How to Setup QuickBooks Desktop: Part 2

Hello everyone. This is part two of the QuickBooks desktop setup where we go in and actually add information about customers, suppliers, the products and services, and your bank accounts. So let's get started. You will see this screen that will come up once you have gone through the process of setting everything else up. So you have two choices. You can add.

Your information or some of it or a small portion of it from here, or you can simply click on Start working and add it directly from the interface of QuickBooks Desktop. So let's add some from the screen here just to see how it works. So click on Add. And this is the people that you do business with, so your customers and your vendors and potentially your employees. So we click on Add. You'll see that you can either import your customers or vendors from Yahoo or from Gmail if you have a bunch, or you can simply copy and paste from Excel or enter them manually. Since at this stage many of you will just have one or two customers or none at all, let's just go with paste from Excel or enter manually. Click on Continue.

And then here you will see a way in which you can determine whether it's a customer, a vendor, employee, enter the name and some of the information relating to that.

Corporation. So let's click on Custom contact name. And that way you can pull it up either by the first name, first and last name, or the company name. You have various sort options. This is sort of where you could put the first and last name individually if you want. It's sort of duplicated to the name area, just a more organized way of reflecting it in case for export purposes. Because everything in desktop, or almost everything can be exported to Excel and then further manipulated. You can put in the email, phone, an alternate phone, fax, if you know they still have a fax number, and then you can go on. You can also select a vendor. Let's make our vendor Irene Adler. This is also our company name. We can leave this blank. Then the only thing that will show up is Irene Adler. Same thing. You can enter all of her other details. And for employees, let's just add Sherlock Holmes because he is has a corporation and is paying himself as an employee. And there we are, good to go. We can click on Continue. This will add.

It gives you a message telling you that three contacts are ready to be added and that there are no errors. If there are duplicates, then you might have an issue here. And then you could go in and fix them. So click on Continue. Here you have opening balances. So if you actually have amounts owing to or from existing customers or vendors. You can enter them here or you can enter them later. I prefer to enter them later. I have more control at that stage. And also it affects your books. And as an accountant, it is very important to ensure that these balances are entered correctly so that your reports are correct. Okay, let's click on Continue.

Now, the next option is to add the products and services that you sell. And this is important because QuickBooks has what's called a chart of accounts, which we refer to. But the products and services sort of feed into the chart of accounts. You can have multiple products and services that just feed into one sales account, for example, on your chart of accounts. So let's click on add. We're going to add a service.

Sherlock SHDA actually provides consulting services. So let's add that as a service.

And then you can put a description if you want, and you can put a price. Let's say his hourly rate is $250 an hour. We'll put that in. Click on Continue. And then that has been added. And then the final thing that you can do is add your bank account. So if you already have a business bank account, whether you're a corporation, a sole proprietorship, a partnership, or just an account that you use for your business, you can add that here. So you can call it the name of the account. Often it is. Most frequently it is a checking account. You can put checking business account.

Enter that if you want. You can put an account number. This is not necessary. Opening balance. I would leave this blank for now, and that's something you could do at a later time. But if you were, and you really wanted to enter an opening balance, and you would do that, and you could select a date and click on Continue.

And so here QuickBooks offers you the option to print checks, and then you can actually order checks directly from Intuit if you want. So let's click. We're not going to do that. We're going to click on no, thanks. And then we're going to continue.

And that's it. So you now have the structure, the basic structure of your company that is set up. And we can click on start working.

So here, this is your interface. And in your interface you can see a variety of things that you can do. Let's go to the chart of accounts. You can go here or you can actually on.

On the menu above, you can go to Lists and click on chart of accounts here as well. Or Control A is the menu shortcut. So let's do that. Expand it and you'll see this is your pre populated chart of accounts. These are the accounts that you will need to begin with to start your company. You can also create new accounts by going here and you can edit accounts, delete accounts, make them inactive. Something to keep in mind is if you've used an account and there is a balance in it, you will not be able to delete it. The only way to remove it from this view is to make it inactive. This is because any accounting system tracks every single transaction from the moment of inception in one way or another. So this is your chart of accounts. If we go to your customers, we can see James Moriar already has been added. If you double click on the customer, you can add more information including payment settings. There's all kinds of things that you can add here. Sales tax settings. You can put in a sales tax code, a default code which QuickBooks has already set up for.

Quebec because we chose Quebec as the province. And these are Canadian sales tax codes. So you can close that. You can look at additional info, customer type, rep, job info. So there's quite a lot of options available and we can, we will go over that in a later video. Similarly, if you go to vendors, you'll see Irene Adler. It automatically adds Minister of Revenue Receiver General. And this relates your GST and QST payments. Again, if you're registered in Quebec and similarly you can double click on it, you have the same option. So you can fill this out if you much or as little as you want. And then finally when you go to the employees, you'll see that Sherlock Holmes has been added. And remember, in order to use payroll in QuickBooks Desktop, you do have to pay for a monthly subscription and that is also something we will go over at a later time. So that is your basic setup. You can now start entering transactions and working from here. Chances are your first transaction is going to be an invoice. I like to go to customers. There's various ways you can access invoices, but if you go to customers, you go to new transactions, invoices and then you can start to enter your information here and all that for another time.

So we will click next know and that's all for now. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the video, please like and subscribe and that will encourage me to make more videos in the future. Have a great day.