like. Now when I click OK it’s going to ask me if I’d
also like to update the legal address. I’ll just say No for now. And you can see the phone number
is now underneath my city, state, and zip.

Also you have the ability to print the past due stamp. All that means is if you have an invoice
that’s past due it’ll be across in green and it’ll say Past Due right up here. There’s also going to

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be a print status stamp. That’s going to print a stamp on your invoice. So if it’s paid you’ll see it
say Paid, Pending, Void. You can kind of see what it would say.

The next thing you want to do is go to the Additional Customization. Here we’re going to have
several things we’ll be able to do as far as customizing this. So we started with a broad
customization and now we’re going to do some kind of middle of the road customization and
then we’ll get really detailed.

You’ll notice there are several tabs here and we’re on the tab that says Header right now. And
these are some of the things that I can turn on or off. I can choose to see them on the screen, I
can choose to print those, and also change the wording over here for any of these that I would
like.

Let’s start with Default Title. Right now it says Invoice. That’s this word Invoice up here. Just to
change this I’ll put Invoice all in capital letters so you can see how it works. And as soon as you
tab through you can see the preview of what it’s going to look like.

The next one down is Date. That’s going to be this date right here. I’ll put in here Invoice Date.
And then you have Invoice Number. That’s going to be right here.

The next thing I see is my Bill To and my Ship To. Here’s my Bill To, here’s my Ship To. If I
don’t need the Ship To I can just uncheck these and then you’ll see that that disappears from my
invoice.

Purchase order number. If I happen to use PO’s then I’ll want to turn these on. And you’re going
to start getting this message. It pops up on your screen saying you have overlapping fields. What
you’ll want to do is hit Continue for now and you can see this is an overlapping field. When we
get into part two and talk about the Layout Designer that’s where you’d actually move these
around so they don’t overlap.

Next is SO number, which is a shipping order number. Then you have terms, which is right here.
That’s going to be your net 30. Then you have due date. Rep, if you’re company has sales reps in
your organization you may choose to have a field so that you can put in the sales rep’s name.

Also you have account number. This would be if you give your customers an account number.
You could actually have it print that account number for you.

Here’s some more shipping options. If you don’t ship you don’t need these, but you have ship
date, ship via, freight on board, and then you have project. In QuickBooks they’re called
Customers and Jobs right back here. Let’s say you want to change this word Project to Job
Name. That way you can show the job name in a field all by itself and you can see it popped up
right down here somewhere. We’ll see it once we go through the layout designer.

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And the last thing you’ll see are some additional fields. One says Other and other is just like a
miscellaneous field that you can use for anything you want. These ones that say Contract,
Birthday, and Spouse’s Name. Those were actually set up in the customer set up and we decided
we’d like to see those for customers, vendors, and/or employees. So if you needed additional
fields that aren’t here that’s where you set them up and then they’ll show up here.

Here’s a preview of what yours is going to look like right now.

Let’s go ahead and do this. Let’s stop the video at this point and I’m going to let you go over to
part two and that way we can continue talking about some of this additional customization.

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Video: Form Customization – Part 2

Cindy: We are working in module ten, Customizing Forms. This is part two of section one.
We’re just going to continue what we were talking about as far as form customization.

When we left off in part one we had just completed going through the header tab. Let’s talk
about the columns tab now.

When we talk about the columns, Item is a column, Description is a column, all the way across.
And we have the ability to show those on the screen. We can also print those and change the
order if we’d like.

The first thing you’ll see is the service date. So if I wanted to use this I could. I could check
those. And then you’ll see Item. Notice you can’t uncheck Item on the screen. That’s because
you have to have that column there to pick an item to invoice your customer. However you
probably don’t want to print it because when you create items those an internal name that you
give them. The customer is going to see the description and know what that item is.

The next one is Description and that’s number two. Then you have Manufacturer’s Part Number.
If you wanted to turn that on you could. You have Quantity as the next one, Unit of
Measurement, then you have the Rate, and then the Amount. The amount will always be the last
column. You can’t change that. But let’s say you wanted to rearrange the quantity and the
description. Notice that if I go ahead and click OK out of this so you can see it, now I’ve got the
item, quantity, description. So it changed the order of the columns. If you ever have to get out of
this you’re going to get back into it under the Formatting tab and go to Customize Data Layout.

We were under the Columns tab just then. Let’s go ahead and move over to the Progress
Columns. This is really the same thing except it’s more for estimates. See how it says Estimate
Columns? So we’ll move over to the footer.

The footer is all of the information at the bottom of your invoice. They have a customer message.
That’s what’s going to show up right here where you see this blank box. Those are your “Have a
nice day”, “Thank you for your business” type things. They have subtotal, sales tax, total,
payments and credits, and balance due. That’s all of this right here. I think that’s way too much
to put at the bottom of an invoice.

The first thing I’d uncheck is the sales tax because typically if you charge sales tax it will
automatically just appear underneath the last line here. So you don’t need it down here at the
bottom. I’d take off total and payments as well. If you wanted to add those you could. The reason
you would add them is what if you have a customer that has a really large invoice and they’re
making payments towards that invoice and they call you up and they say, “Hey. Can you send
me an invoice showing what I owe?” That would be an instance for turning on the total, the
payments and credits, and then the balance due. You also can put in a customer total balance

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here and that would be for the entire customer, not just this invoice. You can show a job total
balance and you can add a disclaimer if you like.

The last tab over says Print. There are some things that you may be interested in here. First of all
if you wanted to use these options that are grayed out you have to click this little circle that says
Use specified printer settings below for this invoice. Now you can turn it portrait or landscape,
print two copies if you like, or change the paper size.

It’s going to print page numbers. If you have more than one page number in your invoice you’ll
see that they’re numbered page one, page two. And you can also put a trailing zeros if you like. It
basically will add some zeros at the end of the decimal point so that everything kind of lines up
nice and neat.

You can see we’ve got all the options turned on or off and it looks a little jumbled down here.
What we’re going to do now is we need to go into the Layout Designer because this is where we
move things around and make it look nice.

In order to do that we need to go over into section two and talk about the Layout Designer.

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Video: Layout Designer – Part 1

Cindy: Now that we’ve gone through all the customization for our forms we need to talk a little
bit about the Layout Designer. This is where you’re going to make your invoice look nice.
You’re going to be able to move those overlapping fields, make a column wider, maybe put
some pictures, some text, things like that just to make this look a little more like you would want
to look for your business. We’re going to go ahead and start over in part two of module ten. This
is Layout Designer and this is part one. So there are two parts to this. Make sure you watch part
two as well.

To access the Layout Designer you have to be in this additional customization window. If you
forgot how to get into this window then on your Formatting tab you have a button that says
Customize Data Layout. That’s how we got into this window. And at the bottom of that is what
they call the Layout Designer.

If you’re familiar with any graphics type software, maybe PowerPoint or if you worked in Adobe
then a lot of this will be very familiar to you. You’re going to see here that each one of these is
what we call an Object. When you have an object selected whatever you do next will affect that
object. If you needed to select more than one just hold the Shift key on your keyboard and notice
you can keep selecting as many as you need. To deselect you just click anywhere aside and that
will get rid of the selection for you.

A couple of things just to point out. The first thing you may be wanting to do is make this
window bigger and you’re not going to be able to. See how I can’t get my arrow here to enlarge
it? I can only close this window. So you do have the confinement of working in this small space
here.

You have a blue dotted line that goes around your page. That is your margins. If you want to
change those just go to the bottom left and you’ll see a button that says Margins and you can
actually type in here whatever numbers you’d like.

The other thing I’ll point out is you have these blue boxes here. You’ll see one here and one
here. These are used so that if you plan to fold this invoice and put it in a window envelope that’s
where the window is. So it’s letting you know that you might want to move your addresses into
that blue area. If you don’t want that notice at the bottom there’s a checkbox that says Show
Envelope Window. You just uncheck it or check it, either one.

Also the grid that you see to the right of margins here. If you notice these little dots on your
page. Those are actually your grid. And the grid allows you to actually line up your objects. You
have some choices with this grid as far as the spacing. If you want to change it to like an eighth
of an inch, for example, you can do that. You can just not show the grid at all or you’ve got what
they call a Snap To grid. And snap to basically means that if I start moving one of these objects

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and it gets close to one of the grids it will snap to the closest one. Again it helps you line things
up. You can tell my space is a little bit bigger now between those little dots.

When you’re looking at this you’re going to see a couple of things. The objects that have a gray
border, like these, that is a gridline. It’s just there to show you the outline of your object. It will
not print. However, the ones with the black borders that you see those do print. You can add
borders, you can delete borders. We’re going to go through all of that. I just wanted you to be
aware of that right now.

Let’s do a couple of things here. Let’s say that I don’t need this Ship To. I’ll go ahead and hold
Shift and click both of these and then I can use this Remove option or I can hit Delete on my
keyboard, either one, to get rid of that.

If you notice these overlap a little bit. Something else I can do is I can select these and I can
move them anywhere I’d like. You just click and drag to move them. Make sure you have that
white arrow. If you’re having a hard time moving them, sometimes using the up and down
arrows on your keyboard or your left and right arrows will help you line things up a little bit
better.

Something else you can do is draw what’s called a Net around your objects. I can hold Shift to
select these and that’s pretty easy, but what if I just hold the mouse right here and just kind of
drag across them like this? That’s another way to select my objects. And then I can keep playing
with this and I can use my arrow keys if I want to see if I can get these looking a little bit nicer.

You’ll spend a lot of time playing with these. But once you get them set up then you’ll be good
to go. Alright let’s see if I can get these even close. Okay. I’ll play with that a little bit later.

Let’s say that I want to move these over. I’ll be able to do the exact same thing. I can just move
them over and then of course I would play with them and get them where I want them to be.

Alright, a few things at the top. I’m going to select my title for my company. Let’s say I’d like to
change the font, the color, maybe add a border, those type things. As long as you have it selected
you can access properties right here. One quick thing I’ll point out. If you’re used to working in
other graphics programs you can select more than one object at a time and then make your
changes. Notice if I have more than one selected here then this is not available. I’m just going to
go ahead and use my title only and go back to properties.

The first thing I can do is I can actually work with the text within the object. Currently it’s left
aligned. That doesn’t mean on the page. That means within the object. I can also choose to right
align or center it or if I have multiple lines of text I could indent the first line of text. That’s my
horizontal what they call Justification. Here’s my vertical, meaning for top to bottom. Do I want
the text on the top, the bottom, or the center? If I just wanted to change the color I could click
here and go pick whatever color I’d like. But if I need more font options I can click on Font right

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here and go in and change all of the options, including the color. Let’s just say I go down and I
pick a different font. Let’s say that we pick this one. And I’ll make it bold and then I’ll make it a
little bit of a larger size. Here’s your strikethrough and you’re underline if you happen to need
those as well. I want to see what this is going to look like so I’m going to click OK and then
click OK again and there it is.

Let me make my font a little bit larger. I’ll go back to Properties, go back down to Font. Let’s
say I make it size 22 and click OK. If you notice the last word in my title is gone. That’s because
the placeholder or the box is not big enough. You can actually just change the size of it by
grabbing one of your control handles as they’re called, that’s the little box on the side. As long as
you have the double arrow you can change the size of that particular object.

I’m going to go back to Properties and let’s look at the next option over which is Border. The
border is the line around my object. Remember that currently I have a gridline that’s just
showing me where the outline is but it won’t print. If I wanted a border that prints I’m going to
check all of these. I can also have rounded corners. That means instead of just a square corner
here they’re a little more rounded. I’ll pick large just so that you can see what it looks like. Over
here I can pick a pattern. Instead of having a straight line I may want a dotted line, a dashed line,
or a double line. And also I can choose the thickness. This color here has to do with the border. If
I want my border to be a specific color I’m going to choose it from the list and click OK. Let’s
go check it out now and see what it looks like.

Now all this means is that the text was really wide up and down. I can do a few things to change
that, like move this down a little bit, maybe move this down a little bit, and that way I can
actually move my bottom control handle to widen that particular object up and down.

Let’s see what else we have. Let’s go back to Properties. The last tab over says Background. And
this is what we call your Fill. You can have a color in the background of your object. I’ll just go
ahead and pick a color and click OK and there you go. So you can be really creative with how
you want any of these objects to look.

Now what if I had another object I wanted to have the same formatting? If you’re familiar in
Microsoft Office with the Format Painter button we have something similar here. It’s called
Copy Format. What this will do is copy your formatting from one object to another. You have to
start by clicking on the object you want to copy the formatting from, then click on Copy Format,
and then you can click on the object you want to copy it to. This will stay on until you go back
and turn it off. Let’s say I like this but it’s a little too large. All I have to do now is go back to
Properties and I can make it a little smaller. I’ll make my font a little bit smaller and maybe not
bold or something like that. I can just kind of play with it here.

So there’s a lot of different things you can do. You just have to be really creative and get in here
and play with this.

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Okay let’s say I want to make a few changes to my company address here. I’ll go back to
Properties, I’ll change the font and just make the font a little bit larger here and click OK.

Let’s talk about what you can add. There are three things you can add. You can add a textbox, a
data field, or an image. Let’s start with an image.

If I did not pull in a logo or even if I did I can still pull in an image from here. All you have to do
is find your image and pull it in. Once you get it in you can make it whatever size you’d like and
then place it wherever you’d like on your invoice.

Let’s go ahead and do this. We’re already at ten minutes for the video. Let’s go ahead and wrap
this one up and I want you to go over to part two so that we continue going through the layout
designer.

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Video: Layout Designer – Part 2

Cindy: We’re in module ten, Customizing Forms, and we’re all the on the last section, which is
part two of the Layout Designer. Let’s go ahead and continue working on our invoice.

When we left off we had actually talked about adding an image. Let’s talk now about adding a
textbox. You can put any text you’d like in your textbox and then you can change any of the
options for the text, the border, and the background that you would like. What’s going to happen
is this is just going to look like some generic text that’s sitting on your page and you can move
the box wherever you like, and when you click away from it you can see what I mean by it looks
like text just sitting out there.

You can also go up and add a data field. These would be fields that are in QuickBooks but have
not been pulled over into this particular invoice template. If you scroll down the list and you find
one you like, let’s say we’re going to find customer email. You’re going to choose it and click
OK and now you’ve got that field and you can put it wherever you like in your invoice template.

The next thing over is copy. If you have some objects you’d like to copy you can go ahead and
choose it and then copy and now you have two of them. And if you want to get rid of one you
can either hit Remove or Delete on your keyboard.

Look at these three here that say make same height, width, and size. What this does is if you
have more than one object selected you can make them the same height, width, or size. Size
means both, up and down and across. Here’s a good example.

Let’s say that I want to put these right down here and I want to put date right above it. The first
thing you’ll notice is they’re not the same width. Let me go ahead and select them all. I’ll just
draw the net and I’ll make them the same size. Now that they’re the same size I can go back and
select the date and move it over so it lines up with the invoice number. Pretty close.

The next thing you’re going to see is you can center something horizontal. That just means on
the page. Now I liked where I had this koala bear but you can see what I mean when it says it
centers it.

You can undo if you like and also redo. And then you have an option to zoom in or to zoom out
so you can see it a little bit better.

You’ve also got some options I want to point out down here at the bottom. You’re probably
going to want to make the description as wide as possible. That means that some of these other
columns can be a little bit smaller. Notice if you put your mouse on the line that separates the
columns there you can drag to make those columns smaller if you need to, or larger. But let me
go ahead and move some of these over so you can see what I’m talking about. There you go.

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Now if you’re quantity was not centered like this one is all you do is go up to your Properties and
choose the Center option.

Down at the bottom this is where the message is going to go. So if you need a little bit more
space in there for that message area feel free to make it as large as you need it. And then of
course you have all these options over here. If you don’t want them you can delete them or you
can move them.

It will take a little bit of practice. You’ll go in and out of this several times before you get it the
way you want, but eventually you will.

I’m going to go ahead and click OK here and I’m going to click OK out of that. And let me pull
in a customer and a job so we can see what this looks like. I’ll just cancel out of the billable cost.
And I’m going to go up to the main tab so I can hit my preview and there you go. You can see
the changes we’ve already made and obviously I’d want to make some others, but this is how
you would do this. Remember to get into where you want to customize this. You’re going to
formatting, customize data layout. That’s going to throw you in here and then you can go to the
layout designer if you want to go in and start working with your fields.

That’s pretty much all there is to working with your templates. What I’d like to do now is we
need to go ahead and wrap up module ten. Let’s move over into module eleven and we’re going
to change focus and talk about reports.

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Chapter 11 – Reports
Video: Quick Reports

Cindy: We’ve made it all the way down now to module eleven. And in this particular module
we’re going to spend a good bit of time talking about reports. One of the great features in
QuickBooks is there’s so much reporting you can do to get all kinds of information on how your
company file is doing. I want to start off with some quick reports, then we’ll jump in and look at
all the different reports in here. We’ll talk about memorizing some of these and then I’ll show
you how to create what’s called a Report Schedule. Let’s go ahead and start off with quick
reports. This is section one of module eleven, Reports.

I want to just start off this first section talking about quick reports because they are quick ways to
actually run a report on an individual item in QuickBooks. What I mean by that is it might be a
particular item in the chart of accounts, it might be a customer, but if it’s just one then you can
run a really quick report on that item. Let me give you an example.

I’m going to open up the chart of accounts. Let’s say I go down and I find the expense account
called Automobile and I want to run a report just on that one item in this list. All I have to do is if
you notice at the bottom there is a button that says Reports and if I click the down arrow I can
choose Quick Report from the very top. And here’s a quick report just for automobile. Now
notice it includes the fuel, the insurance, the repairs and maintenance because those are
subaccounts of automobile, but these are the only ones that show up on the list.

Let me give you another good example. Let me close this. Let’s say from the home screen I go
over to the customer center. If I’m clicked on a particular customer notice I can run a quick
report on that customer right over here. Here’s Kristy and here’s Kristy’s bathroom.

That gives you a quick overview of how the Quick Reports feature in QuickBooks works. What
I’d like to do now is take you over into section two and we’re really going to dig into all the
reports that are in QuickBooks. Let’s go ahead and head over and I will see you shortly.

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Video: Creating Reports – Part 1

Cindy: Now that we’ve actually taken a quick look at how quick reports work I want to actually
take you in and show you all the reports that are in QuickBooks. Now obviously we don’t have
time to look at every single one of these but I’m going to try to hit most of them and give you an
idea of at least where to look if we don’t address one that you’re interested in.

This is actually module eleven, Reports, and this is section two, Creating Reports, part one.
Make sure you watch part two as well so we can finish up looking at all of these reports.

There are quite a few reports in QuickBooks and there are several different ways to get to the list
of reports. The easiest way to me is to go up to Reports on your menu and then you’ll see a list of
all these reports here. When you point to one that has an arrow over on the right that means these
are subreports that are part of the main heading here. There’s also an option on your icon bar that
actually says Reports. And if you click on that then you’re going to get what’s called a Report
Center. It doesn’t matter if you use the report center or use reports from the menu. It’s the same
either way. You get more of a visual with the report center. If notice from here down, this is the
same list that you see right over here. For example, if I see Company & Financial and then I see
Profit & Loss Standard, over here is Company & Financial and there’s Profit & Loss Standard.

Let’s take a peak first of all at the report center so you can see how it works and then we’ll start
using the menu to see these a little bit quicker.

You’re going to see that when you’re in the report center you’re on the standard tab when you
first come in. And this is where you’re going to see all the reports. You may have to scroll down
if you don’t see one that you think is in this list. You’re also going to notice that in addition to
the reports you’re going to see the graphs because they’re considered part of the same feature in
QuickBooks.

For each of these you’re going to notice on the bottom that you can change your date range. You
can actually type in here whatever date range you’d like. Or you can pick a date range from the
dropdown list this way. Once you’ve chosen the correct dates you can choose Run to run that
report.

To close a report you’re going to click the X at the top right of that particular window.

The next one over is Info. If you want more info on the particular report that you’re pointing to
you’re going to see a little description of it down here at the bottom. Also there’s a heart at the
bottom. So if you have a particular report that you like to run on a regular basis mark it as your
favorite and it’s going to show up under your favorites up here. There’s the profit and loss we
just saved.

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Alright I’m going back to standard. You also have your Help option. If you needed help on this
particular report, you wanted to learn a little bit more than Info showed you, you can click on
that as well.

You have a Memorize tab at the top and we’re going to actually talk about memorizing reports
over in section four, but if you have any memorized they would show up here. We mentioned
Favorites. If you’ve marked any of these as your favorites they’re going to show up here. Also
your recent reports. Many times you might run a report and then you run a couple more after that
and then you want to go back to one and you don’t remember which one you ran. This will show
you those recent ones.

Let me also tell you about Contributed. One of the features that QuickBooks has is the ability for
users on the Intuit network to actually collaborate and share some of the different reports they
might have customized or come up with. That’s why you’ll notice at the bottom of these it’ll tell
you who created the report, the popularity, that means how many times it was downloaded, if it’s
been given any ratings by users. And you’ll see that for all of these. These were created by Intuit.
I don’t know if you can see that there. But then look. This one was created by this person
KACPARM, whoever that is. You’ll have the ability like I said to go in and actually collaborate.

Let me go ahead and use the reports option under the menu here and show you some of these
reports. Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to come down and start with Company &
Financial because these are just some options for reports up here.

We’re going to start with Company & Financial and we’re going to look at a Profit & Loss
standard. This is the most important report in QuickBooks right here, Profit & Loss standard,
sometimes referred to as P&L.

A P&L is where you’re going to see if you’ve made or lost money. If you think about the chart
of accounts and all the different types of accounts that were there what’s going to show up on the
profit and loss are all your income accounts and notice it’ll tell you the total income, then it will
take all your cost of goods accounts and it will subtract them from your total income to give you
a gross profit. Below that you’re going to have all your expense accounts. And at the very
bottom it’s going to take basically your income minus your expenses and tell you if you made or
lost money. That’s why I say that’s the most important report in here.

A couple of things about reports. I want you to notice the date range. This is only for a two week
period. I want to show you that if I change this how drastic this number will change. So when I
look at, for example, my total income it’s $51,000 right now. I’m going to go ahead and instead
of typing in January 1 I’m going to come over to the dates here and I’ll say this fiscal year to
date. Notice my other choices. I could say last fiscal year, I might look at just the quarter, this
month, but I’m going to go ahead and say this fiscal year to date. And immediately the report is
updated.

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If you ever know there’s been a change that affects the report go ahead and hit this Refresh right
here and that’ll update it for you.

The other thing is if you’re on any report and you want to run a report on a specific line item,
maybe I just want to see design income. As long as I have this magnify glass here I can double
click anywhere on the line and now drill down. And basically now this is only on design income.
So you can do that in any report.

The other thing I want you to notice about this report is the fact that this is run on an accrual
basis. Just to give you some terminology. Accrual versus cash. Here’s what this means. When
you look at a report on an accrual basis that means that all the income here is reflective of all the
invoices you’ve created whether they’ve been paid or not. When you see $449,000, that’s not
how much has been paid. It’s how much you’ve actually invoiced and sent out to customers. The
same thing with your expenses down here at the bottom. When you look at all these expenses
these are only the ones I’ve put in QuickBooks. It probably includes bills that aren’t paid yet. So
technically all of this money hasn’t been spent yet. Versus if you show this on a cash basis let me
show you what happens. The total income right now is $449,000. If I go up here and click on
Cash now the total income is only $379,000. That’s a really big difference. Think about at tax
time do you want to pay taxes on money you have not received yet?

Alright let’s go ahead and close the Profit & Loss because I want to show you the other report
that’s going to be very important to you and that’s going to be under Company & Financial your
Balance Sheet standard.

The Profit & Loss showed the income minus the cost of goods minus expenses. Right? This
particular report shows all the other accounts in QuickBooks and the balance. I can see my
checking account has a balance of $46,000. I can see accounts receivable. I’m owed $93,000.
And so on and so forth down this list. This is going to have all your credit cards, your loans,
every account that’s not income, expense, or cost of goods it’s going to show up here.

Think about if you go to the bank to get a loan. The bank is going to want to see the profit and
loss to see if you’ve made or lost money, but they also want to see if you have any money
coming in based on your accounts receivable or how much you’ve got in the bank or how much
you have in loans. Those are all factors in deciding whether or not to give you that loan.

I’m going to go ahead and close that. I’m going back to reports, Company & Financial again. I
want to point out that any time you see Standard that means that you’re going to see a line item
and the total. If you want to see a detail, which is every single item broken out, you can do that
as well. But that’s going to be a pretty long report. So instead of seeing just construction income
or just design income I’m going to see every transaction that made up that particular account.

Going back to reports, Company & Financial again. Notice you can run a Profit & Loss year to
date comparison or a previous year comparison. This is a good one to look at because it’s going

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to show your profit and loss accounts, you’re going to see the current year, the previous year, the
dollar difference and the percent change. That’s a really great way to see if you’ve made or lost
money per account.

Going back to reports, Company & Financial again. You can run a Profit & Loss by job. For
those of you who’ve been wanting to job costing, remember I said as long as you put everything
to a customer and job then you can run a profit and loss by job. This is going to show you all the
jobs left to right. So it can be a long report left to right. If you want to narrow this you can. You
can go up and customize this report and pick the particular customer or job you’d like to see.

Going back to reports, Company & Financial again. You can run a Profit & Loss by class. So if
you’re using the class feature you can see your profit and loss per class. And also there’s one for
your unclassified. That’s a good one if you use the class feature. You can run the unclassified
just to see which items you haven’t yet put to a class and then go ahead and make those changes.

You can see your income by customer, your expenses by vendor, and you can see an income and
expense graph. Let me show you that real quick so you’ll know what the graph looks like.

You basically get a column chart at the top and a pie chart at the bottom. There’s not much more
you can do than this. If you’re really into graphs Excel is the place to be doing this. But you do
have a few things that you can do. Notice that I’m looking at this right now by account and I’m
looking at the income down here. I might decide to look at it by customer and look at the
income. And that way I can see which customer is bringing me the most business. I may choose
to look at it by account and then look at the expenses. And now you’ll see there’s job expenses,
payroll expenses, etcetera. So you can make a few changes to this but for the most part what you
see is what you get here.

Let me go ahead and close that. Let’s go ahead and go back to reports, Company & Financial,
and just notice a few extras. You’ve got a few balance sheet reports you can run. There’s a detail
like we talked about. You can run a previous year comparison. And then there’s a statement of
cashflows and a net worth graph here you can run as well. That’s what you’ve got under
Company & Financial.

Let’s go ahead and stop the video right here. I’m going to have you go over into part two and
we’ll keep going down the list here.

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Video: Creating Reports – Part 2

Cindy: We’re still working in module eleven where we’re talking about reports. We’re in
section two, Creating Reports. This is going to be part two. Let’s go ahead and continue where
we left off.

When we left off we had actually gone up to reports and we looked through the reports that are
under the category Company & Financial. Let’s take a quick peak at the reports under Customers
& Receivables.

There’s actually going to be two really big ones here. Let me point out this one that says Open
Invoices. These would be any invoices that you’ve invoiced the customer for and they have not
yet paid you in full. Even if they ow you a penny it’s going to show up on this list here. If you
know there should be one here and you don’t see it the first thing I want you to do is check your
date because if it’s after in this case December 15th it’s not going to show up until you change
that date.

A couple things to notice. If you happen to see on this report an invoice, let’s just say for $100,
and for the same customer and job right underneath it it says Payment for $100 then that is
wrong. And what I mean by that is if it was correctly set up than that payment would have been
applied to that invoice and neither one would show up on this report. It’s super easy to fix. You
would actually find the payment here, double click, and check off which invoice it goes to.
That’s open invoices. Let me go ahead and close this.

The other one that goes right along with that, if you’re under customers and receivables, is going
to be the customer balance detail. This is every transaction that happened with your customer.
Looking down this list you can see things like invoices, there’s payments, credit memos. You
can see all that. Here’s where one of them received a check. It looks like a refund. So everything
that happened with that customer is going to show up on this report.

Going back to Reports, Customers & Receivables. You have some AR reports if you want to run
those. Here’s an AR aging summary. This basically will show you for each customer and job the
aging of those invoices. You can see if they’re in the 1 to 30 day category, 31 to 60, and all the
way across. That’s a really good one to look at to see who your customers are that have the most
outstanding invoices.

Back under customers and receivables again. You’ve got a customer balance summary if you
wanted to look at that. You’ve got some collection reports, average days to pay. Here’s another
graph. This would be your accounts receivable graph. Basically this is going to show all of your
customers. You can see them in the list here. And then you’ll be able to see what percentage of
the pie they’re taking up as far as accounts receivable.

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Let’s see what else is under that same category, Customers & Receivables. You can go down to
the bottom and you can run a transaction list by customer. A customer phone list, a customer
contact list, and an item price list.

The next category down is Sales. You can see your sales by customer. I’ll just show you what
this would look like. This is all of your customers and the total amount of sales for this date
range. So again remember to change your date range if you need to. You can also run a report on
items by summary. So you can see the items, you can see by sales rep, and you can also see a
sales graph if you want down here.

Let’s go over to jobs, time, and mileage. There’s several here, especially if you’re under job
costing you’ll want to know about.

You’ve already seen that you can run a profit and loss by job. This is just another place to get to
it. But here you can run some job profitability reports. Here’s one that’s very helpful if you
estimate jobs in QuickBooks. Here’s an estimate versus actual. Let me show you what that looks
like. Here’s Tom Allen Sunroom. I estimated $1,680.78. So far it’s cost me $767.00. So that
means I’ll have a difference of $913.00. And you can see the estimated revenue, the actual
revenue, and the dollar difference. That’s a really cool one for job costing.

Alright back to jobs, time, and mileage. You can also run estimate versus actual. And we talked
about the profit and loss by job. Down here if you wanted to see an estimate report on your jobs
you can run an estimate by job report. Here’s unbilled cost. And this is open purchase orders by
job.

We haven’t yet talked about but here’s all the time reports you could run. And also mileage. We
haven’t mentioned that yet, but there’s your mileage reports.

Let’s look at Vendors & Payables. Here’s an AP aging summary. Let me show you what this
looks like. These are all the bills you’ve entered in QuickBooks. You can see what category
they’re in as far is the bill in the 1 to 30 day due category, 31 to 60, and so on and so forth. This
is a great one to run if you’ve got a lot of bills in here and you’re trying to pay off the oldest ones
first. You’d be able to see them over in these columns.

Going back to Reports, Vendors & Payables. Here’s your unpaid bills. Let me show you unpaid
bills detail. These are all of the bills that you’ve entered that you have not yet paid, even if you
owe a penny. That’s a good one to run. Also right along with that, back under Vendors &
Payables is going to be your vendor balance detail. This is going to be all of the transactions that
occurred per vendor. You’ll be able to see here all the bills you’ve entered, if you’ve written any
checks to pay those bills, that type of thing.

Alright let me close a couple of these. Going back to Reports, Vendors & Payables. Here’s a
really important one. If you have vendors that are supposed to get a 1099 here’s your 1099

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reports right here. Also notice where the sales tax reports are. When we talk about sales tax over
in module twelve here’s the reports you’ll run for that. And then you can run a vendor phone list
or a content list if you’d like.

The next category down is purchases. You can see everything you’ve bought or purchased per
vendor. You can see it by item. You can also look at open purchase orders or if you want to see
some detail on that you could.

Inventory. If you track inventory you can run an inventory valuation summary or valuation
detail. You can see your stock status by item. And let me point out this physical inventory
worksheet. You know inventory gets off and we talked about you would have to go in here and
actually change this quantity. You can print this out if you want, take it in the back, and write in
the physical count. That way when you come back you’ll know what the count is.

Alright let’s see where we are now. Let’s go back to Reports. Employees & Payroll. This is all of
your payroll reports. When we get to the payroll section in module thirteen you’ll be able to go
and run a payroll summary, you can see your workman’s comp numbers if you need, you can go
down and run some, an employee contact list, you can kind of see all the reports there.

Banking is the next category down. Here’s a deposit detail. If you’d like to see the information
about each deposit you’ve made you can do that. You also saw that there was a check detail
there. Also missing checks. This one’s kind of funny because it will actually show you each
check and if a check number is missing it’ll say Missing numbers here.

Let’s see what else we’ve got. Going back to Reports. You do have some reports under
Accountant & Taxes and there’s one really important one I want to point out. That is your audit
trail. We set up the users way back and we did that so that if a mistake was made or if we wanted
to track something down we can see which user was logged in. And that’s what you’re going to
see right over here. When you’re looking at this you can see which user was logged in, what the
transaction used to be, what it’s been changed to, what it is now. This is your audit trail for all of
your transactions. Very important report right here.

There’s a few more there that you’ll just want to look through. And that was under Accountant &
Taxes. Some of you might want to look at your trial balance, some of you might want to look at
your general ledger. That’s where you’re going to find all of this stuff.

You’ve also got some budget reports. You can find those here. And then different lists that are in
QuickBooks. Like items, if you want customer list, vendor list, those types of things. So these
are going to be the standard reports that you’re going to see and there’s several different subtypes
underneath.

Take your time and go through and look at all those reports, find one that works for you. You
may want to customize your reports. Maybe there’s one that’s close to what you want. Let me

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show you how to do that. We’re going to go over into section three and I’ll show you how to
customize these reports.

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Video: Customizing Reports

Cindy: One of the things you have the ability to do in QuickBooks is to customize any of the
reports that you see. It could be you want to filter out some of the data on the reports, it could be
you want to add some columns that aren’t there, rearrange some columns. There’s a lot of
different things you can do. I want to talk to you a little bit in this module about how to
customize those reports. This is actually going to be module eleven, Reports, and we’re in
section three where we’re talking about Customizing Reports.

If you’re in any report you have the ability to change some of the options and customize the
report. The options are going to be a little different depending on which report you pulled up but
this is a really good example to show you. We’re in the customer balance detail and I’m looking
at all of my customers and every transaction occurred with those customers.

First of all I can change the dates. We’ve talked a little bit about that already. If you don’t want
to put a date range in over here you can just pick from this list. But if you click right above that it
says Customize Report. The first tab you see is the display tab. Here’s the date options again.
And then here you’re going to see a list of the columns. Now the ones that are checked are the
ones you’re seeing automatically. If you notice right up here I’ve got type, date, number, and you
can see all those are checked here. Let’s say that you want to add another column here. I want to
add memo. All I have to do is find it in the list, check it off, and click OK. And now you’ll see I
also have the memo column here.

From here there’s a few things you can do without having to go to Customize. Let’s say you
don’t want to see this account. I could go back to customize and uncheck it but notice I can also
just grab the line that separates account and class and if I pull it all the way over then I actually
hide that column.

The other thing is what if I want to move memo to the right of class? All I have to do is point to
the heading there and get the little hand and then click and drag to change the order of those
columns.

Let me go back to Customize and show you a few other things you’ll be able to do.

Under the Filters tab. Let’s say that I just wanted to see Chris Baker and no one else in this
report. If I go down this list and look for Name, Chris Baker is a customer name, then I’ll be able
to choose that and from here I can go down the list and pick Chris Baker. When I click OK you
can see Chris Baker’s now the only customer in this report.

Let me go back to customize, go back to filters. You can add as many filters as you want to this.
Let me go over to header/footer. When we talk about the header information we’re talking about
this right here. I could have the company name, I could say customer balance detail. Why don’t I
put Chris Baker in here instead? That way if I print this out I know exactly what I’m looking at.

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And if I don’t want a subtitle at all let’s say I just uncheck it. The date prepared that you see
here, that’s this date right over here, and there’s the time prepared as well. It’s also going to print
the header on pages after the first page. So if you print 2, 3, 4, 5 pages they’re all going to have
the header on them.

As far as the footer information you can print the page number and there’s several different
formats you can pick from. You can print an extra footer line if you like and you type in
whatever that text should be. And also it’s going to print the footer on the first page. If you don’t
want that you just uncheck the box.

The last tab over is Fonts & Numbers. For each of these you can change the font. The column
labels, that’s this word Type, the word Date, the word Number. The row labels, that’s going to be
Family Room, Invoice, Payment, those are rows that go across. The report to data, that’s all the
data in here and then you have the totals. And then up at the top you have your company name,
report title, subtitle, and of course date over on the left.

You can show negative numbers, normally. They just have a minus sign. Like you see this one
right here? But what if you’d rather have it in parentheses? You could do that. Or you can have
the trailing minus, meaning the minus is on the right hand side over here. You can also show it in
bright red. Let me go ahead and click OK and now you’ll see that all the payments are in bright
red and they’re in parentheses because they’re negative numbers.

Some more things you can do is you can come up here and comment on the report. I’m going to
click on that and what you’re going to notice now is this is a copy of the report. Do you see these
little comment indicators here? If you click on one it opens up this section at the bottom where
you can type a comment. What you want to do is once you type the comment go ahead and hit
Save over on the right and you’ll see it’s got a number one that corresponds with the first
comment. If you wanted to add a second one, maybe down here for some reason, you just click
on it and then you type your comment below.

Once you’ve gone ahead and made comments you’ll want to go ahead and save this. And you
can give this any name you like. I’ll just call it Chris Baker and click OK. And what’s going to
happen now is it’s telling me it’s saved it successfully and I can close this because the original
report is behind it.

I told you a little bit about the fact that any of the users in the Intuit network can share their
reports. If you’ve made some changes that you think others might benefit from you can share it
with the Intuit community.

We’re going to talk about memorizing over in section four. Let’s talk about print very briefly.
You can print this as a report or as a PDF. You can also email this as an Excel file or as a PDF.

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As far as Excel goes you can take this and actually send it to an Excel file. If I choose Create
New Worksheet here what’s going to happen is it’s going to ask me a few questions. For
example, do I want to put it in a new workbook or an existing? Maybe I already have one over
there and I just want to update that one. Replace one or I can create a CSV file with it. I’m going
to export and it’s going to open Excel and my report is going to be over in Excel.

When you make changes in Excel you can send them back to QuickBooks to this report. And
now you see it in Excel. Let me go ahead and close this. I’m not going to save it for now but you
would in real life if you wanted it. You can also hide the header or show it. And refresh just
means you’ve made a change that affects the report. if you want to go ahead and update it you
would hit that Refresh button and see those changes.

That’s pretty much your options when it comes to customizing your reports. Now that we had
this one customized why don’t we go into section four and I’ll show you how to memorize your
reports.

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Video: Memorizing Reports

Cindy: Hey there. Welcome back. We’re working our way through module eleven, which is the
Report module. This is section four, Memorizing Reports. I just showed you over in section three
how you can customize your reports. The problem is if you don’t memorize them, which is really
the same thing as saving them, then when you close the report you get back to the original report
in QuickBooks. Let me show you how to memorize these and then how to open those memorized
reports.

I’ve done all this work to customize this report. If I do not memorize it, which is like saving it,
and I close it then when I open the report back up I’m opening the original report that this was
based on. If I want to save this I’ve got to click Memorize right up here.

Now before I do that let me take you to reports and show you that once you do memorize it
here’s how you’ll have to open it. You’ll have to go down to this Memorize Reports option and
these are some categories that I could store my report in. Chris Baker would be a customer so I’d
probably store it in here.

Let me go ahead and click on Memorize and I can give my report a name. I’ll just leave Chris
Baker for now. If I want to save it in one of those groups I just showed you then I pick that group
from the dropdown list and I do have the ability to share this report template with others and that
goes back to what we talked about right here. I’m going to click OK and now this report is
actually memorized. Now let’s make sure before we close it. I’m going back to Reports,
Memorized, I’m going to point to Customers, and there it is.

Alright let me close it. Let’s try it out. Reports, Memorize Reports, Customers, Chris Baker.
There it is. At any time if I want to make a change to the setup of this report I can do that and
then memorize it again.

Now it’s a lot of work to go to reports, memorize, and pick it from the list. It’s about four mouse
clicks there. Let me show you something we can do that makes it a lot easier. If this is a report
that you run very frequently you may want to actually save it as an icon on your icon bar here.
All you have to do is have the report open. So let me go back and open it again. It was under
Customers, Chris Baker. Any window at all. This does not have to be a report. But if you have
some window you’d like to make a button for and put it on your icon bar you can do that. You
just need to have the window open.

To do this you’re going to go up to View on your menu and notice it says Add Chris Baker to the
icon bar. I’m going to click on that. It’s going to ask me if I would like a label. The label is the
text underneath here. And then I can pick a picture. Any of these little pictures I want to
represent this report. All I’m going to do is click OK and now you’ll see I’ve added that to my
icon bar.

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I’m going to go ahead and close this. Now let’s say that Chris Baker calls and I want to pull up
his report really quick. I’m going to the icon that says Chris Baker and there it is.

Now one more thing you’ll be able to do. If I go back to View and customize this icon bar here
then I can move the Chris Baker button anywhere else I’d like on this icon bar. I just drag the
little diamond to the left and move it wherever I’d like. Now I click OK and now he’s the second
button. That shows you how to memorize these reports.

Let’s go ahead and wrap up module eleven and move over to module twelve and we’ll totally
change focus and talk about working with sales tax.

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Chapter 12 – Working with Sales Tax

Video: Working with Sales Tax – Part 1

Cindy: Hey it’s Cindy again. We’re down in module twelve now and we’re going to talk in this
module about Working with Sales Tax.

This would be sales tax that you’ve actually put on an invoice and your customers paid you for
it. You’re going to have to actually set it up correctly so that QuickBooks knows which
customers get taxed and which ones don’t, it has to know which items get taxed and which ones
don’t, and also what the different taxes are that you’re collecting. Let me go ahead and take you
over into this first section and I’m going to show you all about how to set up the sales tax so that
you do end up invoicing your customers correctly.

If you collect sales tax in your organization you will need to forward it to the proper entity. The
way sales tax works is typically you’re going to collect the tax for the county you’re delivering
the items to. If you have a storefront and people come to you you just charge the one tax rate in
your county. But if you’re actually delivering items or shipping them out to other counties you
need to know what county your customer is in so you can charge that rate.

A sales tax rate might seem like one number but it’s actually made up of several little taxes.
That’s because what happens is the voters in that county vote on those individual taxes. Even
though two counties may have the same rate they could be different taxes in those groups. Let
me show you what we’re going to do. We’re going to go to Items & Services and if you go to the
very bottom of the list here is the sales tax items they had set up for the practice file. You’ll see
they have three and each one has a different rate and then they have a sales tax group, which is
accumulation of those three. Here’s why you want to do this. You want to break these out so that
when you forward the tax to the proper entity it’s going to ask you how much goes to this one,
how much goes to this one, and so forth. But if you ever look on an invoice the only place that
you can actually put a sales tax is right here where it says Tax. You can’t fit all of those
individual ones into this one field. The way it works is once you create the individual taxes then
you create a sales tax group and you tell it these taxes go in that group. You always pick the
group right here and it will charge your customer correctly. Let’s go set a couple of these up so
you can see how this works.

I’m going to go ahead and right click and choose New. The first thing I want to do is choose
sales tax item from this list. If you don’t see these two options it’s because you told QuickBooks
when you set up your company file that you don’t charge sales tax and now you’re doing it. You
can always turn these on in the preferences.

I always start with the state tax first. It really doesn’t matter but that’s just my little thing that I
do. I’m going to go ahead and put in here state tax. And every county charges the same rate for

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that tax. Now I’m going to put in here the Department of Revenue. That’s going to be my
vendor. It will let you leave this blank but don’t do it because when you look at a report it will
group the blank ones in a separate place on the report. I’m going to click OK and now you’ll see
there’s the state tax that we just set up and it’s at 6%.

Now I have two counties that I want to set up. Let me go ahead and set up county number one
first. I’m going to go ahead and say New. And let’s say in this county they charge a total of 8%.
And let’s say that the second item they charge is a transportation tax. I’ll just call it Trans. And
in this particular case they charge 1% and again it goes to the Department of Revenue. Now you
can see both of them right there. Now let’s say I want to edit this and I wanted to call it Trans 1
for Transportation 1. I’ll right click and edit that and just add a one at the end of it like that and
click OK. Now I’m going to go ahead and set up the other one. They also charge in this
particular county 1% for what they call a local tax. I’ll call this Local Tax number one and I’ll go
ahead and say that this particular one is 1% and it goes to the Department of Revenue.

Now what I can do is I can right click and make a group from those three taxes. I’m going to go
to New and this time I’ll go ahead and create a sales tax group. I’m going to name this Group 1
and I’m going to go down where the tax items are and pick all the items that go in this group. I’m
going to say Sales Tax, that’s my 6%, I’ll do Local Tax 1, and I’ll do Transportation 1. See how
that’s 8%?

Now let me go ahead and set up the other one for you so you can see how this works. It’ll be the
same thing.

I’ve already got the state tax in so I don’t have to set that up again. So I’ll just go to New and I’m
going to do a sales tax item and I’m going to call it Local Tax 2. Let’s say that it’s 0.5% and let’s
say it goes to Department of Revenue. If I click OK now I’m going to have two of those. Now let
me create one more group. I’m going to right click and choose New. I’m going to choose a sales
tax group. I’m going to call this one Group 2 and then I’ll have the State Tax in here and I’ll also
have the Local Tax 2. See how that’s 6.5%? And then I’ll click OK.

The two groups are the ones I’ll be pulling onto actual invoices.

I’m going to go back to home because there’s actually a second part to this. We’ve set up the
taxes now. The second part is that certain items are taxable and others aren’t. If I go back and
look at the items list again, I’m just going to pick a couple of these just to show you. Typically a
service you provide is not taxable. I’m going to go ahead and look at the floorplan, so I’ll just
double click, and here’s where you would tell QuickBooks if your item is taxable or not. And
you can see it’s not in this case because it’s a service I provide. Let me go down and see an
inventory part. I’ll look at cabinets here, custom cabinets. And if you look at this one notice it is
taxable. So that’s the second part. You have to tell QuickBooks which items are taxable and
which ones are not.

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The last part to this is you have to tell QuickBooks which customers are taxable and which ones
aren’t. And if they are taxable which tax do they get charged? Let me go to the customer set up
and we’ll look at a couple of these.

Let’s say we take our first person on the list here, Mr. Burrows. I’m going to double click so we
can edit. And the third tab down says Sales Tax Settings. This is where you tell QuickBooks that
this customer does get charged sales tax and this is where you tell it which tax he gets charged.
Remember you’re picking a group. Resell number. All that is, is if I sell chairs in my store and
you come to me and buy chairs in my store that you want to turn around the put in your store to
sell you could actually apply to the state for a tax exempt certificate. And if you present that to
me I can plug it in here in case I get audited and I’ll have it.

Let’s go ahead and change one more customer. We’re going to change Tom Allen. We’re going
to go to the Sales Tax Settings. Notice he’s taxable. We’ll put him in Local Tax 1 as far as his
tax item and click OK. This will not go and change any existing invoices. This is only ones you
create for future reference.

Let’s go ahead and go back to home. We’re going to create two invoices and we can see how this
works.

My first customer was Ken Burrows. And if you noticed it automatically picked Group 1. See
that? I’m going to go ahead and just pick something. I’m going to pick framing. Remember
that’s a service. So see how it says Non-taxable over here? That’s what that means. I’ll go ahead
and say there were ten of those. And then on the second line I’m going to pick the exterior wood
door. And notice that this one is taxable. I’ll just do one of these. So QuickBooks is charging 8%
tax but it’s only charging the tax on the wood door and not the framing.

Let me go ahead and add one more, Save & New. And I’ll pick Tom Allen. Now I’m going to
ahead and cancel that. I just want to pick something from the list. Let’s say I pick that same
wood door. And that’s an exterior wood door. I’m going to invoice him for two of these and
notice it does charge sales tax on the door.

Now I noticed something when I looked at this one. I’ve got the same tax rate for this guy. I need
to go ahead and pick the Local Tax 2 and I’m going to Save & Close. Since I changed that it’s
going to ask me, “Would I like to change it in Tom Allen’s record?” I’m going to go ahead and
say Yes and now it’s changed.

Once you actually have all the taxes set up you’ll want to go ahead and run some reports because
you’ll need to actually pay those taxes to the proper entities. Let’s go ahead and stop the video
right here and I’m going to have you guys go into section two with me and we’ll finish up all the
stuff about sales tax.

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Video: Working with Sales Tax – Part 2

Cindy: We’ve been talking about working with sales tax. This is module twelve and we just
finished section one. I showed you how to go in and actually set up the taxes. We were able to go
in and tell QuickBooks which customers get charged tax and also which items. Now that we’ve
done all that and we’ve invoiced our customers let’s run some reports so we can see how it looks
on a report and how much we need to forward and I’ll show you how all that works.

Once you’ve invoiced for the entire month then you’ll want to go ahead and see how much you
owe and forward that money to the appropriate entity. I know in my state it all goes to the same
place, our Department of Revenue. I understand in some other states though that they go to
different entities. So check with your state and see where you need to forward your money. I’m
going to go ahead and show you a report that you can run to see how much you owe.

First of all you can get to it under Reports. We briefly looked at this but notice that if you go
down here you’re going to see some reports under Vendors & Payables that say Sales Tax
Liability. Another way to get to this report, if you notice there’s a whole icon here that says
Manage Sales Tax.

Here’s the same sales tax liability report. Let me go ahead and pull that up. When you’re looking
at this report always check your dates. Make sure you’ve got an entire month in there. The two
invoices we just created were in December. So I’m going to change this to December 1 to
December 31. In real life you’re not going to see this part. That’s for the practice exercise and
this as well. So really this right here is what you’ll see. Notice that’s exactly what we just set up.
There’s our two local taxes, the state tax, and the transportation. You don’t see the group name in
here, you see the individual tax name. the reason for this is because when you forward this
money you’re going to have to also fill out a sales tax form that tells the Department of Revenue
how much you collected per tax. You can see here it tells me the total of the sales, how much of
those sales were nontaxable, how much were taxable, the rate, and the tax collected. When you
go through and you fill out your form this is the amount of money you’re aiming for right here,
not this last column. This is how much you collected.

You will get a little discount if you pay it on time. Maybe something like 1% or 2%. So the
number could be a little bit lower. Now if the number is higher you need to figure out why.
Sometimes what happens is you might buy some purchases from out of state and you have to
report those purchases. If that’s the case then this might be a little bit higher, but if it says you
collected $10 and it says you owe $100 for some reason then something’s wrong.

Use this report when you’re filling out your sales tax reports for the month. In my state the taxes
are due by the 20th of the following month. You’re okay if you pay them on time, but if you pay
them late then it will figure out a little penalty.

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In my state also we have to go online now and fill out the sales tax report for the month and
make the payment. They do not let us use a paper form anymore to do this.

Once you’ve done all that then you have to actually go in QuickBooks and tell it that you’ve
written the check so to speak for the liability that you just paid online. What you’re going to do is
go back to your manage sales tax and notice here it says Pay Sales Tax.

What you’re going to do is you’re going to check off each of the taxes you’re going to pay. Now
I don’t see the ones we set up here because check the sales tax due through date. I want to make
it December 31 and then click down here and now you’ll see them appear. See them right here?
You want to check them all off and you’re going to put over to the right how much you’re
paying for that particular tax. If you’re getting a little discount you’re going to have to look
online and see what that discount amount is. This should be the total you’re going to pay right
here. If you get a discount that means the next month it’s still going to say you owe those few
pennies from the last month. You can adjust those if you need to at any point.

I’m just going to click OK, and by the way let me look at this. I’m going to make the check date
in January. So January 11th. I’m going to click OK and then let’s flip over to the register and see
if we see it here. I’m going to look on January the 11th and there it is. Department of Revenue.
It’s a tax payment and it’s split amongst multiple accounts.

That’s what you have to do if you’re working with sales tax.

We’re going to go ahead now and wrap up module twelve and let’s move over to module thirteen
and talk about payroll.

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Chapter 13 – Payroll
Video: Overview of Using the QuickBooks Pro Payroll Service

Cindy: We’ve made it all the way down now to module thirteen where we’re going to talk about
payroll. We’ve got five sections in this module and we’re going to start with an overview of
using the QuickBooks payroll service. A lot of people don’t understand that it is not free to use
the QuickBooks payroll service. You do have to purchase a subscription. The other thing is you
don’t need to buy the software for payroll. I know a lot of people do. All you have to do is in
your QuickBooks in the preferences have it turned on and then you can double click your icon
and set up QuickBooks payroll from there. So don’t spend the money buying that extra payroll
CD. Let me go ahead and flip over and show you a little bit about how the QuickBooks payroll
service works.

I went online to the Intuit payroll website. I wanted to show you the different subscription
services they have available and what each one would have to offer. You do have to sign up with
one of these. If you don’t sign up with the QuickBooks payroll and somehow you’re able to
actually get in and write your checks for payroll you’re deductions may not be correct because
you’re not going to get any of the updates. That’s what you’re paying for.

You’ll notice they have three different products. They have Basic, Enhanced, and Full Service.
And notice the pricing as of right now. This is based on a six month period in this case and it’s
plus $2 per employee per month in addition to this $20. Same thing over here and same thing
over here. But let’s look at the Basic real quick.

Pretty much all it’s going to do for you is you’re going to put in QuickBooks that the employee
worked 40 hours. It’s going to spit out the deductions. You can actually pay them by check or
direct deposit with this. And if you need support you can get that as well. But that’s pretty much
it. Notice you’re still going to have to file your own W2’s, you’re going to have to do your own
tax forms, pay your own taxes. They don’t guarantee anything. And they’re not going to set up
the payroll for you.

If you look at the Enhanced version, which moves up in price, you’re going to see in addition to
you entering the hours and doing direct deposit and that sort of thing they will actually let you
electronically file your W2’s at the end of the year and include the payroll tax forms. If you do
the last one here they’ll pretty much do everything for you.

When you’re using a QuickBooks payroll service it’s like hiring any other payroll service.
You’re going to have to pay for it regardless.

One other thing I’ll point out is that if you use the basic or enhanced version you’re still going to
have control over each employee’s paycheck within QuickBooks. What I mean by that is you’ll
still have a check for each employee in the register that you can go in and print or whatever you

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need to do with it. If you go with the full service option where they do everything for you what
will happen is that after payday happens you will download information from their website into
QuickBooks. In the register you’ll only see three things. You’ll see the net of all the checks, their
fee, and the net for the taxes. You will not see the individual checks in the register. You’ll get
reports, so it’s not a big deal as far as that’s concerned. But just kind of know that.

Here’s where you would come and sign up with one of the services and then they would help you
get started.

I just wanted to show you that so you’d know how payroll works. What we need to do now is go
ahead over in section two and let’s start getting payroll set up. You’ll have to go ahead and set up
your payroll items first.

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Video: Working with Payroll Items

Cindy: We’re all the way down to module thirteen and we’re talking about payroll. We’ve
actually just gone through section one where we got a quick overview of the QuickBooks payroll
service. Assuming at this point you’ve signed up with one of the services you can now go
through and actually start setting up your payroll. There’s going to be several things you need to
set up but one of them is what we call Payroll Items. Let me go ahead and flip over to
QuickBooks and I will talk to you about what those are and how to set those up.

Payroll items are basically things you’re going to add to or deduct from an employee’s paycheck.
You will want to set up the payroll items first before you start setting up your employees. That
way when you do set up the employee you can pull those payroll items onto their setup screen.

You’re actually going to have to access the payroll items through the menu. There’s no icon on
the home screen for this. We’re going to go up to Employees and then you’ll see Manage Payroll
Items. Here you can create a new payroll item or you can view or edit the payroll item list. I’m
going to click on that so you can get a feel for what payroll items are.

When payroll items are set up you’re going to have to tell it what type of item as well. You’ll
notice there’s different types in this list here. If you have multiple payroll items of the same type
they’ll be alphabetical. Yearly salary are those people that are paid a salary. You can see there’s
an item for the salary itself, there’s going to be sick and vacation salary, and then you have the
hourly ones. So here’s overtime, regular pay, and sick and vacation for the hourly workers.
Here’s a bonus. There’s a mileage reimbursement. See how that’s an addition? There’s health
insurance. See how that’s a deduction? And then you’ll see company contribution and all of your
federal taxes right here. The federal taxes will automatically be loaded for you. The state taxes
will not. You’ll have to tell QuickBooks which state your company works in and which state
you’re in so that you can deduct the correct taxes. You’ve got a couple of miscellaneous other
taxes and a direct deposit option here at the bottom.

Let’s go through and add dental insurance. I’m going to right click anywhere and choose New.
When you’re adding a payroll item you can use the Easy Setup or the Custom. Let’s go through
one of each so you can see how this works. We’re going to use the Easy Setup first.

The first thing it asks me is what type of payroll item am I getting ready to create. Notice my
choices are a compensation, it can be an insurance benefit, retirement, paid time off. I’ve got
other miscellaneous additions and deductions as well I could choose from. This is going to be an
insurance benefit and then I’ll click Next.

What’s going to happen now is it’s going to load all the payroll setup options. You might have to
give it a minute the first time you do it but then this screen will pop up and ask you about setting
up your insurance benefits.

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The first thing this asks me is to check all of these that apply. This happens to be dental
insurance. There’s also other insurance options down here. You can see there’s group term,
there’s other, medical dependent, you can kind of see the list there. I’m going to click Next and
it’s going to ask me how is the dental insurance paid for. Some companies the employee pays for
all of it or sometimes they split it with the employee. You just have to kind of choose the one
that applies. There’s also an option for the employee if they’re going to pay for it all themselves.
I’m going to go ahead and click Next and then it’s going to ask me the payee. This means when I
actually write the check to pay for this who is the check made payable to. Let’s say it’s Blue
Cross. If Blue Cross isn’t on the vendor list yet you will have to set it up.

The next thing is the account number. That just basically means what is Blue Cross’s account
number they’ve given you so when you make the payments you can reference that. The other
thing is what is the pay frequency for Blue Cross. If you don’t need a pay schedule for it you just
click at the bottom here and that’s probably the choice you’re going to choose most often. I’m
going to click Next. Now all we have left to do is finish.

What’s going to happen now is when our payroll item list pops up you’ll see that you now have
dental insurance on the list and notice it says Company Paid. If you needed to go through that
and edit this, because look health insurance is a deduction. I’ve set this up as a company
contribution. I’m going to right click and edit that payroll item. And notice when I go through
here that this is actually the setup that was the long one I told you about. You’ll notice that I just
took off the words Company Paid in the name here. I can track this by job or I can tell it the
payroll item is inactive. I’m going to click Next. Here’s the agency Blue Cross. If I have plugged
in my account number with Blue Cross I’d see it here. And then here’s the liability account.
Right now when I actually deduct the dental insurance from my employees paycheck it’s going
to go into a place called Payroll Liabilities in the chart of accounts. That’s fine but I’ll probably
want to put into a subaccount as well so that I can track exactly where it is.

You’ll notice looking down this list that they’ve got employee health insurance payable but they
don’t have anything about dental insurance. I’m going to go ahead and set that up.

I’m going to go ahead and put in here a colon and I’m going to put in Dental Insurance. And
when I tap through it it’s going to ask me to set that up in the account list. Now I’m going to go
ahead and give it a number. I’m going to say 24,800. Here’s the dental insurance and here you
see it’s a subaccount of payroll liabilities. I’m going to go ahead and Save & Close and then
click Next and now we’re on the screen that says Tax Tracking Type.

Now there is no tax tracking type needed for this but notice it could be a compensation, it could
be that it’s a fringe benefit, a moving expense. You can kind of see your choices there.

The next thing it asks is, is this item I’m setting up subject to any of these taxes that you see
here? And the answer is no in this particular case. I’ll click Next. Is this item going to be
calculated on quantity? Is it going to be calculated on hours or neither? This would be a neither

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because it’d be a flat fee you’re taking out. Is there a default rate? What that basically means is
that for every employee are you only going to deduct $100? Probably not. It’s going to vary from
employee to employee. You can also set a limit. If during the year you can only deduct X amount
of dollars you can set that up and let’s say November comes and you’ve reached that limit it
won’t deduct any of that again until the next year.

I’m going to finish and now you’re going to see there is the dental insurance.

If you needed to delete any item here you just right click and then you can choose your edit or
delete options from here. Notice also you can make a payroll item inactive.

One thing I hear often is that people would rather pay a payroll service because they know that
all of this is being set up correctly because a lot of this you may not know how to answer the
questions if you’re not familiar with how payroll works.

What I want to do now is take you over into section three and we’re going to set up some
employees and then you’ll see how these payroll items relate back to the employee setup. Let’s
go ahead and move over to section three.

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Video: Working with Employees

Cindy: Now that we’ve actually gone through and gotten a quick look at the QuickBooks payroll
service and we went in and set up some payroll items we can now go start setting up and
working with our employees. I wanted to show you how to do that here in this third section.
Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I will show you how to set up those employees.

Just like with Customers & Vendors you have an employee center you access right here. This is
actually going to show you a list of all of your employees and all the information about the
employees here. If you’re under the Employees tab and you’re clicked on an employee you’re
going to see information like the address for the employee, the phone number, any information
you would have set up related to that employee. Down at the bottom you’re going to see any
transactions for that employee, any To Do’s that were set up, any notes, and any sent emails.

You can attach a file here just like we talked about with customers and vendors as well. If you
needed to edit this particular customer you can double click and it’ll take you right into them.

Let me go ahead while I’m here and go through these tabs with you so you’ll know what type of
information you’re going to use when you’re setting up your employee. Notice that it brings you
in on the personal tab and this is where you’re going to put in the employee’s name, the name
they’d like printed on their checks, their social security number, you can pick a gender, date of
birth, a marital status, are they a U.S. citizen, and their ethnicity.

Over here on this side if your employee is disabled you can say Yes or No here and if they are
you can put in a brief description of their disability. If you have an employee that has an I9 form
you can say Yes that you have it on file or No that you don’t. And when their work authorization
expires right here.

For military people that you’re hiring, is this person a U.S. veteran, yes or no and what is their
status currently.

The next tab over is their address and contact info. So this is where you put in their address, their
phone number, fax, if they have a website, any of that information you want to track. Also you’ll
notice the emergency contact info right down here.

The additional info tab on the left. If you have employee IDs you’ve issued to your employee
then you might want to plug that in here. And then these are your custom fields we talked about
and we talked about these when we were actually setting up customers way back in the
beginning. You can actually go down to Define Fields, type in whatever the label is you want for
this particular field, and tell QuickBooks if that field should be available when you look at
customers, vendors, and/or employees so that you can see where those three came from right
there.

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The payroll info tab is probably the most important one here because this is where you set up all
the information about the actual pay for the employee. Let’s start at the top and I’ll just mention
what a payroll schedule is.

If you have a larger company with a lot of employees you might have a group of employees paid
biweekly and another group paid monthly. You can actually tell QuickBooks when you go to run
payroll to pay the biweekly people. And it knows who’s on that list and it will pay them. If
you’re a smaller company you may not need to use this option.

Here’s where you pick the class if you’re using that. And then notice here this is where the
earnings are set up. If you have a salaried person you’d put in the annual rate, like you see here.
If you have someone who is paid regular pay you’re going to put in their hourly rate. Now if you
wanted to pull all this stuff in here you could. For example, if they work overtime frequently you
might put that in. But just because it’s here doesn’t mean they’re going to get paid for it each
time. It just means you don’t have to pull it in manually when you write their paycheck.

Over here is where you put any additions, deductions, and company contributions. Remember
those payroll items we talked about? We actually set up the dental insurance. That’s where this
stuff goes. If I click here you can see the dropdown list. If I wanted to choose dental insurance I
could and I could put in the exact amount that we’re charging for the dental insurance.

Up here is where you set up the direct deposit. If you do click on that you’ll actually have to go
and set it up with your bank.

Now let’s talk about taxes for a moment right here. Under the Federal tab you need to tell
QuickBooks if this person’s filing status is married, single, and you can see the choices there,
how many allowances are they claiming, and do they need any extra withholding held out of
their paycheck. Are they subject to Medicare, social security, advanced earned income credit,
and federal unemployment tax, which is company paid? You have to check off the ones that
they’re actually subject to.

Under the State tab you want to specify which state the employee worked in and which state is
subject to the withholding, because it could be two different states. This SUI here is the State
Unemployment Insurance. You can see it’s company paid here. And then over here is the state
disability insurance. How many allowances are they claiming for the state? And what is their
filing status from this list? If they need any extra withholding you can put that in. And if you
have any estimated deductions or things that you want to put here you can certainly plug that in
as well.

Under the Other tab, some states might have some miscellaneous type things that need to come
out of the employee’s paycheck. It looks like in California they have this employee training tax,
but not all states will have something under this tab.

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I’m going to go ahead and click OK here and let’s talk real quick about Sick/Vacation.

If you give your employees sick time or vacation time you can set up all the criteria here and it
will track it for you. How many hours are available as of this date? How many were already used
before that date? And is this accrual period from the beginning of the year, every paycheck, or
every hour on the paycheck? How many hours are accrued at the beginning of the year? And is
there a maximum they can accrue? Also do you want it to reset the hours each new year? And
you can specify when the year begins. Begin accruing sick time on and there’s the date. So you
plug in all those criteria and the vacation options are exact same. Now it’s not going to
automatically start deducting this. You have to actually click on their paycheck and say they’re
taking eight hours of sick time. And it will look at this and deduct that from their hours they have
available. Alright I’m going to go ahead and cancel there.

Two more tabs left, Employee Info. This is things like when did I hire this person. Is there an
original hire date? Is there an adjusted service date, release date, that would be when you let
them go? Here’s the employment details. Are they a regular employee, an owner, an officer? Are
they full or part-time? Are they exempt? And are they a key employee, yes or no? And here’s the
job details over here if you wanted to set that up. It could be that once they make so much money
for the company they get a bonus here and you can set all that up.

The last tab is your workers comp and you can go ahead and assign your workers comp code
right here if you need to do that.

That’s pretty much all you have to set up when you’re setting up an employee. I’m going to go
ahead and click OK at the bottom. The way you would set up your employee is by going right
here where it says New Employee and then it takes you to a blank screen so you can set up a new
employee. Alright I’m going to Cancel out of that.

A couple of other things. If you’re on this tab that says Transactions, this is going to be a list of
transactions for every employee, not just the one you’re clicked on. Notice if you wanted to
narrow this list you could. Or if you wanted to narrow it over here by looking at a different date
range you could do that as well.

This Payroll tab here we’re going to get to when we get over to section five, but this is actually
going to be where we pay the liabilities and things like that. So we’ll see that shortly.

Going back to Employees. A couple of things up here. You can manage your employee
information. Also here you can print. And this is where you could print paychecks, an employee
list, different types of information like that. Also the paystubs. Here’s where you could enter
some time. There’s the weekly timesheet. We haven’t talked about that yet but we will. But this
is where you could enter that they worked eight hours on Monday and six hours on Tuesday or
enter a single activity. You can also send this information to Excel or if you wanted to do a mail
merge with Microsoft Word you can do that too.

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That’s what you need when you’re setting up your actual employees.

Let me go ahead and close this. Now that you know how to set up your payroll items and your
employees we can actually talk about how we go through and actually pay the employees. Let’s
head over to section four and I’ll show you how they get paid.

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Video: Paying Employees

Cindy: We are working in module thirteen where we’ve been talking about payroll. We went
through in section two and talked a little bit about how to set up those payroll items. And then in
section three we talked about how to set up the employees. Now all we have to do is actually pay
them and I’m sure they’re going to be glad to get paid. This is going to be section four and let’s
go ahead and flip over and start paying our employees.

When you get ready to pay the employees just go right here where it says Pay Employees and
then you’re going to be able to see everything you need to see as far as running payroll. If you
notice we’re actually just on the Payroll tab. Remember when we were over in section three and
we were talking about working with employees? We were just over here. We’re just on the
Payroll tab now.

You’ll notice that if you’re on the Payroll tab there’s three options here that you can work with.
Let’s start with the one that says Pay Employees.

What you’ll notice right here is that this is actually a payroll schedule that’s been set up and it’s
letting us know that it’s overdue and that we should run it by the 29th. If you want to run a
payroll schedule just choose it and come down here and say Start Scheduled Payroll. It will
know all the employees that you need to pay. If you just want to go ahead and pay someone
who’s not part of one of those schedules or maybe you don’t have those schedules set up just
start an unscheduled payroll right here.

Back to the schedules for a minute. Let me just point out right here this is where you would
create a new one, edit a schedule, or delete one. These are recent payrolls down here. Also notice
there’s some quick guides in here, some PDFs if you want to read through those to kind of help
you with this. There’s also some other activities. Those will be things like do you need to set up
direct deposit? Do you want to go ahead and void some paychecks, print them? You can kind of
see what your choices are. Here’s some reports for payroll. And these are some supplies and
services you could actually buy from Intuit, if you want to order checks, order a labor law poster,
or get a workman’s comp quote you can do that. Let’s go ahead and start an unscheduled payroll.

The first thing you want to notice is that you have to set the pay period ending and the check
date. You need to make sure those are accurate or you’re not going to be able to have the correct
information on your checks. This is the bank account the money is coming from and it does tell
you the balance in the bank account just so you can make sure you have enough money.

When you print your checks you can print the paychecks on check stock or you can handwrite
them. If you’re going to handwrite them go ahead and put in the first check number right here.

If you wanted to check all of the employees you just Check All right here. But if you only
wanted one at a time then you can just check that one or those two, that sort of thing. This is

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what you’re seeing here. This is each employee. You can see the last time they were paid, their
regular pay, what it was, overtime, how many hours, all that information. So you can see that
Elizabeth Mason, for example, her regular pay is 80 hours. If I wanted to look at one of these,
let’s say I look at Elizabeth and I click on her, she’s a link there. This is what her paycheck will
look like. She had 80 hours of regular pay. What’s going to happen is let’s say she had 80 hours
of regular pay and she also had three hours of overtime. You would just plug that in right here. If
you wanted to take sick or vacation you could actually go ahead and plug that in here and it
would actually take it and deduct it from however much they had available. And you can see that
changes as soon as I click the Tab key there that vacation changed. Here are your other payroll
items. If I happen to be here and I see the health insurance and I say to myself, “You know she
actually has dental as well” I can come down here and plug it in. Let’s say she pays $685. These
are all the deductions that the company pays and these are all the deductions from the employee
side. This is going to be the check amount. That’s all you have to do is double check all this and
then Save & Close. If you have an employee that maybe they get pretty much the same amount
of hours each payday you really wouldn’t have to change anything in here. I’m going to go ahead
and Save & Close and now Elizabeth is set up ready to go. Did you notice her hours changed?
See that? I could go through with Greg and do the same thing and Dan Miller if I wanted to.

I’m going to click Continue at the bottom and it’s going to show me for each employee here
what their gross pay is, what the taxes are, the deductions, all the way across. Now I’m just going
to Create Paychecks. This check date is 1/13. I’m going to show you in the register in a minute
how it shows up.

Here it asks me, Would you like to print the paychecks now or print the stubs? Let me just show
you what a stub looks like just so you’ll be aware of it. I’m going to preview. And here’s what
their check stub looks like. It’s just on a regular piece of paper. It has their name and address.
You can see it has all their earnings, the taxes that were withheld, any paid time off. You can
kind of see everything there.

Let me go ahead and close that. I’ll just go ahead and get out of this and go on over to the check
register so I can show you that those paychecks are in the register now. I’m going over to check
register here, I’m going to go to checking, and if I go down and look there’s Greg, Elizabeth, and
Dan on January 13th. You can see that it says it’s a paycheck and it has a split option here
because it’s split amongst multiple accounts in your chart of accounts.

That’s pretty much all you need to know about your payroll. Now we’re going to go ahead and
do the last thing associated with payroll. We need to pay those payroll taxes. Let’s go ahead and
head over to section five and I’ll show you how that’s done.

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Video: Paying Payroll Taxes

Cindy: We are getting ready to wrap up module thirteen. We’ve been talking about Payroll. But
I wanted to take a second in this last section, which is section five, and show you how to go
through and pay those payroll taxes. Those payroll taxes are the ones that you’ve deducted from
the employee’s paycheck and you need to forward on to the state or the federal government.
Also, sometimes you’re going to have to pay for the uniforms you deducted or for the health
insurance, those types of things, and this will work the exact same way.

Once you’ve actually run payroll and deducted any of those liabilities you’re going to pay them
right here where it says Pay Liabilities. This is actually going to take you to that same screen we
were just on previously and you’ll notice that we’re now on the tab that says Pay Liabilities.
These are going to be all the taxes, the health insurance, the dental, anything we deducted that we
need to forward on to the correct entity. All you have to do is go down the list and check off
whatever it is you’re planning to pay. If I’m going to pay the health insurance, like I just checked
off here, I may want to go over here where the blue link is, where it says Amount Due, and just
look at it and make sure that those are the correct liabilities I’ve deducted and that is how much I
have to pay. I’m going to go ahead and just click OK out of that and now I can view or pay.

This is the actual check that I’m going to be writing that’ll go in my register for that liability.
Since this is for my health insurance I would probably make the check payable to Blue Cross and
I could change the amount if I wanted to, but other than that you need to pay whatever it says
you’ve deducted. That’s really all you need to do. I’m going to Save & Close and you can always
go look in your register and it’ll be right there. That’s how you pay your liabilities.

This is payroll liability summary that QuickBooks is showing me. It’s just showing me
everything I’ve paid here. When I get ready to actually print that check notice at the bottom I can
print checks or print the summary. I’m just going to go ahead and close it and that’s pretty much
what you need to know as far as payroll is concerned.

Let’s go ahead now and move over into module fourteen and talk about the Lead Center.

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Chapter 14 – The Lead Center

Video: Working with Leads

Cindy: We are working now in module fourteen and this is the module where I want to talk to
you about a feature QuickBooks has called the Lead Center. There’s only one section in this
module, Working with Leads.

Most people don’t know that the lead center exists because you don’t have an icon on your home
screen for it. You have to go through the menu. But it’s a great way to track any potential leads
that come into your business that may turn into customers. Let me go ahead and show you how
the lead center works over in QuickBooks.

You’re going to access the lead center by going up to your menu and clicking on Customers and
then you’ll see the Lead Center.

You’ll notice it’s set up with the same look that you have for your customer center and your
vendor center. But really this is a place to track potential leads for your business. Anything you
put in here will not pull onto reports or anything like that. And you will have the ability to
actually take this if they become a customer and transfer them over to the customer list.

Here’s how you add a new lead.

You’re going to put in the name of your new lead and let’s say it’s Ken Burrows. You can set up
the status as Hot, Cold, or Warm. He’s a Hot lead. Under the Company tab you can track things
like the company name, the phone number. These fields can represent whatever you’d like them
to represent. You can also track different locations for this lead. If there was an uptown location
and a downtown location you would set those up and then you could put in the address for that
and add a second location if you needed to do that. You’ve also got a Contacts tab where you can
put in information about the contact itself if he’s the primary contact. You can put in the job title,
first and last name, and then again these fields can represent whatever you’d like them to be. I’m
not going to fill all this in right now. I’m just going to click OK and then you’re going to see that
now you have a lead. And it’s a hot lead. You can see the status right here.

You’re going to have the same options you had, like I said, for the customer center where you
have the To Do’s, the contacts, the locations, and your notes. Notice what you don’t have is a tab
for your email. Any To Do’s that you have right here you’re going to see down here that it’s the
same exact way that you would set up a To Do for a customer, for example, and these would
show up on your calendar if you needed that.

The other thing you can do is import multiple leads from this option. This is basically going to
let you type them in this grid if you’d prefer or if you had these in Excel and you wanted to copy
and paste you’d be able to do that as well.

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Here’s an option if you wanted to send this list over to Excel you could. You could send the lead
contacts list, the lead status list, and any converted leads you could send over as well.

If you notice right over here, here’s your Edit option. But here’s where I wanted to show you
how to convert this lead to a customer. We’ve been talking to Ken for a while now and he’s
decided he wants us to do some work for him. Let’s go ahead and click this button and it will ask
me if I’m sure I want to convert this lead to a customer. Notice you cannot undo this action. I’m
going to say Yes and then I want you to notice I’m in the customer list and look who’s here.
There’s Ken Burrows right there. If you had any To Do’s set up they would show up in this list
right here. But now that he’s a customer all of his options are going to show up under the reports.
Great little feature, huh?

Alright let me close that and that’s how the lead center pretty much works.

What I want to do now is have you go over to module fifteen and we’re going to spend a little bit
of time talking about mail merges.

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Chapter 15 – Mail Merges

Video: Creating a Mail Merge

Cindy: Okay we’ve made it down to module fifteen now and this is a really cool little feature
that QuickBooks has. It’s called Mail Merges.

We’ve got two sections here. We’re going to talk about what is a mail merge and how to create
it. And then we’ll go in and talk a little bit in section two about what we call Mail Merge Main
Documents. Let’s go ahead and dive right in.

Just in case you aren’t familiar with what a mail merge actually is let me give you a brief
explanation. It’s actually a Microsoft Word feature. So you would have to have Microsoft Word
loaded on your computer. Basically if you had some sort of letter, maybe you had some labels,
and you wanted to actually pull in some information from QuickBooks onto that letter or label
you could create what’s called a Mail Merge.

A mail merge has three parts. It has an actual main document. A main document can be one of
five things. It can be a letter you create, it can be an envelope, it can be labels, it can be an email,
or it can be what’s called a directory. Now in QuickBooks you’re only going to have a couple of
those five options. You’re going to have the letter, the envelope, and the labels. Once you get the
main document set up it is up to you if you want to save it. If it’s a one time thing you don’t have
to, but if it’s something like a collection letter that you’re going to send on a regular basis you
would want to save it. You’re going to see that QuickBooks has a lot of these already set up for
you so you don’t have to set them up but you could actually pull in one you’ve already got set up
in Word or create one yourself.

The second part to a mail merge is what we call the Data Source. That’s the actual data that you
pull into the main document. You’re going to have the person’s name, their address, their invoice
number, the amount that’s due on that invoice, those types of things.

The third part is when you put the two together you create a merged document. A merged
document will always have one page per record. What that means is that if you merge a
collection letter with six different customers that merged document should have six pages. You
do not have to save a merged document. That’s up to you. You can if you want to, but typically
people just spit them out and they don’t save that.

Let me show you where you go in QuickBooks to do mail merges.

What you’re going to do is go up to Company on the menu and come down to the bottom where
you see Prepare Letters with Envelopes. This is a list of the categories of letters that QuickBooks
already has set up for you. You can add to that or edit these. We’ll talk about that later. But

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notice they have collection letters, customer letters, vendor letters. You can kind of see all the
letters they have. Let’s do a collection letter.

And the first thing it asks is would you like to send a letter to each customer that’s active,
inactive, or both, create a letter for each customer or job, and do you want to limit letters to
customers who are overdue by like 31 days, 61 days, you can specify the list. Most of the time
it’s going to be 31 days or more. I’ll just pick one day just to show you the list and click Next.
These are the two people that meet my criteria. If you happen to be looking down this list and
you decide that Brian Cook shouldn’t get one just uncheck him. The next thing you’re going to
do is you’re going to pick a particular letter template that you’d like to use. This will be your
main document. They’ve got a formal, a friendly, and a harsh. We’ll pick the harsh one and click
Next. What you want to put here is the name that goes at the bottom of the letter, like the
signature. So if it’s yourself it’d be your name and then the title. And then you’ll click Next and
now it’s actually performing the merge. It’s actually going to open Microsoft Word if you don’t
have it open and then it’s going to create what we call a Merged Document.

Here’s your merged document. You can see that we’re in Microsoft Word and you can see that
there is two pages. There’s one per record, one per person. You can see that it brought in each
person’s individual name and address, it’s got the invoice number. So that person owes the
amounts, all the pertinent information about that person’s account. But if you notice the main
document, the letter itself is going to be the same for each person. See how this one here is Mike
Violet but it’s got the same text but his information about his invoice.

That’s the idea behind a mail merge.

What I want to do now is take you over into section two and I’ll show you how these main
documents are set up and how you can import your own if you want to do that. Go ahead and
join me over in section two.

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Video: Mail Merge Main Document

Cindy: We’re in module fifteen and we’re talking about mail merges. We’ve already completed
section one where I showed you how to create a mail merge. What I want to do now is show you
how to look at some of those main documents that Intuit already has set up for you and then you
can go through and edit some of those yourself or if you wanted to create some new main
documents you could do that as well. Let me go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I’ll show
you how to do that.

You’ll want to go back to the same place. You want to go up to Company on the menu and
you’ll see Prepare Letters with Envelopes. In section one we went through and used a collection
letter as an example of how to do a mail merge. You’ll notice at the very bottom here it says
Customize Letter Templates.

Here are some of the things you can do. If you wanted to create a brand new letter from scratch
you would actually click here. What it would do is open a blank document in Microsoft Word
and then you could pull in the fields and type in the letter the way you wanted it to look. The
second option lets you convert an existing Word document to a letter template. Maybe you
already have something over in Word and you just want to pull into the list here so that you can
pick it straight from QuickBooks. You can do that. Here’s View or Edit. We’re going there in a
second. And notice the last one lets you organize your letter templates. There might be times
when you want to delete one that you don’t use anymore, if you’ve got one you want to copy you
can do that by duplicating, maybe move it to a different folder, things like that, just lets you
organize what you’ve got. Let’s go back to View or edit existing letter templates.

These are the same categories that we saw we could pick from. Before I actually pick our harsh
collection I wanted to just go down the list and show you the letters they have for customers.
You can kind of see they have blank customer letters, a customer apology, a birthday. They’ve
got a lot of customer letters in here. For invoices they’re going to have an invoice letter with
details, you can see the choices there. There’s an envelope if you wanted to print one of those.
They’ve got some letters for estimates. They’ve got some for vendors, employees, and then
other. Let’s go back to collection and we’ll do the harsh collection that we used in section one.

I’ll click Next and what it’s going to do is it’s actually going to open up Microsoft Word and
here’s your main document for the harsh collection. So you can see it says Harsh Collection here.
The way you know this is a main document is notice it doesn’t have any pertinent information
about your customers. This is merge fields right here. You’ll see the letter itself is down here and
of course you have some more merge fields at the bottom. You can edit this any way you’d like.
Where you see the actual letter down here, Please contact us immediately regarding this
situation. What if you wanted to put in a merge field? You want to say, Please contact us
immediately, customer first name. Then what you would do is you would put a comma in there
like that and if you notice you have a tab that says Add-Ins. Under this tab these are your

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QuickBooks fields. You can see they have them categorized. These are ones that have to do with
the company, here’s the customer fields, and here’s the other miscellaneous type fields that has
the collection information in it. So here if I’m wanting to put the customer’s first name I’m going
to pick from this list First Name. See how I’ve got a merge field here? Now it’s actually going to
pull in that customer’s first name.

What if I wanted to put something else in here? Let’s say that instead of this Mister and Misses, I
want to actually say First Name, Last Name, then I would do the same thing. I would go up and
pull in First Name, make sure you have a space in there or they’ll run together, and now you’ve
got Dear First Name and Last Name. Maybe you want to put a space between the address block
and Dear. See how you can go in and put anything you want in here?

What if we wanted to put at the top we’ve got our company name, our company address block.
But let’s say the address block did not include the telephone number for the company. I could go
up to the insert my company fields and pull it in that way. If I go down this list you’re going to
see my company phone number. You can add anything you want to this.

What you’ll want to do is when you’re finished go ahead and save this and that way you’ll be
able to pull up the harsh collection next time and it’ll look just like this.

That’s going to wrap up module fifteen where we’ve talked about mail merges. Let’s go ahead
now and move over to module sixteen and I’ll show you how budgets work in QuickBooks.

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Chapter 16 – Creating a Budget

Video: Creating a Budget

Cindy: One of the really cool features that QuickBooks has is the ability to create a budget.
What I want to do in this module, which is module sixteen, is go through and show you how to
create a budget and then I’ll show you some reports you can run to see where you are in
conjunction with your budget. Let me go ahead and pull QuickBooks up and I’ll show you how
to create a budget.

You will want to go in and set up your budget in QuickBooks. You can base your budget on last
year’s data or you can create a brand new one where you type in the information. Regardless you
will want to set these up so that you can run reports and see where you stand and where your
budget is and that way you can see if you’re off or you’re close and that sort of thing.

Here’s where you go to create your budget. You’re going to the menu and you’re going to click
on Company and then you’re going to come down to where it says Planning & Budgeting and
then Setup Budgets.

Here are the current budgets that you have set up. You can see that when you’re looking at a
budget you have all of your profit and loss accounts. That’s going to be your income and your
expense accounts. You can see the annual total and then the total per month. If you want to
create a new budget you’re going to come up to the top right where it says Create New Budget.

It will ask you what year you’re wanting to create the budget for. And then it will ask you if you
want it Profit & Loss and/or a Balance Sheet. Most of the time people create the Profit & Loss.
And then you’ll click Next.

You probably don’t want any additional criteria but you could have a customer and job or a class
here if you want.

You can create your budget from scratch, like I mentioned a moment ago where you type in the
amounts, or you can create it from the previous years actual data. I’m going to go ahead and hit
Finish and it’s brought in your budget. Notice this is the new one, 2024, and then this is last
year’s data. The way this is going to work is you’re going to go through each one of the accounts
on the list and if you don’t like the number that’s under one of the months then you can change
it. What if, for example, instead of just having $1,000 for only January in Design Income you’d
like to budget $1,000 per month? Instead of typing that on each one of these go down to the
bottom and say Copy Across and notice now it put $1,000 in each one of these for you and it
changed the total. You won’t be able to change the total. That’s an automatic calculation but you
can change the monthly numbers.

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You just go through this list and change all of these to be whatever you’d like them to be. When
you’re finished you want to go ahead and save it at the bottom and then click OK.

Now that your budget is actually set up you have the ability to run reports to see where you
stand. Let’s go ahead and flip over to section two and I’ll show you how to run those reports.

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Video: Budget Reports

Cindy: Now that you have your budget set up there are several different reports that you might
want to run to see where you stand as far as the budget is concerned. That’s what I want to show
you now. We’re in module sixteen, talking about budgets, and this is section two, Budget
Reports.

If I just go to Reports on the menu at the top there’s a whole category that says Budgets. I want
to show you a couple of these because they’re going to be very helpful for you so you can know
if you’re over or under budget. We’ll start with a budget overview.

You’ll want to pick the particular year that you created the budget for and click Next. You can
choose to see this by the month and then click Next and then when you choose Finish you’ll have
your report. and this is basically as if you went into the budget feature and were looking at the
budget itself where you could edit or save it. It’s pretty much the same screen.

So here’s all of your accounts. You can see per month what was budgeted. And if you scroll all
the way to the right you can actually see the yearly budget. That’s a Profit & Loss budget
overview.

Let me go ahead and close that one and I’ll show you the next one, which I think is the most
helpful, and that’s going to be again under Budgets, the Budget versus Actual.

Again I’m going to pick the budget for the year I’m looking for and click Next and I’ll click
Next one more time and Finish and now what I’m looking at is again my Profit & Loss. I’m
looking at each month and I can see how much was budgeted, how much was over budget or
under, and then the percentage of budget. That’s a really good way to track and see where you
are, if you’re close to where you need to be, and that sort of thing.

Alright let me close that one. Going back to reports and back to budgets again. Here’s a Profit &
Loss budget performance. Same choices. I’m going to pick the year and account by month and
Finish. And now I can see December of that year how much was budgeted, there’s the entire
year, the year to date, and the annual budget.

There’s one more thing I want to show you and that’s the graph. If I go back to Reports, back to
Budgets, I can see the Budget versus Actual graph. This is a really good one to give you a visual
of where you stand. You can see the ones that are under the line mean you have not met the
budget, the ones that are over the line mean you are or above budget.

That’s a real quick way to look at your budgeting reports.

What I want to do now is let’s go ahead and wrap up module sixteen now that you know how to
work with budgets. We’ll go over into module seventeen and talk about some miscellaneous just
kind of other QuickBooks features. I’ll see you shortly.

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Chapter 17 – Other QuickBooks Features

Video: Searching in QuickBooks

Cindy: We are all the way down now to module seventeen and we’re going to talk in this
module about some just other little features that QuickBooks has. One of them is the ability to
search.

What I want to do here in this first section is show you some of the different ways to search for
different things in QuickBooks that’ll make your life a lot easier.

There are many different ways to search in QuickBooks and we’ve seen a few of those already.
Let me just go down to Create Invoices for a minute.

If you’re working in any form you’re going to have these options right here to search. Let’s say
I’m in an invoice and I’m looking for a particular one and I just can’t find it. I can use these
arrows that go left or right to search the next or previous invoice. Keep in mind that if you had
backdated the previous one let’s say a month then it wouldn’t be the previous one when you’re
using the arrows here because this is going to find these by date. If that doesn’t help use this Find
option right here. I might know the name of the customer but maybe that’s all I know. If I did
know additional criteria I could type that in but let me go ahead and click Find and now there are
three invoices that appeared related to Tom Allen. If I wanted to go to one of these I could just
double click on it, I could also go to it this way, or send it over to a report if I wanted.

Let me go ahead and close this window. And I’m going to close invoices.

Some other ways to search. Let’s say that I go up here where this little box is, this is your Search
box, and I put in the name of my customer. Let’s say that I know his name is Tom Allen but
that’s really all I know and I want to see every transaction associated with Tom Allen. Let me
maximize this so you can really see it. This is every transaction in QuickBooks that has Tom
Allen’s name somewhere in the customer, colon, job field. You can see I’ve got Tom Allen
there. So if I wanted to change the search criteria I could. But looking down this list you’ll see
here’s the bills related to Tom Allen, we did a credit memo, there’s an estimate, there’s several
invoices down here, we’ve got the customer set up, and you can see every single thing related to
Tom Allen.

Some of your other search criteria that you could plug in. If you wanted an amount of money, for
example, you can tell QuickBooks to find the exact amount you type in, anything greater than or
less than that, or a range if you don’t know the exact amount. And you can just type in that
amount here and say go. Let’s say that I know it was about $100 but I’m not really sure. So what
if I say $100-150? I’ll just say a range. I’ll say $100-150. And I’ll hit Go and the only thing that
came up was this bill for $125. I could also put in some date range criteria if I knew that. Based
on my results I should be able to narrow this and find exactly what I’m looking for.

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Let me go ahead and close that search option and there’s one other way you can use search. If I
go up to Edit they’ve actually got this feature called Find and Search here. If I click Search, for
example, it takes me right back to this window. If I go back to Find it’s going to take me to this
window. I like to use this Find feature for everything. I just find that I get a lot more control over
what I’m looking for but it’s really up to you how you want to search. When you’re in this Find
feature you’re going to have a Simple tab and an Advanced tab. And the Simple one let’s you
look for things, like if you know you’re looking for an invoice or you happen to know the
customer and job, amount of money, some of the same criteria we just saw. Under the Advanced
tab though you’ll have a lot more flexibility.

Let’s say that you happen to be looking for Tom Allen Sunroom. All I have to do is scroll down
this list of different fields that are in QuickBooks and I’m going to look for name and then I can
pull down this list and find Tom Allen Sunroom. And by the way when it says Name it’s just not
customers. It’s all the names in QuickBooks. I’m going to see vendor names, I’m going to see
employee names, and other names as well.

I’m going to click Tom Allen Sunroom and then I’m going to come right over here to the right
and click on Find and there’s everything related to Tom Allen Sunroom. I can add additional
criteria. If I’m looking for a particular amount of money or if I’m looking for let’s just say a
particular date range I can type that in and add to my existing choices that I have here.

If I wanted to reset this I would just click Reset and it clears all of my choices out.

When you’re in this window you also have the ability to go to the transaction you’re clicked on,
see it in a report format, I’ll show you what that looks like, there’s the report, and also I can
export this if I want over to Microsoft Excel. Here is where I can put it in a new worksheet if I
want, maybe update one if I already have it, replace an existing one, or create a CSV file.

You can see that you have lots of choices when it comes to actually working with the Find
feature. I’m going to hit Reset over on the right. But like I said, this is my preferred choice. I
usually leave this open the entire time I’m working because I’m always looking for something.

I found that under Edit, Find.

Let me go ahead and close the Find window and let’s move over to section two and I’ll show you
how reminders and alerts work.

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Video: Reminders and Alerts

Cindy: We are in module seventeen. We’re looking at some of the other features that
QuickBooks has. We’ve already talked about searching in QuickBooks. Let’s go ahead and go to
section two and talk about reminders and alerts.

Reminders are things that you want QuickBooks to tell you to do on a certain date a certain time.
You can also have it alert you about different things as well. I want to just show you real quick
how the reminders and alerts work in QuickBooks.

When we talk about actually working with reminders, reminders can be To Do’s that you’ve set
up and you’ve told QuickBooks to remind you to make this phone call on a certain date. It could
also be that QuickBooks will remind you that you have some invoices to print or some bills to
pay. Let me show you a couple ways that To Do’s get on the list.

We’ve talked a lot about customers and vendors. I’ll just use customers as an example.

If we’re on the To Do tab here we can come down and create a To Do. Now I’m going to click
on Tom Allen Sunroom because the To Do will be related to that. I’m going to go down and say
Create a New To Do. This To Do can be a phone call, a fax, email, meeting, appointment, or a
task. Let’s say it’s a meeting that I want to set up and it’s very high priority. Notice it pulled in
my customer and job I was clicked on, but I can change that if I need to. Also I can go in and set
the due date and the time if I need to. At the bottom I’ll plug in some of my details about this
meeting. Currently the status is set on Active. When I complete this meeting I’ll want to choose
Done or Inactive if I want to just make it inactive and hide it from the list. But I’m going to go
ahead and click OK and you’re going to see that it shows up here first of all. So I can always
click To Do’s and see it here.

Now I want to show you where else this will show up.

If I go up to Company on the menu and I go down to where it says To Do List I’m going to see it
here. These are all the To Do’s that I’ve set up for any customer. This is a good way to go
through and make sure that you’ve got everything marked as done or that you have done all of
these.

Now let’s say I’d like to see the full reminders list. All I’d have to do is go back to Company and
back down to Reminders. And here’s your full reminders list. Now reminders are in addition to
those To Do’s we just discussed. It might be a business service message QuickBooks wants you
to know about. Maybe that you need to do an update or whatever they want to tell you. You
might have some inventory to reorder and it lets you know that. Over here it says that there are
some sales orders to print, purchase orders to print, and sales receipts to print. If you needed to
pay bills this would be on the list. If you needed to go through and actually receive payments
from a customer, those might be things that might be on this list.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

A couple things you can do from this screen. Notice the plus sign over here. That’s going to let
me add a To Do right from here. I also have the ability to change some of the settings. We call
these preferences in QuickBooks. Remember I could go up to Edit Preferences but here’s a quick
way to get to the exact screen I need for these reminders.

Right here you see a list of things that QuickBooks will remind you of. You can show the entire
list if you want or just the summary. The entire list is every single transaction that made up that
summary item. Or say Don’t remind me at all. If you choose to be reminded you might say
Remind me five days ahead of time, you can kind of see that list here.

The other thing that you might want to consider is this. If I go to the My Preferences tab there’s a
checkbox that says Show reminders list when opening a company file. Basically if I open my
company file the same window back here will show up automatically with these reminders on it.

That’s how reminders work. They just don’t pop up on your screen, but you do have to either go
to the reminders list or check the box and have it remind you automatically when you open the
company file.

That’s a quick overview of how reminders and alerts work. Let’s go ahead now and go over into
the next section and talk about how to use the QuickBooks calendar.

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Video: Using the QuickBooks Calendar

Cindy: One of the features that QuickBooks has is a calendar built inside. It’s actually on the
home screen. You’re going to have the ability to actually add To Do’s or appointments or things
like that on the calendar, but what’s really cool about the calendar is if you’re clicked on a
particular date you’ll be able to see things like which invoices are due today, if you have some
bills that are due, anything that in QuickBooks would have that date on it.

This is going to be module seventeen and we’re in section three, Using the QuickBooks
Calendar.

You can access the calendar from the home screen. Under the company grouping you’ll see
calendar. When you open up the calendar if you want to be on a different date all you have to do
is click on that date. You can also use the arrows that go left or right up here to take you to the
next or previous month. And also if you’d rather just pick a specific date you can pick it from the
dropdown list here.

Right here what you see are different ways to view the calendar. You’ll notice this last one is
what they call the monthly view and that’s currently the one you’re looking at, the middle one
here is your weekly view, and the first one is what we call your daily view. And also notice you
can go to today’s date if you’d like.

What you’re going to see is that whichever date you happen to be clicked on these are all the
transactions that have that date. You can see there are bills, there are bill payments, there’s
checks, there’s invoices, there’s all kinds of stuff in here. If you wanted to fold these up and
collapse them so you don’t have to look at every single detail in this particular view then you can
go ahead and click these arrows on the left here to collapse or expand them. You can also filter
this list a little bit by looking at just deposits or just invoices from this dropdown list. You can
see how you can filter this. Also the little plus sign will let you add a To Do and then you’re
going to see this arrow that will collapse all of these or expand all of these. You just click on that
to turn it on or off.

Over on the right of the calendar you’re going to see what’s upcoming for the next seven days. A
lot of this is the same information that’s over here, but if you didn’t want to see this area on the
right just use this arrow to actually hide or collapse that and then you can use the actual calendar
itself here.

Let’s say that you want to add a To Do. Let’s say it’s going to be a task and it’s going to be
medium priority. And notice how there’s no customer or job chosen here. It just has Kristy
because she’s the first customer in the list. Let’s say that this is with a vendor, for example, and
let’s say that I actually have to go to the Bank of Any City and take care of some business there.
And I want to make sure I get there this week. If I go ahead and set this for Friday of this week,
which is the 16th, I can specify a time as well. I’d like to do it by lunchtime. And down here I can

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

type in the details that I’d like. I’m going to put in the word Loan just to remind myself that I’m
going to the bank to check on a loan. The status is active and I’m going to click OK.

You’ll notice it’s on this list if you look because I’m looking at just a particular day. If I go over
to the monthly view and look at it, I entered that To Do on the 16th. You’ll see right here it says
one To Do. Let’s click there and see what we see. And there is my task with the Bank of Any
City. I do have the ability, if I want to double click on this task I can go in if I’ve already gone to
the bank maybe and I want to make this inactive or if I want to go ahead and say it’s been done I
can do that and that way I can tell QuickBooks that I’ve completed that particular task.

Some other things you’re going to see, looking on the 29th, for example. This says Entered and it
says one. You can see here this is actually a check, it looks like a debit actually, for Cal Gas and
Electric. It looks like that that date was the 29th and that’s the date I’m on. So it’s telling me
that’s the date I entered it. I’m going to go ahead and Save & Close and get out of that.

This calendar is actually nice that it’s here in QuickBooks. Honestly though most people have
this type of thing in Outlook or in some email program they’re using. But just know where it is in
case you need it.

I’m going to go ahead and close that and that’s going to take me back to my home screen.

That’s how the calendar is going to work. Let’s go ahead now and move over into section four
and I’ll talk to you a little bit about memorizing transactions.

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Video: Memorizing Transactions

Cindy: One of the nice little features that QuickBooks has is the ability to memorize
transactions. If you have any repetitive transaction that needs to be entered in QuickBooks you
can set it up so that QuickBooks enters those transactions for you and you don’t have to
remember to do it. A good example might be a car payment. If it’s deducted the first of every
single month you don’t want to remember to go and enter it. QuickBooks will just do it for you.

Let me show you how those memorize transactions work. This is actually module seventeen and
we’re in section four, Memorizing Transactions.

If you have a transaction that occurs at the same time every single month do you want to
remember to go to into QuickBooks and enter it yourself or would you like QuickBooks to enter
it for you? You can set it up so that QuickBooks will automatically have that particular payment
in your checking account on the first of every single month.

Another example might be if you have rental property. You don’t actually send your invoices out
to your tenants but you do need those invoices in there by the first of every month so that when
your tenants pay you you’ve got something to apply it to and you know who hasn’t paid you yet.
Those are just a couple of examples. You could actually memorize any form in QuickBooks.

I want to start off showing you where the actual transactions are listed and then I’ll show you
how to create one.

I’m going up to List on the menu and I’m going to click on Memorize Transaction List. These
are some they’ve already set up for the practice exercise. I want to point out that this list shows
you the name of the transaction, what type of transaction it is, the source account, meaning
where the money is coming from, the amount of money, how often does it happen, if
QuickBooks is going to automatically enter this, and the next time it’s scheduled to appear in
QuickBooks.

You can also set up groups. If you had four or five autopayments and they were all deducted the
first of every single month then you could create a group and you could call it Car Payments and
then every single car payment would be listed underneath there as a separate memorized
transaction.

Let’s first go back to the home screen. We’re going to enter one, we’re going to memorize it, and
then we’ll come back here and see how it shows up.

I’m going back to home and I’m going to write checks. Let’s say that we’re going to set up a car
payment and it happened on December 1st. This will be to the Bank of Any City and it’s $500.
We’re going down to the bottom. We’re going to break this up. Remember some of this is the
loan and some of this is actually the interest. I’m going to go and find that van loan that they

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

have and then also interest expense. That’s going to be right here. They actually call it Loan
Interest.

Now let’s say that we don’t know how much the interest is but we know how much the loan part
of it is. Let’s say it was $138.53. That means that the interest has to be the difference between the
$500 and the $138.53. A little calculator trick that I really should have shown you way back. If I
take $500 and I subtract on my keyboard $138.53 and hit the Enter key it’s going to tell me what
that number should be.

You need to have your form totally filled out before you memorize it because exactly how it’s
set up here is how it’s going to be remembered. And you don’t want to have to come in and
make a change to that.

Right up here it says Memorize. You have the ability to name your memorization. I’m just going
to say Van Payment. I can have QuickBooks add it to my reminders list. I can say don’t remind
me or automate the entry. Usually you want to automate the entry in a case like this. Notice this
Add to Group. This is not available because we don’t have any groups set up. How often does
this happen? It happens monthly. The next time it will happen will be January 1st. This one here
is December 1st. That means the next one is January 1st. How many do you have remaining? If
you know there’s only ten car payments left put that in here and that way when the eleventh
month rolls around it won’t enter that. Also you can enter this early if you want. In the example
of rental property, sometimes tenants will pay you a day or two early and that way if you entered
this five days in advance that invoice will already be in QuickBooks for you to apply the
payment to. I’m going to click OK and now that’s memorized.

There’s nothing on this screen that shows you it’s memorized. I’m going to have to Save &
Close it and now let’s go back to our memorized transactions and see if we see it on the list. And
we do. It’s right there. You can see it’s a check, it comes from the checking account, it’s $500 a
month, and it’s going to be automated.

You will have to come in here and delete any memorized transactions that you did not tell
QuickBooks to automate, if you’re not using them anymore. Let’s talk about how you would do
that, how you would create a group, and a few other things.

If I right click you’re going to see my option to create a new group. You can name a group
anything you want and all those same options apply. The only thing you need to know about the
group is that every single autopayment has to happen at the same time on every month in order
for you to put it in a group. If not then you need to put those in separately. If I wanted to edit one
of these I just right click and edit the memorized transaction. And that’s this. It’s not memorizing
the check, it’s memorizing the actual memorization of the check.

The other thing if I right click I can delete this memorization. That will not delete any
transactions, just the memorization.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

That’s going to be how your memorize transactions work. It’s a great little feature, like I said, for
things that are automatically deducted or things that automatically happen in QuickBooks.

I’m going to go ahead and close this screen and the next thing we’re going to talk about is how to
import lists into brand new company files. Go ahead and meet me over in section five.

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Video: Importing Lists into a New Company File

Cindy: Sometimes in QuickBooks you want to actually start a new company file. And if you do
that then you’ll have to retype your list, your chart of accounts, your customers, your vendors.
One of the great things that QuickBooks allows you to do is actually export those lists from your
old company file and then import them into your new company file, but you have to do it a
certain way. Let me flip over to QuickBooks and I will show you how to actually import those
lists into a new company file you’re creating.

This is actually module seventeen, Other QuickBooks Features, and we’re in section five,
Importing Lists into New Company Files.

One of the things that you’ll want to do if you’ve been using your QuickBooks file for a while,
and I’m talking several years, is you’ll want to start over with a new, fresh copy of your file. You
don’t have to set everything up again because you’ve already got customers set up and you’ve
got your chart of accounts. You can actually just export them from your old file into your new
file.

One thing you need to know when you’re doing this is that you are not exporting transactions,
only the list. So it’s a great way to start fresh. The other thing is don’t set up your new company
file until after you’ve exported these so you can bring them into the new one as you’re creating
it.

All you’re going to do to export is you’re going to go to File, Utilities, you want to Export and
you want to export list to IIF files. Here are all the lists in your QuickBooks file. You just check
off the ones that you’d like to export and then just click OK. You’re going to have to actually
give it a file name and I usually just call it Export and stick it somewhere where I can find it
pretty easily. So I’ll hit Save. I already had one in there so I’ll just save over it. And now it says
your data has been exported successfully. I’ll just click OK.

Now what I want to do is create the new company file. I’m going to go up to File and say New
Company. Now what’s going to happen here is you’re going to use the Start Setup because I
don’t want to go through the Easy Step Interview. If you don’t want to verify your email address
just skip that and here’s where you’re going to put in the name of the new QuickBooks file
you’re creating. I’m just going to send Cindy’s File for now.

You do want to pick an industry. Now here’s the key to the whole entire thing working. What
you want to do is go over here and say Help me choose and don’t pick anything from this list
except Other or None. If you choose one of these other options you cannot import your chart of
accounts. I’m going to click OK and I’m also going to pick a business type, Other or None. And
the rest of it you would fill in if you were going to send out correspondence. I’m just going to
create a company at the bottom and now it’s creating my new company file. We’ll give it just a
second there to create the company. You’ll be able to actually import the list when you get this

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

new company set up. You’re going to see that I’ll show you there’s no customers in here, there’s
no vendors, there’s a few in the chart of accounts that has to be there but other than that it’s
pretty empty.

I’m going to go ahead and say Start Working here. Now let me show you there are no lists.
Here’s customers. No customers. See? Let’s go look at our chart of accounts. These few that are
in here they have to be in here. If you had any others already in here then it wouldn’t be able to
pull everything over.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to close that. I’m going to go back to File, Utilities, and I
want to Import IIF files. I’m going to go find my documents and find my file, there it is, Export,
and I’m going to choose Open. And now it’s importing those items.

Now sometimes in a case like this, for example, I’m trying to import something and it’s a bank
account, for example, and it says there’s nothing online set up. That’s fine. We’ll click OK. If
you just click OK past all those you’ll be good. Now I’m going to click OK and you’ll see the
list pulled in here shortly. Sometimes there’s a few things it can’t bring in but those are just a
couple and you can always set those back up.

Let me go click on the chart of accounts and you can see there’s the entire list. See how there’s
no balance over here? This is a great time to go ahead and delete ones that you need to get out of
here or if you need to edit any of these before you actually start using them. That’s actually how
you’re going to work with your lists that are in QuickBooks.

Let’s go ahead now and go over into the next section which is section six and talk a little bit
about working with vehicle mileage.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

Video: Vehicle Mileage

Cindy: We’re working our way through module seventeen and we’re talking about some of the
other QuickBooks features. We’ve made it all the way down now to section six where we’re
going to talk about vehicle mileage.

QuickBooks has a little section where you can actually type in the vehicle you’re driving, the
mileage, and it’ll track it all for you so you don’t have to write it in your little book that you have
sitting in the console or your car. Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I will show
you how to access the vehicle mileage options.

You’re going to access the vehicle mileage options from the menu if you click on Company.
Down near the bottom you’ll see Enter Vehicle Mileage. Here you can track each vehicle that
you have, the date that you start the trip and the date you end the trip, and you can put in the
odometer start the odometer end. If you do that it will calculate the total miles. If you don’t know
that you can put in the total miles, for example, and it’ll also track it that way.

If this was related to a particular customer or job you can choose it from the list. Also if it relates
back to a particular item then you might want to set that up as well. Notice in their items list they
actually have mileage set up and that’s how you want to set yours up. If you’re using the class
feature you’re going to pick the class and then in notes you might want to type about this
particular trip.

Notice also that this is checked that it’s billable. Remember that would mean that if you want to
turn around and invoice the customer for this at the end of the month you can pull this directly
onto an invoice. That’s why it says Not Billed. If you uncheck that it’s still going to say Not
Billed but it’s not going to pull up in a report that way.

A couple of things you want to know about at the top, you have your next and previous like
you’re very familiar with now. Here’s your spellcheck. Here’s where you create your vehicle list.
These are the ones you just saw on the dropdown. All you have to do to put in a new vehicle is
right click and choose New. It will ask you the name of the vehicle and a description if you want
to plug that in. I’m just going to cancel out of that and close out of the vehicle list here.

What’s really important here is the mileage rates. You’re going to have to make sure that those
are updated so they are the correct mileage rates. You can also look at some mileage reports. If
you come up here and look at your mileage by vehicle you can do that or by job because that’s
going to be part of your job costing as well.

All you do is Save & Close when you’re finished and it’s going to track the mileage for each trip
that you have and then you can run reports.

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Learn QuickBooks 2018

That’s how your vehicle mileage is going to work. Let’s go ahead now and go over into section
seven and talk about backing up your company files.

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Video: Backing Up Company Files

Cindy: It’s very important that you have a backup of your company file just in case you ever
need it. A lot of times people say to me, “Well, my company backs up my whole computer on
the server.” My question to you is if you came in one day and you needed to restore that one
QuickBooks company file would you know how to go to the server and grab that one file?
Probably not. So it’s to your advantage to go ahead and create some sort of system where you
back it up on a regular basis and that way if you ever need it you’ve got it.

This is going to be section seven. We’re in module seventeen, Other QuickBooks Features.

If you’re using QuickBooks online you won’t need to do this because your files automatically
backed up since it’s on the QuickBooks server. The other thing is if you happen to have
purchased this online backup from Intuit you wouldn’t have to back it up yourself either because
they have a copy for you. I suggest you get on a regular basis and decide what works for you as
far as backing up. If you want to do it every Friday afternoon or if you’ve done a lot of work
today and you just don’t want to take a chance that you might lose it go ahead and back it up. It
doesn’t hurt anything.

All you have to do is use a flash drive or if you want to use a CD or maybe you want to back it
up to Google drive or something like that you can. Just don’t back it up to your hard drive. That
defeats the purpose.

To backup your company file you’re going up to File in the menu and you’re going to see
Backup Company. What you’ll want to do is create a local backup.

Here’s where you get a choice to do an online backup, and that’s the same thing we talked about
over on the bottom right there. Notice fees apply. You have to actually pay for that. But if you
want to do a local backup onto your flash drive or onto a CD like I talked about you can do it
right here.

There are some options here. This is where you browse and you tell QuickBooks you want to
save it to your CD or to your flash drive. You pick the drive from here. QuickBooks will add the
date and time of the backup to your file names and it will limit the number of copies in this
folder to three. You really don’t need more than three. You’ll probably never use that many, but
at least have a couple of them because if you had to use it and the most recent one was corrupt
for some reason you can still go back one more.

QuickBooks will always remind you to close your company file every four times you close the
company. Even if you just backed it up and it’s the fourth time you close it will still ask you.

Also if you want QuickBooks to verify your company data is okay and it’s not corrupted when
you save it you can go down here and complete what they call the verification process, or you

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don’t have to do this at all. I’m going to go ahead and click OK and since I didn’t pick a place to
save it to that’s what that message said. So I’ll just cancel out of that.

If I click Next at the bottom I get the same screen. Now I’m going to stop right here because I’m
not actually going to back it up but the next screen would be your finish screen and it would just
back it up. It’s very, very quick. It literally will take probably a minute or two, unless you have a
super large file. And if you do it’s probably time to be starting a new company file if that’s the
case.

I’m going to go ahead and click Cancel and I do want to tell you about one more quick thing.

There is an option in here to create a portable backup. If you go to File and go down to where it
says Create Copy, here’s another way to backup your company file, but also you can pick a
portable company file. If you ever needed to email this it would be way too large if you just sent
a regular backup. If you create a portable it compacts it so that you can email it. I’ve never had a
problem with this. They do give you a little warning sometimes that says that because it’s so
condensed you could open it and be missing some information, but it’s always worked great for
me.

Also notice you can create an accountant’s copy. If you wanted to actually compact your version
and create an accountants file that he could use then you can do that. What’s great about this is
that if you create an accountant’s copy you can still keep working and then you can merge those
two together. You can’t do that if you create a backup.

I’m going to go ahead and click, cancel out of that because that’s all there is to that.

That’s all you need to know about backing up company files. Just make sure you get on a regular
system for doing it and make sure you do actually back it up because I’ve seen people that don’t
have a backup and they’re up the creek when something happens.

Let’s go ahead and go now over into section eight and let’s talk about the QuickBooks PC to
MAC conversion.

© Copyright 2008-2018 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn QuickBooks 2018

Video: QuickBooks PC to MAC Conversions

Cindy: We are in module seventeen. We’re talking about other QuickBooks features. This is
section eight where I want to talk to you briefly about the QuickBooks PC to MAC conversion.

I’m often asked if Intuit makes a version of QuickBooks for MAC. They have in previous years
and what’s happened is I’ve had students come to my class and bring their MAC laptops. They’ll
end up putting it aside and using our PC in the classroom because the MAC version is very
different, it doesn’t have all the options, it’s a lot harder to use. I noticed this year for 2018 that
Intuit basically is trying to get everyone to go online, even with the PC version. Eventually
everyone is going to go to QuickBooks online. But what they’ve done right now is they actually
have a QuickBooks online MAC app that they want you to download. You just download it to
your computer and you can access all of your online data right there from the applications folder.

The benefits are going to be that you’re using your QuickBooks online account right from your
desktop, it’s very fast, and you’ve got some keyboard shortcuts and things you can use to make
things a lot faster.

If you want to convert your PC data file to a MAC data file in QuickBooks this is how you do
this.

You’re going to be in your PC file and you’re going up to File on the menu, you’re going to
Utilities, Convert, and here’s where you’re going to see from Quicken or Peachtree, if you’re
trying to convert that file and down here you can make a copy for your MAC.

I wanted you just to notice while we’re here as well you can make a copy for your QuickBooks
online. That means that if you want to go online now you can pull in all of your data from your
desktop version. You cannot go the other way, just kind of know that.

If I go back up to the QuickBooks for MAC option, basically it recognizes that I’m working on a
PC and it’s telling me that QuickBooks for Windows might be a better fit for my company.

There’s some features that if you do have the QuickBooks for MAC, like an older version, that
you don’t have. For example, if you have very complex inventory needs, like units of
measurement and things like that you won’t have those. You also don’t have your shipping
manager, the loan manager, and some of these other things that we talked about that are industry
specific. But if I still wanted to continue I’d click Yes at the bottom. What would happen is it
would create a copy of my Windows file and it would actually make a new copy and make it in
the MAC format. If I want to continue I would click OK and it would go ahead and create it for
me. I would have a chance to put it on a flash drive if I wanted so I could carry it over to my
MAC computer.

And that’s pretty much how that works.

© Copyright 2008-2018 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn QuickBooks 2018

Video: Canadian Version

Cindy: We’re in module seventeen and we’re on section nine now. We’re going to talk briefly
about the Canadian version of QuickBooks. This is the last section in module seventeen. After
that we’re going to wrap this up and we’ll be done. Let me go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks
and I’ll tell you a couple things that you need to know.

You are already know that there are different versions of QuickBooks. QuickBooks Pro,
QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Accountant edition. You may not know that they also make
editions for different countries. A big one that I get asked about often is the Canadian version
and what the differences are between the U.S. and Canadian version.

One thing I’ll tell you real quick is in Canada they have the VAT tax where we have sales tax in
the U.S. version. That’s one big difference there and it’s going to be set up for whichever edition
you purchase.

If you happen to have a U.S. edition and let’s say you’ve created a company file, now you buy
the Canadian edition. It’s not going to overwrite your U.S. edition because QuickBooks doesn’t
overwrite the previous one when you load a new one. However, you’re not going to be able to
open your company file in that Canadian version. You will get a message basically saying that
you created this in the U.S. version and you can’t open it here. You will have to buy the
Canadian version of QuickBooks and then create a new file in that version.

The other thing to think about is if you plan to give your accountant a copy of your file he’s got
to have the same version you do. If you’re in the U.S. and he’s in Canada he’s got to have a U.S.
version and vice versa.

Think about those two things when you’re deciding which version of QuickBooks you want to
use.

That’s going to go ahead and wrap up module seventeen. I want to have you go ahead and go
over into eighteen. I do have a conclusion video where I want to wrap things up. Let’s go ahead
and head over and I will see you shortly.

© Copyright 2008-2018 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn QuickBooks 2018

Chapter 18 – Wrap Up
Video: Conclusion

Cindy: Well it’s almost sad to say but we are done going through QuickBooks. I wanted to take
a few moments and just say thank you so much for letting me spend my time with you. Make
sure you go back through these videos if you need to. You can watch them as many times as you
need. There’s always a lot of positive reinforcement that comes from watching a video more than
once. If you have any questions at all do not hesitate to ask us and we’ll be more than glad to get
back with you.

Also, we’d like to know how we’re doing with these videos. We’ve always got room for
improvement so we like to hear those comments. And also we’d like to hear really good things as
well. So just let us know how we’re doing so we can improve for next year.

That being said, we’re going to wrap it up until next year when Intuit comes out with
QuickBooks 2019. That’ll be somewhere around the third week in September, which is normally
what they do. And make sure to check back with us so you can watch those videos as well and
we can let you know what all the new things are. I will talk to you soon.

© Copyright 2008-2018 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.