QBOA getting started in QuickBooks Online Accountant - Part 1

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So I'm going to sway a bit from my regular talking about working with law firms and all the things I've been doing every week and just take a little sabbatical and go down the road of what it's like to become a ProAdvisor brand spanking new. So I've been a ProAdvisor since I think it's 1999 or 2000, maybe 2003, somewhere in that range. It's been a long time. And it's been a really great program for me. It's helped me grow my business. And I'm involved in a group on the Intuit Community, which I've been partnered with for a very long time. And they started a brand new page. I want to take you to it, and then I'm going to take you to a PDF that the moderator created that is just great. And we're going to go through week by week some of the steps to be a ProAdvisor, how you can start to do it, how you can benefit from it, and all the fun stuff. So let me take you— let me share my screen. So here's the Intuit Community page. So if you've never really tried this and come here, this is a really great platform to find out all the answers to questions that have to do with QuickBooks. They've got lots of topics. So if you've never been to this page, it's intuit.com/community. And I'm going to bring you to the business section because that's actually where this new page is housed and where they're starting to develop kind of a new way of doing the questions and answers. But there's also in here, help articles, and then Q&A. So people ask questions in QuickBooks, and then people like me would answer the questions and, and have interaction back and forth. And I've answered over the years, it's over 28,000 questions over the, you know, 20 years that I've been doing this. So this is the group. If you're just starting with QuickBooks Online accountant, and you're wanting to be an Online ProAdvisor, QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor, and get certified, this is where you would start. You come right into this page and then it will take you to all the great topics that are in here. And you'll see that this is getting started. There's a whole page here. Here's Cheryl Grinnell, the moderator, and she's fabulous. And she will, you know, there's questions in here. People just ask random questions, but there's also lots of helpful tips if you're just getting started. This is a question that's come up in my community group in Facebook that I've had some people that just don't know where to get started. And it's Things have changed quite a bit from when I started back in the days of actually answering ads in a newspaper, help wanted ads, and driving to the clients. This is the cloud version, you know, this is the cloud version, the new version of what I did a long time ago. So I want to take you through these steps because I think getting started, it's a little bit, a little bit like, how, where do I start? Right? It gets a little bit confusing. And what Cheryl did was she actually made this really cool page that says getting started. So your success starts here. And I think this is really great. So we're going to go through the steps of signing up. And I'll take you through the week. So this will be week 1. We'll go through this section and then I'll take you through adding a client and all these things that are involved in the next 4 weeks. So we'll start here and signing up with QuickBooks. So it's going to recognize my online ID. So you would start here and I'm going to start with my new— whoops— newbieqbo@gmail account that I created. Is my account name. So I'm just gonna put my name in here. So you would do the same thing. I'm just going to put my name in here. You do the same thing, you know, last name, phone number. It's going to want your phone number. What's great about this is it's free, right? So you're going to manage all your clients, your work. So you even have a place called Work that you'd be able to manage your clients in and communicate with your clients in. So we'll get to that down the road. But there's also free training. And access to your QuickBooks Online files. It's really cool. You're going to have your account, and then you're going to have a place for your team once you get to that point, which happens down the road, and then all your client lists. And then I'm going to enter my firm's information. So it's going to be Newbies Accounting. How's that for a name? And I'll give it my zip code. And I'm going to hit Finish. This is how you start creating an account for me. It's creating a QuickBooks Online account for me. So I'm going to have my own account for my own business, and it's Free. Yes, I said free. It's hard to believe that you get a whole account for free. So here we are. Hello, Linda. Welcome to QuickBooks Online Accountant. So what's really good about this is I'm going to get all the tools that are in QuickBooks Online for me to work as an accountant with my customers. So let's go. So it's really neat. You keep all your clients handy. So obviously we don't have any clients yet. We'll get to that in the week too. But this is where you'll be able to see your client list. Your ProAdvisor. So, this is where I would start if you're brand new. I started my business when I was working at a job that I didn't really care for, and I had a boss that I didn't really care for. He was a little pushy with me, and it just wasn't a job that was making me happy. So, I started this, doing what I do for him, I started doing this on the side, and I started growing a list of people, a list of clients. And, it got to be to the point where I couldn't maintain that full-time job and do this stuff on the weekends. My weekends were gone; I was working until 2 o'clock in the morning, and something had to give. That's how I started my business. So this is a great place to go first to get certified. So I highly recommend that. So we'll go to next. Now this is your Work tab. So this is where you would work with your team. You would communicate with your team. You can also communicate with your clients. They have templates to set up like checklists, which is really cool. We'll get into that as well. And then help when you need it. So you can go right here and get your support. So you got it all. So this is our starting point. It's time to get organized so you can, you know, get started with your clients. Place to get feedback. You can discover this, the cool features in here. You can go in here and take the tour. There's also, you can save some money and time to save, save you some work with the accountant tools. So this would be your dashboard for your company. So when you get into Your Books, Your Books is for your company. And obviously I have nothing in here yet. You can hook up your bank account for your business. You should get a bank account specifically for your business when you're starting out. And I would connect it. I would also maybe get a credit card. You don't have to, but a lot of businesses, it's just easier, especially when you're buying all these cloud apps and things you probably will be adding in as your little accountant's toolbox. You want to have a credit card, maybe get one with points. You can go on vacation or maybe go to the conferences. That's what I do. I save all my points from my conferences so I can use it to travel and fly for free, get the hotels for free. And it's just the money that I spend on getting the Getting the apps for my clients, paying for QuickBooks, because you do get a discount with wholesale billing for, for working with your clients. Obviously, sales is where you're going to be putting in all your invoices, where you're going to get paid. And this is pretty easy to follow. You can create an invoice, get paid anywhere. You can get paid on, you know, paid online. It's an online feature. You can apply for it and get approved and then have the clients pay you with a credit card or by bank, bank account. Here's where you put your expenses in. Um, you know, like I said, I use my credit card for everything. I don't even pay— very, very, very rarely do I use a check. We were just laughing about this the other day. I haven't used a check in a long time. I have one person I have to pay with a check. And other than that, I don't pay anybody with a check. I have a pile of checks. I probably have 500 checks and they're getting kind of yellowed from being around for so long. I just don't use checks anymore. It's just, there's, in this day and age, there's really not a need to do that. Workers is if you were going to obviously pay yourself, you would put yourself in as a worker. You get a free QuickBooks payroll, full service, free. It comes with your free subscription to QuickBooks. Yeah, I mean, they give you this. It's like, this is like Christmas time, right? You're getting everything you need to start your business. I mean, how awesome is that? When I started, we had to pay to get the— they gave us a good price, but we had to pay to get the desktop, get the programs and all that. The ProAdvisor program was always free. But all this stuff is free, which is really cool. And obviously reports, if you want to track your, your favorites, your balance sheet, your profit and loss, your financials, you'll want to get into that. And anything in here for payroll taxes would be here, sales tax, if you have to, if you have to charge sales tax to your customers, it depends on your state, should really find your Department of Revenue for your business. Ours is, you know, the Florida Department of Revenue and find out what the rules are, whether your services are taxed, for what you do, you know, find out the rules around all of the business regulations that are going to be applicable to you. That's a very important tip. And accounting is where you would add where your chart of accounts is. You can come in here and see there's a really small chart of accounts in here. It's kind of already made up for you. It's pretty small, but it's pretty specific. You can add here as well. If you are a sole proprietor, it's all preset. That's how I started. I started as a sole proprietor. And then as the year went on, I did pretty well my first year, even though I was working full-time. I had a lot of clients. And about July 1st— June 30th is when I stopped working and opened my business. And for really first day of business was July 1st. And by July 1st to December, I had made enough money that the accountant sat me down and said, let me tell you something, time to change your entity. You need to move to an S corp because you should start paying yourself a payroll and not pay self-employment tax. And I listened to him and I never looked back. So Something you might want to think about as you go forward. Sole proprietorship works, but you will have to pay self-employment tax. One of the places that a lot of people skip is in your accounting settings. So this is the first place I try to take a client and let's just fill out the information. Let's get your logo in. Let's get your phone number in. Let's get your EIN number in. You need to apply for an EIN number if your business is going to become a sole proprietor— an S corp. You need to apply for an EIN. Sole proprietorship, it's going to be your Social Security number. And I hope that if you can come to our Facebook group and just join us, there's a lot of really smart people in that group. And if you have any questions along the way, and it doesn't have to be QuickBooks specific, it can be about marketing, it can be about anything, anything that's going on in your life, a bad customer. We discussed that this week on the mentoring page. I highly recommend you following the mentorship videos that are already in, in the, in the video files to see what it's like to Go through a mentoring program with us. So I hope this was helpful. I know it's a little bit of a longer video and I didn't really take you too deep. But I will get deeper into the program as we go along. But hopefully this helped and hopefully it gets you started. So don't be afraid, go for it. That's my tip of the day and I will see you next week. Bye now.