Are you a small business owner thinking about using QuickBooks Online to track your expenses and revenue? Here is an overview of QuickBooks Online to give you an idea of how it works.
QuickBooks Online is Intuit’s accounting software. The program costs between $15 per month for a self-employed individual to $150 per month for a larger company with many users and additional functionality. Discounts are sometimes available. The overview of QuickBooks Online shown here gives a general idea of how the program works. The following are good tutorial sources.
- Intuit’s QuickBooks Online Tutorials
- YouTube QuickBooks Online Tutorials
- Facebook has many QuickBooks Online oriented groups
Open QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online opens to a dashboard. Users can personalize the widgets. The purpose of this page is to give an overview of the financial position of the company.
Down the left side of the page are the main areas of the program. The areas that might be used most often are Banking, Reports and Accounting. The area underlined is where a business can designate an accountant to have access to their QuickBooks Online account. This is useful whether the accountant enters information, answers questions, or prepares tax returns.
Choose Banking to check the business bank accounts.
Periodic Updates
This example shows three bank accounts for this business. Connect an online account by entering log in information. QuickBooks downloads new transactions periodically. The user can click on Update in the upper right corner to perform a lookup immediately. Any new transactions are displayed for review before posting.
Transactions display on this screen. Apply categories to transactions based on rules and past entries. If an entry is already in the register, then QB will match to it, otherwise it will ask for permission to add.
Click on Go To Register to enter the check register for the account highlighted in blue.
Bank Register
The bank register is much like a checkbook. Display shows payments and receipts. Entries downloaded or matched from the bank include the C and the green icon. Transactions entered directly do not have that notation until they hit the bank.
Chart of Accounts
QuickBooks is accounting software, and the basis of the entire program is the Chart of Accounts. QB comes with standard categories based on the type of business described. Change the accounts at any time. Only use the ones you want, rename them, or add new ones. There are many sources online which give good advice about how to use the Chart of Accounts for a particular type of business.
Reports
QuickBooks has many standard reports. A user can highlight their most used reports, depending on the business. Statement of Activity, and Statement of Position, are highlighted and show above in Favorites.
Only Chart of Accounts categories used are displayed.
Summary
QuickBooks Online is a very powerful program for tracking finances for a business. Use QB to send bills, track sales or run payroll. This post gives just a simple overview of QuickBooks Online.
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