Linda Artesani walks through QuickBooks Self-Employed, a $10/month tool for Schedule C filers. It tracks income and expenses, calculates quarterly tax payments, and integrates with TurboTax, but lacks reconciliation and works only for simple self-employed businesses.
Chapters
Hello, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I thought I would step into the realm of QuickBooks Self-Employed a little bit and just touch upon it. It's a pretty interesting product. It's great for the purpose it's designed for, which is a small business, someone who's self-employed, everything goes under their Social Security number, they file a Schedule C with that business. You may or may not know, I— if you follow me on Facebook, you probably know I also teach yoga as my side job. So I have this business and the yoga business. The yoga business is just for fun. I don't make a lot of money at it, but I do have to track my income. So that's where I use my Schedule C. So I'm coming here into the homepage. This is what it looks like. It's pretty straightforward. You connect your bank account. I have my main bank account connected, and then all you have to do is come to your transactions, and there's 19 to review. And then I just— it'll automatically tag from previous previous selections, and you can make rules. So when I pay my personal credit card, it goes to a rule. I can come in here, and I know this particular check was personal. I do not deduct my, my office at all with my business, but if you were going to do that, you can actually open up and split the transaction. So percentage-wise, let's just say that you use, you know, you count your rooms, you have 12 rooms in your house, so a 12th of the house is used for business. You can divide it out by that portion as business and that other portion as your personal. So that is one I don't do that, so that would be my personal. So I would just come in here and do personal, personal, and anything that's got to do with yoga obviously would be business because that's where I work and teach as a yoga teacher. So it's pretty simple. You can track your mileage. I don't do that, but if you track your mileage, it can follow you around and see when you're going to certain places. And those places may be yoga studios, so you can put that towards business. Same as the thing, you just click it business or personal. Here it will tell you how much taxes you owe. So this is figuring out my taxes based on my income with my yoga job, and it can see how much I have created for income for the quarter, and it will tell me how much my recommended— this is my recommended payment. So it bases what I put into my business income. and how much I should pay towards taxes. And then that's just a setting that you can set up. There's a projection you've got over here, some projections. You can put your tax profile in. You can base it on your last year's taxes and kind of go through that. And then there's your reports. You can also, you know, do a profit and loss report. You can do a tax summary report, tax detail report. You can invoice your customers from here, which is really nice. I don't need that because I just get a 1099 at the end of the year. I don't really have customers that I bill out. I don't send the studios my invoices. But if you have a business, say you make jewelry and you sell that on the side and you need to invoice your customers or just create sales receipts, maybe you sell that jewelry at shows and you want to show which customers you have, you might want to reach out to them. This is a way to get your customers billed. So it's pretty simple. One of the main questions I see all the time in QuickBooks is how do I— say you looked at this product, you thought it was going to be great because it's really inexpensive. It's only $10 a month, about that anyway, maybe a little bit more now. And you wanted to— you tried it out and you're like, oh, this is just— there's no reconciling. I don't have a lot of versatility. I can't change my chart of accounts. There's no way to change it. It's based on Schedule C. So this is your chart of accounts that you have to work with. Anything that doesn't fall into those boxes that land in that Schedule C, you have to put it in that other miscellaneous one because that's the only selections you have. With QuickBooks Self-Employed. It's very structured in that way. It's designed for Schedule C, so this way you can actually do your own taxes with TurboTax, and this product is sometimes bundled with that. If you're interested in— say you started using it and you decided, nope, I don't want to use it, it's a program that doesn't work with me— you just come over to your gear wheel. This is where some of your settings are, and then you can come over to Your billing information, and my product is bundled in with my ProAdvisor membership, so I don't pay anything per month. But if you had a fee per month for this, it would show here, and then you just hit cancel. And that's as simple as it is to cancel your self-employed product. If you're on the trial, you can still cancel. If you haven't paid anything, you can still cancel. They'll probably ask you why, even with if you cancel if you've been using it. So if you're interested in the QuickBooks Self-Employed product. I highly recommend it. Try the trial, take a look, see if it will work. Maybe hook up your bank account and try it out. If not, you can— it's really not that expensive. You want to see if it will work for you. Like I said, it's built for one specific type of business model. It's not built for all businesses. You're probably better off with maybe a basic Simple Start, QuickBooks Simple Start, if you want more of an accounting program for a business, especially if you are a corporation. I would not use QuickBooks Self-Employed. It's really meant for that small business that's self-employed that files Schedule C. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to me. Again, this is Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. I'd love if you could reach out to me on Facebook and ask for some tutorials on anything in QuickBooks that you are really struggling with or need help with.
