In this QuickBooks Online Accountant tutorial, the hosts (Linda and a co‑host) walk through Week 4 of the "Getting Started as a ProAdvisor" series, focusing on how accountants can fine‑tune their daily workflow after setting up accounts and clients. They begin with a deep dive into the Accountant’s Toolbox, highlighting key utilities such as Prep for Taxes, Reclassify Transactions, report‑date defaults, voided/deleted transaction lists, write‑off invoices, journal entries, the Close Books feature, and accountant‑specific reports. The discussion then moves to the Work/Dashboard area, showing the three task‑view options (Kanban, List, Calendar), task templates, project creation, and how to assign and track tasks. Next, they explore the Clients tab, demonstrating client list navigation, banking and tax tabs, payroll toggles, and team‑member access controls. Throughout, they sprinkle productivity shortcuts—keyboard shortcuts list, Ctrl + F search, opening multiple windows/tabs, and using the QuickBooks Online desktop‑style app on Windows and Mac—as ways to speed up work. The video ends with a reminder that these tools act as “training wheels” for accountants transitioning from desktop QuickBooks, encouraging viewers to experiment with the features and reach out with questions.
Chapters
Happy Mother's Day, Linda.
Thank you.
It's so kind of you to take Mother's Day to make a video real quick talking about week 4, I believe, of the Getting Started as a ProAdvisor, right?
Yeah, we're already up to week 4.
It goes quick.
It does, and there's a lot in it.
What are we supposed to cover in week 4 this time?
Let's go there and see. Week 4, fine-tune your workflow. You've created an account, added clients, connected the apps, and now comes the fun part— working. So we're going to unpack the Accountant's Toolbox first. So you want to go to the Accountant's Toolbox first, or—
Yeah, so the Accountant's Toolbox is one of the biggest benefits really of having QuickBooks Online Advanced for Accountants. a subset of tools that only we get to use to help make the job that much easier.
Alright, so we're talking about this. Accountant's Tools.
Yes.
Lots of good stuff.
This whole list of different tools, there's quite a few different functionalities that you can set up. One of the newest ones, as you can see there, is the Prep for Taxes, where it's basically you're going in and you're able to map out the different accounts in your chart of accounts to where it's supposed to hit, you know, on the tax line. And then my personal favorite one is the Reclassify Transactions. Do you mind clicking into that one real quick?
I love this tool. This is like the best tool ever.
So Reclassify Transactions gives you the ability to go in for any given period of time, to/from date, cash basis, accrual basis, right? And either looking at a profit and loss or a balance sheet as well. And you can go account by account and see what's in there already and then quickly reclassify or recategorize items in the wrong place.
Like if I wanted to make this one office expense, I could, and it obviously class 2. The only thing you can't do is— I don't even know if I have office. We'll just stick it there. But anyway, the only thing I can't do is anything that's item-based. You can't really move anything that's item-based. So usually anything in the income, if it's If you did invoices and things like that, which doesn't look like—
Correct. Now that would come into play obviously if you went and modified the item itself. You should be careful changing historical information, but if you needed to do that, that is a possibility there.
You have that ability too.
Now one of the other tools that shows up in there is actually, I think it's under report tools. This is an important one to know right away.
Oh, I love this one too.
Because what you set here as your defaults, so last month, last year, or even a custom from and to date, that is what's going to be your default for all of your reporting, but also for the reclassify transaction tool. So that way, if you're going through and there's a lot of transactions, you need to shrink it down. You don't have to keep going back in and changing the dates every time. You can set it there to make it a little bit easier.
I don't know about you, but I use this too for checking on my staff to see if things are reconciled. And working with the law firms with all the trust accounts, they all list here. So I have the whole list to go by so I can see when those have been done too. So this is a really great window.
I love this. It's a great way to see what's been reconciled, what hasn't. And if you go through and you actually reconcile additional asset accounts, you know, all of your balance sheet accounts, they'll show up on here as well and show you the date they were last reconciled.
Which is great. I mean, it's so nice, and you can access them from here too. You can actually click and it'll take you to it. If you click on this, it'll take you to it. So that's nice too.
Matter of fact, if you go to the briefcase next to that there, again, back to our tools. So a quick overview, you've got your voided, deleted transactions. That will show basically a list of all of the voided or deleted transactions in the company file. Your write-off invoices gives you the ability to go in and you can write off your invoices. Again, this is only something accounts have. If you've got a couple invoices that have a penny due or 35 cents due, you can pull all that stuff out.
What's nice is that this is stuff that was in Desktop. Some of these are just new, kind of newish to this toolbox too. These were always in Desktop and now we're getting them here, which is nice. Yep.
Your journal entries, they've got them quick and easy for us to get to because we don't really want other people making those journal entries. Close the books is super important. That is something that a lot of people have difficulty doing or setting because their clients may question it, but it's really, really recommended. Once you're done with the period, close it out so you don't have to worry about somebody going in and making historical changes.
Especially if you're doing sales tax and you don't want them changing invoices that are closed sales tax period. Yeah.
And then your accountant reports takes you to accountant-specific reports. Management ones would be the custom management reports you make or your own custom reports. And then I actually never use the new window option there.
No, I've not ever really noticed it.
Because I just usually right-click and duplicate a tab if I'm in Google Chrome. But in the desktop QuickBooks Online desktop application, that's really confusing. But that version, you would click the new window there and it would actually populate. I believe it populates a new window that way also.
So you can have a couple of windows open, especially if you have like a, you know, you have a whole other company, right, with a window? No, you can't. Okay.
Got to be one single company unless you go into an incognito window, then you could have 2 different ones.
Or another browser, you can do the same thing. I like to do that when I have 2 companies that have an intercompany, you know, 2-company loan and you want to see the, you know, the payables, the loan side, the liability, and I want to see the asset side. So I usually like to see the 2 and make sure that all the transactions line up. But that's a nice feature with QuickBooks Online. You can have the 2 files. But you can do that on desktop too. You can have 2 different companies open, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
That's the accountant's toolbox which is awesome.
Really awesome. Managing your firm from the dashboard and I believe we decided that was the work tab, right?
Yes. What they're talking about here is we do a lot of payroll with our company and we do the essentials payroll which means we're the ones pushing the buttons on everything. So whenever the pay dates show up, we'll actually see a list of the different payroll or different clients that have payroll due that week will populate up onto this list for us.
Tasks you have, you have a lot of work to do this week.
I know I'm slacking off. It happens. Now there's 3 different views though also. Do you mind clicking on the different views that they have on the far right side there?
Yep.
Like the Kanban style versus a list versus a calendar style, right?
Yep. I like that box one better than the list, but the list is good. They're actually good for both. I mean, they're all good. They're all good, right? But I prefer this cleaner look, but I've also reverted to this too.
Let's go ahead and click on one of the tasks real quick. I know we kind of covered some of this in a previous video showing on how you could use the work area, but what will happen because they have the different templates you can use and create That's what some of this stuff is here. These are different individual to-do tasks as part of a bigger project. So you can check them off, have them assigned to people, you can see the end date. The goal is to have a bird's-eye view of everything that's coming up and going to be due.
Yeah, it's pretty neat.
Really, especially if you're using the templates, it's pretty neat. And then I know we're also— the other part of this is the Clients tab.
Yes, so going to the— this client list, because there's a lot on here. Obviously we have— no, don't you hang up on me! Something went wrong. Let's see if I can fix it. No!
So on the client tab, traditionally— let's try to reload.
Oh, I tried that, it didn't work. Um, I have to log back in. It didn't work. I hit reload, it didn't work. No problem.
So while you're logging back in, basically the client tab, what that does is it's going to show you— that's where you have your list of your different clients, and you'll have the QB icon you can click on to actually access the file if you wanted to. But you'll also notice you have a tab for banking, you've got your prep for tax, tax returns, and if you hit the gear icon on the far right side there, I believe you have the ability to turn on a For payroll also, right?
Yeah, but see, I don't have any clients with payroll, so— but you normally would have that ability, right? Yep.
And what's going to show up there is like under banking, if you have transactions coming through the bank feed that have not been accepted yet or categorized, it's going to show you how many are there. If you have reconciliations, I don't think it shows reconciliations.
It shows when somebody's changed something too from a closed period, which is nice.
That's very nice.
Yes.
Payroll will show you when payroll's due. If you have any forms that are due, it'll give you kind of a reminder for all those details.
And they, they actually just— and you can also filter by online. Here's your payroll, all these different things. You can— they just cleaned this up too. This is a lot different. It was a lot more stuff on it. They've kind of streamlined it and made it a little bit less busy.
It helps when you start getting to larger and larger We've got over 70 or 80 things listed on ours so we can shrink it down and get to the things we need to really get to.
Of course, I don't know about you but I use this a lot because I've got a big list too. If I'm looking for a client, I just type the name in and pull it up instead of having to go through the list or try to search that way. The search works pretty well.
Of course under team, you can also go in if you have different team members and you can assign access to specific clients. To specific people too. So any of your employees would only see the ones you actually provide them access to see.
Right. And I gave you, I gave you a promotion. I gave you full access this week.
Do I get a raise too, boss?
Did you notice that I gave you more tasks to do too? So, okay, so and then we were going to talk about managing the client list. So that's what we just discussed. And now we're gonna go into productivity. And this is kind of, we were talking about neither one of us really uses the keyboard shortcuts. But there are a lot of people that like live by the keyboard shortcuts. So You can get the whole list here and it's a pretty big list. This is just a little sampling of them. I don't use them. You get in habits where you just do certain things and I guess maybe I should use some of these. I know like the date, end date, month, day and all that's in there.
My personal favorite which isn't even listed there, Ctrl+F which is actually a search function using the browser to search because if you have a large list, maybe you're trying to get your deposit details together, you can do Ctrl+F and it will give you the ability to type in like a check number, 1122. Even on a scrolling page, it will pull up any reference of that number that you see. There's a lot of times with reports and such that that can be one of your best friends.
There's a pretty big list here. I've downloaded this list. You just get into habits. It's just really habits to get to use. It probably saves a lot of time to use these. View multiple windows. And we both use that, right? Opening up more than one window. And if you had to, you can do that with QuickBooks Online, obviously. You can repeat the projects. And we went into that last week, didn't we, where you could actually go in and set up your projects in the Work tab and repeat them, make them recurring and all that. And then using— For Windows, Mac, and using the app. Now I have a Mac. And I've not had the greatest experience with the app. Maybe it's better now, but it used to crash and I just, I'm so used to using it. And again, I'm used to using the browser. So it's just a habit. But I know when I did, when I do teach QuickBooks to other people and they come, especially if they come from desktop, I totally use the app for Windows because it gives it a little desktop feel and it gives them a little bit of a comfort level. So I highly recommend using the app on the PC and maybe that, I don't, like I said, maybe the Mac one's good now.
I call it training wheels for QuickBooks Online. If you're coming from desktop and you're going to online, it just gives you that comfort zone because you have dropdown choices instead of it being different areas. Fundamentally, it has all the same functions. It actually— they've done a really good job. It also makes it to where when you're using the application, you don't have to log in every single time. You can still go through from the firm aspect and choose different clients and such too, which is pretty neat. And you use it, right?
Yeah. So, and it works well?
Yeah, I haven't had any issues. It works pretty— it works great.
So, and you can open multiple tabs in it now, right? Because at one time you can only have the one screen, and now they've improved that too. So it's got that ability, which is one of the reasons why you would want to stay in it if you can open up more than one. I like to have more than one window open. Well, some days I look at my computer and I've got 50 tabs open. I'm like, why is this computer slow?
Because it's a Mac. Well, that's because there was so much stuff to review. But as always, more questions, you know, they can reach out and we'll be happy to help answer them however we can, of course.
Yeah, for sure.
So on this Mother's Day, I wish you a very, very happy Mother's Day, Linda. And to everybody else out there, here's wishing you a very successful week.
