How to Use QuickBooks Online: Step-By-Step Guide
You can then set up your customers, vendors, items, and financial accounts. Once you set up your bank connection, you can start categorizing all imported transactions. The nice part about this is that much of the transaction what is an invoice what is it used for posting is completed automatically, making month-end reconciliation a breeze.
Next Steps: Ready to Use Accounting Software?
Along with producing quality invoices for your customers, you’ll also want to properly manage your expenses, whether it’s to create an expense report or to simply better track your business expenses. Perhaps the most important task in QuickBooks Online is the initial setup process. After logging into QuickBooks Online for the first time, you’ll see a display screen where you can choose the features you’ll be using in the application.
What Are Some Alternatives to QuickBooks Online?
However you work, no matter what your business does, QuickBooks has a plan for you. Whether you’re a new user or a pro, get your questions answered with one of our free, live webinars. Learn about how to add a new supplier to save time, edit supplier information and add columns and sort the Supplier List to get more insight. Learn about what the Chart of Accounts is and how it is used on transactions along with different parts of the Chart of Accounts. Find out how the Chart of Accounts is used to build financial statements.
How to set up invoice preferences
Even though QuickBooks Online is user friendly, it might help to get a little more acquainted with some of its bookkeeping features, which include double-entry accounting. After reading numerous accounting software reviews, you’ve made the decision to use QuickBooks Online software. A Live Bookkeeper cannot begin cleaning up your past books until they receive the required supporting documentation, which your bookkeeper will request from you after your first meeting. Once your understanding current assets on the balance sheet bookkeeper receives all the necessary documentation, they’ll typically complete your cleanup within 30 days. In some cases, your cleanup may take longer depending on timeliness of documentation and the complexity of your books.
- We rate QuickBooks Payroll highly and it will appear as the “Payroll” tab on your dashboard if you use it.
- Get a feel for what QuickBooks can do and try out top features using our sample company.
- This allows them to undo the previous transaction without needing to manually edit individual transactions from within the register.
- Our QuickBooks Online introduction can help, guiding you through some of the common features found in the software as well as providing easy, step-by-step instructions for using those features.
How to Reconcile In QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online gives you the option to connect your bank accounts directly to the software. By connecting them, you can easily track both income and expenses in QuickBooks Online automatically, reducing the amount of data entry required. Terms, conditions, pricing, special features, and service and support options subject to change without notice.
QuickBooks Online is one of the most feature-rich, but easy-to-use accounting solutions on the market, and can help to make the process infinitely smoother. We’d also highly recommend FreshBooks, a solution that has almost as many features and comes at a slightly lower price. It’s a particularly attractive pick for ecommerce businesses, since it has inventory management tools across all plans. No worries, since invoice creation in QuickBooks Online is a simple process, where you can easily enter a customer, product, or service on the fly, add an online payment option, and email the invoice to your customer all from one entry screen. In order to make your invoices stand out to your customers and get paid quicker, be sure to set up your invoice preferences prior to sending out your first invoice. However, as a new user, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed right now.
Learn about how to navigate QuickBooks Online, understand the difference between the Navbar, Create menu, and Gear menu, and learn how to enter new transactions.
QuickBooks has the best payroll software as well, although we offer a quick quiz that can pair you with all the top payroll options for difference between paid in capital and retained earnings your industry. If you’d like to try other great accounting software, we have you covered as well, with deals on FreshBooks, Xero, and others. Perhaps you’ve just received your electric bill, but it’s not due until the end of the month. If you want to enter the bill to be paid when it’s due, you’ll want to use QuickBooks Online’s accounts payable feature, which you can access by clicking on the Bill feature in the application.
Once you’ve set everything up and learned how the process works, it’s just a matter of checking in on a daily or weekly basis to make sure it’s all running smoothly. Your “Account and Settings” menu includes the “Sales” and “Expenses” tabs, and beginners will need to add data to both these pages in order to allow the QuickBooks software to correctly generate reports. The main user should be the “primary admin,” but you can add other admins or standard users (with customized levels of access). QuickBooks Online isn’t the only software out there for handling accounting and taxes, but our research does recommend it for most business needs, even above other top picks like FreshBooks or Zoho Books. We’re firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent, a Motley Fool service, does not cover all offers on the market.