Choosing the right QuickBooks Online

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I wanted to do a video. I know I did one last week on how to cancel your QuickBooks and probably should have done these the other way around. I'm going to do one on signing up for QuickBooks, what your options are, what would maybe be a good version to go with, and just pretty much just go through the options that are available to you and maybe give you a couple tips on some things that work well. I am a yoga teacher, so you can see I'm wearing my yoga clothes today. I teach yoga on Saturday mornings and I usually do my blogs on the weekends. So let's go there. So I just want to explain my attire. It's not quite business attire, but let's just go there. So if you Google QuickBooks Online or Desktop, you can see just from this page, here's, you know, you You're coming here. You searched for QuickBooks on Google, and this is what pops up. And you can see right away predominantly you can see that it says Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus. So that's the three online versions. Of course, they put the most popular little banner on Plus. Plus is a great version because you can see it's got a lot of things in here. Essentials for a lot of clients. A lot of the clients I work with, I work with small businesses. A lot of them come to me and they pay all their bills really small or just starting up. They pay all their bills with their credit cards, so they don't even need bill pay. So then they would fall into the Simple Start category. So it looks pretty affordable, right? $10 a month, $17 a month, $30 a month. Of course, that's because it's half price. So if you wanted to get the 50% off for 3 months, you can come in here, buy now, and you will get the $10 for 3 months, and then it will jump back up to $20. $17 for 3 months, it'll go to $35 and $30 instead of $60. It's $60 now. Over here, Desktop Pro, it's a subscription-based desktop program. You install it on the computer. So you can see there that it's installed, and here's online. You can work from any device. So pretty straightforward. The payrolls here for QuickBooks Payroll, to me, it's very affordable to add the payroll on if you have payroll. Obviously, a lot of these businesses that I work with that are really just starting up, a lot of them are either sole proprietorships or they've maybe turned themselves into an LLC. They're a partnership, maybe single-member partnership. They don't, they don't have payroll. So those companies really work well with Simple Start. But I have one just recently that's in Simple Start. He's doing so well he's hired somebody, so he can't take a pay, but his employees can take a pay. So he's hiring new people. He's very excited. He went with this payroll service. He went with the $49 full service. I mean, when you look at the price, and yes, it's $30 more a month to go with the full service as opposed to the enhanced. For me, the business owner being very busy and the time it takes you to process the tax returns and pay the liability payments that are required to be compliant in payroll, it is worth the peace of mind to go with the $49. All of my customers run full service. If you're not, I just think it's not worth your effort because one mistake of not paying a payment on time— I mean, it's easy with enhanced, they send you an email, but people People are so busy, and with the economy being such a forceful driving forward, really blossoming thing that's happening now in the world, do you have the time? I mean, you think about what do you charge, and is the $30— and then this case, $30, obviously when it goes out of this honeymoon stage of the 3 months, it's— you're looking at a difference of $60. But, and I know it's per month, but that amount is worth the peace of mind that they will cover you for anything. So if something doesn't get paid on time, they actually reimburse you. And I had this happen with a client. He was on full service. They missed a deadline or they didn't pay a payment. I don't even know what happened or where it went wrong. And that happened. It just— I had to go back to them. The client had to pay the penalty, and then Intuit reimbursed them. So whatever happened happened. Very rare. They're usually really good about everything. And I love it because the payroll within QuickBooks is nice. You can go to like Gusto or Patriot Payroll for the other options, ADP Paychex. They tend to be more— you might get a better affordable price per pay period. This is per month, now don't forget. So if you run 4 pays, that's per month. There's no extra charge for doing a weekly payroll or biweekly or bimonthly. It's all the same fee. But when you look at the amount it costs you, there is a $2 fee per employee per month. But when you look at the amount of money it costs you for that, it's, it's just to stay compliant. I think the peace of mind to have them do the work for you, and especially at this time of the year. So if you're jumping in now and maybe you had a payroll since January, you're gonna have to reconcile that if you click Enhanced. You might as well— I would just wait and stay with your current provider until the beginning of the year and start fresh with them if you're going to stay with the Enhanced. Otherwise, Full Service, they're going to tie all your past paychecks together into Your system, then you don't have to do the work. So there's a lot of, a lot of time-consuming effort to, especially now that we're halfway through the year, to have to go back and connect all the paychecks and all the payroll liability payments. And just to start fresh, I would definitely— full service is the way to go. That's my recommendation. Like I said, my clients are on full service. I used to do payroll for them and do all that. I don't do it anymore because I can't do it for $30 to do it for everybody and do it properly. There's too many deadlines that are important. And this includes at year-end also. It includes your W-2s, it includes the final, you know, the 940 tax return. It includes all that, all those things. And when you're comparing prices with other systems, make sure you check into that because a lot of them, some of them charge you for postage to get the checks to you. Some of them charge you for everything. It's like an à la carte kind of thing. So this is, as you can see, which products QuickBooks is really wanting you to go to, the Online, but there's also the Desktop Pro, which is that. But let's go to compare the Online versus Desktop. Sorry, I already opened that. And here you can see where the Online comes versus Desktop. So they both create professional invoices, track income and expenses, they do sales and tax reports. Automatically schedule and send invoices is one of the biggest things. It's wonderful with QuickBooks Online. It is— you can do recurring, you can automate them, you can automate the payments with their merchant services, and payments actually get paid by the payment link and then it will clear them out. You can work from your tablet, computer, or smartphone. A little deceptive, not all the features are in the tablet and the smartphone unless you log in via the web, but you can do that. I love the fact that your accountant can log in and just go in. Anybody that the accounts that I work, the CPAs that I work with, they log into the file and enter the end of year journal entries. So they just log in, or if they have a question, we can be logged in at the same time. Just great. We can share a screen and really try to go through it that way. Integrates 300 cloud-based apps. So I'm going to get into apps a little bit in a few minutes to give you my favorite ones. But yeah, there's apps there. Telephone support. Obviously, you have to pay for it with desktop. Automatically download your bank transactions. It's connected all the time. There's no fee. With desktop, there's a fee. They will upgrade you every desktop three years. You need to update. I mean, it's definitely cheaper to go with desktop if you want to do the nickeling diming of the exact cost of the software. But when you get into the nitty gritty of time saved, that's where I think online is. The winner, hands down the winner in this. Now, one of my newest clients recently Googled QuickBooks offers and he came up with this page and he found that there is a lot of offers here and I told him he was going for Simple Start. So you can come in here and he came here, it pretty much brought him back to a place where he was where you can get some codes. So he went into QuickBooksOffer.com and it brought him here and there's different, you can get money off a desktop, And he found something for the online. So 30-day online trial for free, but he ended up calling. So this is one of my tips. If you don't mind and you know you're gonna stay with the software, if you give them a call and talk to somebody on the phone, then you— he did get this rate, $10 per month. He got that for an entire year because he paid the year in full on his credit card. Oh, that's great. So instead of paying per month, he paid it per year. It's good for the year. I'm sure it doesn't stay that way for next year, but annual customers get a better deal than if you're paying per month. Is it worth it? If you think you're gonna be with the software, it's definitely worth it. If you feel like it's not going to be, or you're not sure, I would stay with the monthly. If you select to get the free month trial, you lose that half price because you're getting the whole month for free. So you lose that 3-month deal unless you sign up again under a different email and go for it. But if you opened it up and started using it for a free trial, you're not going to be able to convert that over. So that's something to think about. So I'd like to take you to some of the apps. So we'll go to apps.com. So here we are on apps.com and it's taking you to the website that is owned by Intuit. So every app on here is an app that's been vetted by Intuit. It's been proven to be protective so you don't have any worries about somebody hacking into your system because you didn't pick an app that's been vetted by Intuit. So they have to go through quite a screening process to be able to be listed here. There are thousands of apps out there in the atmosphere, right? So you might find a really good app on Google that's not listed on apps.com, which is owned by Intuit, and you might find that those apps are just as good as the ones here. The ones here have to go through a bit of a vetting process to be listed here, so you know these are safe and they're good for your system. There are other apps, there are other things out there, but just know that this is probably a first step to come here. And you can see all the apps if you want to view them all. You know, they're by alphabetical. I suggest if you're searching, like if you're going to be looking for a law firm, You search up law firms and then it will bring you up. My favorite by far, LeanLaw. I love it. Simple, basic. It works really well. I've worked with a couple of attorneys that are using it. They're small practices. They're, you know, single law firm, single-owned, and they do everything themselves. And they both do their own billing. LeanLaw is wonderful. It goes through the matters. It's my favorite. So that's my recommendation. And I probably should do a recommendation on that one. If you wanted to do something on invoicing, so you want to have something that helps you with invoicing. So there are a few here. I do have this one about how to invoice with your Google Calendar, and I'll refer you back to that. This one, Invoice Sherpa, is really nice. I've worked with it. I'm still not exactly proficient in actually putting it, setting it up. MineralTree, I've heard really good things about MineralTree for your invoicing. That's another one that's good. Of course, when they get into invoicing, invoicing and bills, it can kind of get mixed up, so you have to be careful in here. Stripe. Things like that are in here. So there's things in here that might work. Jobber is a really good one as well. You know, you can always reach out to a pro advisor and ask. Fundbox is a really good one too. I've referred that one to some of my clients. Some, they will actually advance the payment if you're kind of stuck, you need cash flow, but you've got this money you're waiting on and it's not quite there. You can go to Fundbox. They'll actually give you the money and they just take a piece of it when, when you do get paid. So even just Typing in invoices brings you to Avalara. I think that's how you say it. The tax one, which is a really good one if you have a lot of complex sales tax. I highly recommend that one. Noify for Contractors is phenomenal for any contractor. This is an app that will actually put the contractor's hat on top of a QuickBooks program. I think, in my opinion, this Noify with QuickBooks Online is better than QuickBooks Desktop contractor version. So AutoEntry, another great app. That's an app that will help you with— you can scan bills or invoices. I haven't played with that yet. They've invited me to do and I will get to that. I did look at it when it was in its infancy a couple years ago, but I'm hearing great things on AutoEntry, so you should really check that one out as well. But there's a lot of them here. When you come to the main page, when you come to the main page for apps, you'll see TSheets is predominantly shown. It's owned by QuickBooks. It used to be on its own, but now it's owned by QuickBooks. Another fabulous app for timekeeping. But there's a lot of them here, so just check them out. If you can find something that— some of them are free and some of them cost money, but they're well worth it when you look at the time savings and the data entry savings. The time it takes you to enter everything manually, you might save and be able to do something more productive and more bring you in more money because you, you've used an app. And a lot of the apps actually work, you know, they bring the data in better than somebody manually typing it. And, you know, so maybe you have a secretary or somebody a bookkeeper entering everything manually when you could go to Hubdoc and import the transactions in from, you know, sending the bills over to it and then coding it and just getting it coded in once. And then every time the bill comes in, it gets populated into QuickBooks with the attached copy of the bill. You can't beat that system. So that's pretty much it on signing up. So you have options on signing up for QuickBooks Online or Desktop. So there's options. You can do a subscription-based or you can do buying the program outright. With online, you can do annual and save some money, or do monthly, and you can get the deal if you sign up for initially and just buy now, or do the monthly and do a free trial to see if you like the program. If you want to get that 3-month savings at half price, I'll provide you a link for a test drive. So if you want to play around with it so you're not playing around in your live file, see how you like it. It's just I It's a game changer if you ask me. QuickBooks Online is a game changer. Oh, I should also mention, I didn't get into this, self-employed. Self-employed, great product for the right customer. If you're looking to be, especially some of these businesses start out, right? You start out as a, you're self-employed, it's under your Social Security number, you're just a sole proprietor. This is one of the greatest programs ever. So it's inexpensive, right? Really inexpensive. It's pretty rigid. You can't do a lot. It has to be people who file Schedule C. So it's For sole proprietorships, it's going to help you figure out if you start to make money, how much money you should be paying in estimated taxes. It's all connected. So if you set it up properly, you can actually bundle it and do your tax return with TurboTax. So maybe you're just starting out in your new endeavor. You're starting to become an entrepreneur, and you're not sure. You still get your day job, and you're doing this on the side. This is a great place to start, right? So you start as a sole proprietorship, see how it goes. Everything's under your social, and then eventually you might blossom into a business that you have to quit that job and do your passion full-time, which is wonderful, and then maybe you incorporate or whatever. But yeah, so this is an option for a lot of people and it's really affordable and you can use MileIQ with it and track your mileage. I mean, it's just got so many things happening. It's a much stripped-down version of, you know, QuickBooks Online is totally different, but this is definitely a business product that's actually— the last time I was in it, I was like, wow, a lot of things have happened since I've been in it. It was like a month that I hadn't gone into my own. And like I said, I'm a yoga teacher, so I do all my yoga. All my yoga is on my— it's my sole proprietorship. So I've got all my credit cards. Anything I spend money on is, you know, is personal. But it's sometimes— most— sometimes things come through that are due to my yoga business that maybe I get to write off. So those come through if I go to a conference, more education. Working towards my advanced certification, so I can put my those things in my the monies that I make teaching yoga. It's my side job, but it's fun. So I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you found this to be helpful in in deciding what you want to buy. You know which products you want to go for, and I hope that answers questions. If it didn't, just reach out to me. I'll help you out. I'll help you pick or decide which program works for you. Thank you for watching. Bye now.