Mastering QuickBooks 2020

The ultimate guide to bookkeeping and QuickBooks Online

Crystalynn Shelton

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Computer Science
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789955453
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Get up to speed with QuickBooks Online 2020 for financial management and bookkeeping

Key Features

• Create a dashboard that highlights your company's financial activity and status upon login
• Manage customers, vendors, and products and services seamlessly with QuickBooks
• Explore special transactions such as recurring transactions, managing fixed assets, setting up loans, and recording bad debts

Book Description

Intuit QuickBooks is an accounting software package that helps small business owners to manage all their bookkeeping tasks. Its complete range of accounting capabilities, such as tracking income and expenses, managing payroll, simplifying taxes, and accepting online payments, makes QuickBooks software a must-have for business owners and aspiring bookkeepers. This book is a handy guide to using QuickBooks Online to manage accounting tasks and drawing business insights by generating reports easily. Using a fictitious company, the book demonstrates how to create a QuickBooks Online account; customize key settings for a business; manage customers, vendors, and products and services; generate reports; and close the books at the end of the period. QuickBooks records your debits and credits, so you don't need to learn accounting. However, you will find out what happens under the hood and understand how your financial statements are impacted by what you do in QuickBooks. You'll also discover tips, shortcuts, and best practices that will help you save time and become a QuickBooks pro. By the end of this book, you'll have become well-versed with the features of QuickBooks and be able to set up your business and manage all bookkeeping tasks with ease.

What you will learn

• Get to grips with bookkeeping concepts and the typical bookkeeping and accounting cycle
• Set up QuickBooks for both product-based and service-based businesses
• Track everything, from billable and non-billable time and expenses to profit
• Generate key financial reports for accounts, customers, jobs, and invoice items
• Understand the complete payroll process and track payments made to 1099 contractors
• Manage various bank and credit accounts linked to your business

Who this book is for

If you're a small business owner, bookkeeper, or accounting student who wants to learn how to make the most of QuickBooks Online, this book is for you. Business analysts, data analysts, managers, and professionals working in bookkeeping, and QuickBooks accountants will also find this guide useful. No experience with QuickBooks Online is required to get started; however, some bookkeeping knowledge will be helpful.

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Customizing QuickBooks for Your Business

Whether you created your QuickBooks Online account from scratch or you transferred your details from another accounting software program, there are some additional areas that you need to set up to further customize QuickBooks Online for your business. In this chapter, we will show you how to add, edit, and delete accounts to customize the chart of accounts for your business. We will walk through the process of connecting your bank and credit card accounts to QBO so that transactions will automatically download. By connecting your bank accounts to QuickBooks, you will reduce, if not eliminate, the need to manually enter these transactions into QuickBooks. If you need to give other users access to your QuickBooks data, you can easily do so. We will show you how to give your bookkeeper, accountant, and other users access to your QuickBooks data.

The following are the key topics that will be covered in this chapter:

• Customizing the chart of accounts
• Connecting bank accounts to QuickBooks Online
• Connecting credit card accounts to QuickBooks Online
• Giving other users access to your QuickBooks data

Customizing the chart of accounts

As we saw in Chapter 1, Getting Started with QuickBooks Online, the chart of accounts is a list of accounts that is used to categorize your day-to-day business transactions. It is the backbone of every accounting system, and if it is not set up properly, it can result in inaccurate financial statements. One of the benefits of using QuickBooks is that you don't have to create the chart of accounts from scratch. Based on the industry that you selected when you created your QBO account, QuickBooks will include a preset chart of accounts list. You can customize the chart of accounts by adding, editing, or deleting accounts to fit your business needs. In this section, we will show you how to add, edit, and delete accounts on the chart of accounts list.

How to add a new account to the chart of accounts list

The default chart of accounts list will include a generic list of accounts used by most businesses, with a few custom accounts related to your industry. However, you will most likely need to customize the list based on your accountant's preferences or your own. For example, if you sell products and services, you may want to create an income account for each, as opposed to lumping sales for both into one account.

Go through the following three steps to add a new account to the chart of accounts list:

1. Click on the Accounting tab located on the left menu bar and select Chart of Accounts, as shown in the following screenshot:

2. Click on the New button located in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, directly to the right of the Run Report button, as shown in the following screenshot:

3. To create a new account, you will need to provide the account type, the detail account type, the name of the account, and a description of the account, as shown in the following screenshot:

The following list is a brief description of what information should be included in the fields that are labeled in the preceding screenshot:

• Account Type (1): From the drop-down menu, select the account type that the new account should be categorized as. As we saw in Chapter 1, Getting Started with QuickBooks Online, the five main account types are income, expense, asset, liability, and equity. You will also find other account types in this list, such as fixed assets, bank, and credit card, and they should be used when appropriate.
• Detail Type (2): From the drop-down menu, select the detail type that most accurately describes the type of account you are setting up. The options in the drop-down menu will differ based on the account type selected.
• Description of detail type (3): In this box, QuickBooks will provide you with a detailed explanation of the detail type that you have selected. This should help guide you as to which detail type you should select.
• Name (4): This field will automatically be populated with the detail type you selected. However, you can (and should) change it to something more descriptive, as we have done in the preceding example.
• Description (5): This field is self-explanatory, and should include a brief description of the types of transaction that should be posted to this account.

While you may be tempted to leave the description field blank, I recommend that you don't. It can be useful to include a detailed description so that a bookkeeper or someone who you have hired to manage your books will know what type of transactions belong in this account. If you don't think a description is needed, copy and paste the account name in this field. That way this field will not appear blank on reports.

• Is sub-account (6): Sub-accounts are used to provide a more detailed breakdown of an account that is used for multiple types of transactions. For example, it is a good idea to create a main account for car expenses and a sub-account for repairs, registration, and gasoline. Having a detailed break-down of ea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• Getting Started with QuickBooks Online
• Company File Setup
• Migrating to QuickBooks Online
• Customizing QuickBooks for Your Business
• Managing Customers, Vendors, Products, and Services
• Recording Sales Transactions in QuickBooks Online
• Recording Expenses in QuickBooks Online
• Managing Downloaded Bank and Credit Card Transactions
• Report Center Overview
• Business Overview Reports
• Customer Sales Reports in QuickBooks Online
• Vendor and Expenses Reports
• Managing Payroll in QuickBooks Online
• Managing 1099 Contractors in QuickBooks Online
• Closing the Books in QuickBooks Online
• Handling Special Transactions in QuickBooks Online
• Shortcuts and Test Drive
• Other Books You May Enjoy