In this tutorial, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping provides a comprehensive walkthrough of QuickBooks Online (QBO) for new users. She begins at the dashboard, explaining the left‑hand navigation bar and how to access past transactions, banking, sales, customers, products/services, expenses, vendors, workers, contractors, payroll, reports, taxes, accounting, reconciliation, accountant access, and app integrations. She demonstrates creating and editing customers, products, and vendors (including auto‑populated vendor details), handling invoices, payments, undeposited funds, and statements. The video covers payroll options, recommending full‑service payroll for compliance, and reviews the reporting suite (Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Management reports) and sales‑tax features, noting a useful third‑party app for complex tax scenarios. Artesani explains the gear (settings) area, covering company information, tax forms, subscription upgrades, sales form customization, expense settings, and advanced preferences such as fiscal year, cash vs accrual, and automation options. She highlights the Quick Create (+) menu for fast transaction entry, the powerful recent‑transactions search, and how QBO links related records (payments to invoices, deposits, etc.). Finally, she mentions the differences between Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus plans, outlines the QuickBooks Payments options (ACH and credit cards), and promotes an upcoming live event on moving from hourly to value pricing.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I wanted to continue on the series that we started last week with where to begin in QuickBooks Online. So after watching the first video, I'm assuming that you've already selected your product and you're now moving into learning the basics. So learning a little bit of the navigation piece of how to manipulate and move in the program and understand where things are. So we're going to start here at the dashboard and just taking a peek around. This is a sample company, doesn't have a lot in it, but I just wanted to show you really how to navigate in the program and where things are. There's areas that you will instantly need to know once you log into QuickBooks Online to get started. This post is just going to really let you know where the functionality of the system is, and then I'll start to get into the into the weeds of getting into more depth in each section. So the first area I want you to really be familiar with is this navigation bar on the left. It's a quick way to get to the past transactions, right? This is a way to get to all the transactions that have already been entered into QuickBooks. So you've got your dashboard. This is your first screen that you pop into, and it just gives you a little overview of your company. It's set to last month, but if we wanted to do this year, you'll see that it's going to add up what I've already entered into the program. Same thing, so you can set your settings here to just to customize this a little bit. Because it's a sample file, I don't have a lot of data in it, but at least you'll be able to see that there's, there are some things in here, and you can set those settings so that works for you. I haven't connected the bank account, and I'll get into that in a future video. So again, this is your past transactions, so this is your little toolbar to get to those things. So you've got your banking We haven't connected that, but that's here, and there's actually some resources here now that is fairly new that will help you to figure out how to get into your banking. Sales will take you to past sales that have been entered already. So here's all your invoices that have been entered into the system. You can see that these— this one's due, it hasn't been paid, it hasn't been sent, maybe you mailed it, it hasn't been emailed. And then you can see that these were paid but not deposited, so they haven't been deposited into the bank account. And you can go to these transactions over here to actually physically move things into that category. Also in sales, it's going to bring you to all your sales. So it's going to show your invoices and your payments here and maybe credit memos and anything else that has to do with a customer. Invoices we were just in. Here's your customers. You can go into this and edit it and then your products and services. So here's your products and services. If you need to edit these, you can just come over to this button and hit edit. And just, you know, add words in here that would show what your customer is receiving, you know, consulting services for the month or whatever you need to have. If you have a default rate, you could put that in there. And obviously if you had a picture that you were selling a product and you wanted to add the picture, you can add it there. We get into expenses and vendors. It's the same thing. Here's your vendor names and you can, you can go into your vendor itself and find your transactions that were for this vendor and details on the vendor. And a lot of this actually auto-populated because Intuit's using Google search to start to pull these details in. So when you pick something like Amazon, when you create a vendor, it will actually pull the system in. So let me just grab another vendor. So we'll just create one temporarily here. So let's just do Best Buy and see if it picks it up. So here's Best Buy, and it's going to pick the one closest to my house. So this is my vendor that I would most likely be using. It's the one that's in Estero, my town in Florida. So now I added my vendor really easily. I didn't have to enter any details. I mean, like I said, QuickBooks Online is very time-saving. And then you can keep track and watch a video in here. They've got more help videos embedded into the system to help you learn it. Workers is a tab that you would have if you had employees, and Contractors is where you would put in your 1099 contractors. So people that work for you that aren't an employee, but they are people that you engage, that they're self-employed and they work for you on whatever capacity that follows the guidelines with the IRS. So you would enter them here, and then of course you'd have to— if you're going to have employees, you'd have to activate the payroll, which I highly recommend the full-service payroll in QuickBooks Online. It's very inexpensive, it covers the compliance piece, you'll be able to get out all your— they will handle doing your tax return, your employees' W-2s, and all that paperwork so you don't have to, and it's worth that for peace of mind. They do have another version called Enhanced, but then you're a little bit more in charge of your payroll. So depending on how much time you have, it's just this full-service one will help you sleep at night. All your reports are in here. This is a Simple Start program, so there's not a lot of reports, but this is where you will find your basics. You can star any report that you find to be helpful, and if you star it, it will put it up on the top, and you'll be able to see that as your favorites. Profit and Loss is your typical one that you would see, and you can just click on it and then it will show you the report. And, you know, we have to get off some of those things, and you'll be able to see the income and the expenses and your balance sheet. Those are your 2 basic, most important financial statements. So that's in here, and there's Management Reports and Other Reports. Taxes is for sales tax. If you have sales tax, they've got a pretty awesome new module that works with sales tax. If you have basic sales tax like in Florida, we have Most businesses kind of fall under the 6% sales tax rule, but if you're a restaurant, there's a lot of different variables. Aloe Vera is a really good product to use if you end up having that more complex sales tax. You deal with a lot of different states, highly recommend that app. But the basic sales tax that's in QuickBooks Online is really good, and they're moving towards now being able to have you link over to actually record your sales tax with the state right in the program, which is really awesome. Accounting is just going to bring you to your chart of accounts, and then it'll bring you to reconcile, which is fairly new. It wasn't here recently. This is a really new version of QuickBooks Online, so it's going to give you the new features. And then obviously, if you wanted to reconcile, you'd be able to come in here and reconcile your banking. My Accountant is where you would invite your accountant or your bookkeeper or both to your file. That's 2 more slots that you would have as users that doesn't count against your user amount, which SimpleStart's got the lowest amount. And here's where you would connect your apps. So basically, this is where you're going to look at your historical information that you really need to, to look into where your things have already been entered in QuickBooks. So now I'm going to go over to this Quick Create button. This is where your transactions are. So this is pretty much the button that you're going to live in most of the times when you work in here. So obviously you could access invoices from your sales, so it all depends on which way you like to work. But if you like to work just to do transactional things, this is a great section to be in there, and they're categorized by the column. So anything to do with your customers listed here, anything to do with vendors here, employees, and then the other things. And the other things is you really don't use journal entries, but if you do need to use them, that's here. Making a bank deposit. So now I know that I got a notification that there were 2 payments entered, but they weren't deposited. So they're sitting in that holding account called undeposited funds, and this is where you're going to want to put them in and group them if they went to the bank together. And save and close it, and we'll get out of there. So those things are under this particular category. Statement would be for your customers. So you send statements to your customers if they didn't pay you and you want to show them that they still owe you, maybe several months, or maybe just a transactional statement to show them what money, what invoices went out, what checks have been received, how they've been applied. That's a good way to get to your statements. Obviously, in employees, you can enter weekly timesheets. It's a great little feature built in. And you can invite users to only have this access. So you can actually have people that are your employees that can enter their weekly timesheet and not have any access to QuickBooks, but you'll be able to access them for the program. This button right here is amazing because it's going to bring you to your most recent transactions. I love this feature for finding stuff. So if you're looking for a particular— say you're reconciling and you want to find All transactions, and this has been happening to me lately. Sometimes you have to refresh the screen. And now you can see it changed the box. I'm not sure what that bug is, but it's definitely a little bug. So if I wanted to find all transactions valued at $500, let's just do $505 because I know I entered an invoice for that. It's going to show me my invoice and my payment, which is all part of the same transactional history, but I can access both. Another thing I love about QuickBooks Online, if I'm like, all right, did this guy pay this invoice? It looks like he paid, the balance is zero. When did he pay this? You can come over here to the corner and click on the payment, and it's going to link you back to the payment. And then if I'm not sure when it got deposited, it links me back to my deposit. So you can see that they're all interconnected, and I can follow pretty much the path. And if there's a problem, you can fix it. So in the gear, this is where you're more settings-based. So remember the Edit Preferences in desktop? This is Pretty much where you're going to find those things listed. Your company underneath your company. So here's your categories again under your company account settings. Pretty important. Here's what you really want to fill this out. I was talking to a colleague of mine and we're like nobody ever fills that out. So it's important to fill out tax form industry couple places that people don't really fill out, but it'd be great if you knew how your taxes are filed. Ask your CPA. Say you know. Am I an S corp? Am I a sole proprietor? So you just get that information in the system. Website, all those things, it's nice to have all the details. Billing and subscription is where you're going to find where your subscription is, and if you want to upgrade, you can upgrade out of this product if it's not working for you and you need more. You can move to Essentials or Plus from here. You can subscribe here and upgrade and do quite a few things, set up for the payments, QuickBooks payments. And here's where you can customize your sales forms and get into all the nitty-gritty on that, really make it look really nice. There's a lot of ways to make your invoicing look nice on QuickBooks Online. You can turn on progress invoicing, edit your messages, all those little details that really have to do mostly template-wise, but you can access that stuff here. Same with expenses, you can add if you want to. With Simple Start, it's a really basic bare-bones product. There's no vendors, bills— well, there's vendors, but there's no bills. There's just expenses and checks, so it's basic cash basis. So if you have a reason to use bills and bill payments, then you need to move up to at least Essentials. The payment system is just a system to be able to have your customers pay you online. You can apply really quickly. They can do ACH, which is free. With the caveat being it takes about 5 to 7 business days for you to get your money. With credit cards, you can just apply for it and they usually hit your bank in 2 days. And the Advanced is the section that you really want to get into and, you know, put your fiscal year in. You know, if you're accrual or cash basis, you can set up your reporting from there. You want to add your tax form. Very rarely do I have customers that use chart of account numbers, but if you're one of those people that likes it, you can turn it on here. It's set off, it's off by default. Automation, if you want to pre-fill forms, that's on already. Automatically apply credits is on by default. So sometimes people have a business where they send out a lot of credit memos and they want to be specific to where those credit memos are going to be applied, to which invoice. In this case, you want to shut that apply— auto-apply credits off. Currency, any other preferences here. So that's it in a nutshell for the features of QuickBooks Online. I think it's pretty simple and basic to go through this really quickly to get you in to see the different sections. Historical stuff on the left and then transactional stuff under the plus sign. Gear is where you fine-tune your preferences and settings. It's really all you need to know to get started. So I hope everything's going well and this was helpful. I also wanted to, before I close here today, I've got something going on. It's called Community Live. It's going to be on August 30th on a Thursday. Matthew Fulton and I have partnered up. We're going to be doing a live show. We're going to start to talk of some good topics. The first topic is going to be all about how to move your business from hourly billing to value billing. So value pricing or fixed pricing, we're going to get into all that kind of detail. It's a 30-minute show, so it's going to be really quick and on point, and hopefully you'll learn something. And you can always reach out to us and just ask questions. It's going to be live, so hopefully you get to join us, and we would love to have you on the show. Thank you for watching. Bye now.
