QuickBooks Online Setup to Reports: A Beginner Guide (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today, you'll learn everything you need to know about QuickBooks Online, zero accounting knowledge required. That means how to track your expenses, pay bills, get paid, send invoices, and of course, pay your taxes. I'm David, I partnered with QuickBooks Online to create this comprehensive tutorial. So let's start by heading to the website below so you can follow along. Use the chapters to skip around based on what you need or stick with me to take it from the top. Let's go. Let's cover the QuickBook plans first. So click this white button, see plans and pricing. Now you can either choose a free trial for 30 days by clicking on the switch or 50% off for three months. This 50% off option is actually cheaper long-term. So my job today is to give you all the insight you need to make the right decision for you. Scroll down on this page and you'll see all four plans in detail. Simple Start is great if you're the only one managing your company's finances, not including your accountant. Essentials is good for up to three users while Plus is good for five. Plus can also detect anomalies in your reporting. That can be useful if you've got a really complex set of books. And Advanced is really for finance teams. You're getting up to 25 users and the ability to create custom dashboards and reports. Choose the plan which makes the most sense to you. If you're a beginner, I'd recommend the Simple Start plan. I'll click on Advanced to show you all the features. Now, most of what I show you today is on Simple Start and when you need a higher plan, I'll call it out like this. Payroll is a separate service that you can add on. We will cover that in a later video. So choose a plan or click Continue Without Payroll. From here, enter your email address to sign up and I'll catch you in the onboarding. First, you're gonna get a bunch of questions. Answer them as best as you can. Eventually, you'll get to a page like this asking you to start some setup. Click on Do This First on any of them and then start clicking on Skip for now. We'll handle all of these steps together and I wanna make sure we all start from the same place on the home dashboard. You'll get there after you keep clicking Skip for now. Okay, here we are on that home screen. Just a little orientation for you. On the left side of the screen, you'll see your main navigation bar. Up top, you'll see the apps bar that takes you to different sections inside of QuickBooks. Those apps also show up in the pinned tray in the left sidebar. You can modify the apps that show up in the pinned section. Just click the Customize button in the bottom left and then click the pin icon to pin or unpin any specific app. Each app also has pages inside of it which you can bookmark. Just click the Save icon next to any page like I am with Receipts and you'll see it show up under the Bookmark section. With that out of the way, let's get to your first task of connecting your bank account. QuickBooks will help you track your income and expenses across multiple accounts so you can actually make sure you're making money. To do that, let's move your mouse over the Accounting app and then click on Bank Transactions. Now, I'm zoomed in a bit here so it might feel cluttered to you. If you are feeling claustrophobic, make sure you click on this full screen icon near the top right. You can also toggle that back and forth with Control, period. Back to connecting your account. The obvious choice here is to click the Connect Account button. Here, either find your bank in the list or search for it by its name. Once you've found it, follow the prompts to get your bank connected. Now, if for some reason you don't wanna connect your bank account, you can always upload those bank transactions manually. And because I don't wanna share my bank details with you, I'll show you that process. First, click on Upload Transactions. Now, it used to be you could only upload what I'll call traditional file formats like CSV, OFX, TXT, et cetera. But now you can also upload PDFs and images. Usually with online banks, you can export your transactions. So I'll take an export file and upload it here. The next step is to tell QuickBooks which account these transactions are for. If you have an existing bank account in here, select that. Otherwise, select Add New. Give your account a name. For example, I'll call this one Checking Account. Then select your account type. The most common are gonna be bank or credit card. I'll choose bank. And for detail, I will call this a checking account. I highly recommend you set an opening balance that starts before any of the transactions that you're uploading. The reason for that will become apparent later when we talk about reconciliation. Add a description if you'd like and then click Save. And then continue. Next, we need to tell QuickBooks about our file format. It does a pretty good job of mapping each of the columns in the spreadsheet to QuickBooks fields, but it does need some help with the date format. Select the format which matches your file and then make sure the rest of the column mappings are good too. Once you're done, click Continue. You'll then see all of the transactions that QuickBooks recognized in the file. Before you click Continue, make sure your income line items are positive and your expenses are negative. If that's not the case, you can always click this Reverse All Values radio button. From here, you'll usually want to import all transactions, so click on this checkbox in the header row to do that. Otherwise, just select the individual transactions you wanna upload, scroll to the bottom, and click Continue. QuickBooks asks for your confirmation first, so click the big green button and I'll see you back on the transactions page. You'll see this new help screen which describes accounting with AI. I'm gonna take you through all the new features in 2026. Just click on Go to Your Transactions. Let's start by zooming in. Remember that full screen shortcut? Control period or click on this full screen button. Okay, we've got this list of 76 transactions. For each of them, we now need to set who it's to or from as well as the category. New since 2025 is AI-powered categorization. Normally, you'd be looking at a set of blank categories here, but the AI has done a good first pass. You can see the reasoning for any categorization choice by clicking on the AI icon. Now, while Utilities is a pretty obvious match for a transaction called City Utilities, cost of goods sold in the next line item isn't so obvious, but this is the right answer. AI is by no means perfect though, so if you see a category which is incorrect, click on the Category dropdown and then scroll through the list until you find the category that best matches. Now, this is not an accounting tutorial, so if you have a question on which category is best to use, definitely consult with a professional. You'll also wanna select the vendor for each transaction. That can help you track how much you're paying them over time. Now, it used to be that you had to click on any transaction to open it up and make edits, but in this latest version of QuickBooks, you can make any edit in line. We're prompted here to add FiberNet Internet, and that's a pretty fast way to do it, but even faster is to click on the AI icon and then click on Add to Vendor List. Before you add them, you can make changes to the vendor contact info. You probably won't have a first name and a last name for an internet company, so we can get rid of those. My philosophy is if it's useful to keep address, notes, and other information in QuickBooks, go ahead and fill these fields out. Otherwise, keep it simple, just fill in the name and click Save. One other great QuickBooks upgrade since last year is when we set the vendor for FiberNet Internet there, it does it on all the other FiberNet Internet transactions in our list. Sometimes, though, the descriptions are different enough that the AI won't do this for you. In that case, it's useful to make a rule. With rules, you can use data from each transaction to automatically set a vendor or a category. To create a rule, first expand a transaction, scroll down until you see this button list at the bottom, and then click Create Rule. This rule will set the vendor for every transaction that has sales tax in the description. First, we have to name this rule, and I've got a convention that you can steal. So we're looking for descriptions that say sales tax. I'll start it with D for description and then type hyphen sales tax. Once we find those transactions, we take action. To signify that action, I'll type hyphen greater than as an arrow. Then we'll set the category and the vendor. I'll type C for category, V for vendor, and then set the category to taxes. Next, we have to make the rule work. So let's look at the rule condition first. We're looking for transactions which have sales tax in the description. This contains check is case insensitive. If you're unsure of your conditions, you can always click Test Rule to see which transactions apply. Next, we need to assign a category that's actually already set for us, taxes paid. Then we need to add a payee. You've seen this before, so I'll quickly add it. Then you can change the bank memo if you'd like. I'd actually like to keep the default, so I'll remove what's in this text box and it disappears. The last setting is whether this automatically confirms transactions or not. When this switch is on, you won't even see this transaction appear in this list. It will be confirmed or posted automatically, and it'll be more difficult for you to catch if there's issues with it. If you wanna set the category, the payee, et cetera, but you still wanna review before you confirm, make sure you uncheck Auto Add. Whatever your choice, click Save, and you'll have created your first rule. You'll see it take effect immediately. Get into the habit of reviewing your transactions every week or at least every month. When you're done with a transaction, click that green Post button, and check out the video in the top right for a deeper dive into categorizing transactions. Otherwise, let me show you how to add receipts to your expenses. To do that, exit full screen, and let's go to the Receipts section of the Accounting app. If you get electronic receipts, the easiest way is to forward those emails to the email on screen, or upload them into the File Upload area. But if you still get paper receipts, check out the QuickBooks mobile app instead. Scan the QR code on screen to download it, and then sign in and follow along with me. In the app, you should start on the Dashboard screen, but if you're not there, tap on the Dashboard button in the bottom left. Next, tap the plus button in the bottom right, and then tap Snap Receipt. Go get your receipt, take a photo of it, make sure it's well lit, and wait for it to upload. After a few seconds, it goes to the bottom left. If you're happy with it, tap on that green button in the bottom right, and then tap on Use This Photo. It'll take a few seconds both to upload it and to extract all the information out of it. Once it completes, it looks like this. You can tap on it to view the details, then change information that couldn't be extracted, like how did you pay? We'll set it up as a bank transfer, and then choose the checking account that we made earlier. Everything else looks great here. We're gonna save the receipt. Back on the web version of QuickBooks, you'll see the receipt uploaded down below. You'll wanna check these using the review link to make sure that AI extracted the right data. Looks like we got the right account, the right payment date, receipt number, as well as line items. And the only thing that's missing is the payee. Add that like you would any other vendor, and then click Save and Close. To check on past receipts, you can always click on the Review link here. Now we'll head back to the Transactions view to connect this receipt with an expense. We'll scroll down to the payment date, that's January 12th, and you can now see that this expense is matched with the expense created by the receipt. QuickBooks' Match feature makes sure that you don't double record expenses, so click Match to resolve it. The last piece of expense tracking, which can be a little scary, is reconciliation. This is just a fancy word to make sure your QuickBooks transaction list is in sync with your bank and credit card statements. If it's not, you risk misreporting your income and expenses, and you'll probably get into trouble. Let's avoid that. I've just posted the rest of my transactions. To make sure I got it right, let's click on Reconcile. If you're on the Simple Start or Essentials plan, your screen will look like this, but if you're on Plus or higher, you'll get access to a new AI-powered reconciliation mode, which looks like this. In either case, you'll need your latest bank statement. It should look something like this. With AI-powered reconciliation, you can drag and drop your bank statement into the QuickBooks page and have it extract all of the statement transactions as well as the ending balance. If you don't have this mode, you'll just need to fill in the ending balance and the statement ending date by hand. Once the upload is finished, verify the statement ending balance and make sure you have the correct statement ending date, then click Start Reconciling. So remember, this is all about matching the QuickBooks transaction list to what's in your bank statement. Each row splits at the description column into what the bank statement says in bold and what QuickBooks says in plain text. In simple cases, these should match exactly, but there are cases like when you've invoiced a customer and you haven't been paid yet that these may be out of sync. Since everything matches here, all transaction rows are marked as clear, and there's actually no difference between the closing balance on our bank statement and what we see in QuickBooks. If there are transactions in QuickBooks but are not on your bank statement, you can remove them one by one by clicking this check icon at the end of the row. All the checked transactions are tabulated here to make sure they're in sync with your bank statement. Now, reconciliation can be painless like this, or it can be really difficult. For an in-depth tutorial on reconciliation, check out our video in the top right. You'll know you're done when you hit a $0 discrepancy. When that happens, click Finish Now. We've analyzed the past, and now it's time for the future. Let's get you paid with QuickBooks invoices. To make an invoice, click on the Sales and Get Paid app, then scroll down in the left navigation bar and click on Invoices. Then click the Create Invoice button. The fastest way to get paid is to accept online payment options. You have three options, and each of them has their own processing fee and deposit speed, so choose the ones which are best for you and then click on Confirm and Continue. The invoice page is a little different from last year, so let's walk through it together, starting with adding your customer. Click the Add Customer link and then click Add New. At a bare minimum, you need two pieces of information. The first is the company name, and the second is the best email to send the invoice to. Of course, you can choose to fill in all sorts of information like contact info, communication permissions, address, notes and attachments, payment methods, and any additional info or custom fields. Some of these options might only be available on higher plans, so your screen might look different. When you finish, click the Save button and let's add some line items to this invoice. Ah, but something interesting has happened. The Payments Agent has showed up and is prompting us to click. When you select a customer on an invoice, the Payments Agent analyzes that customer's payment history. If they tend to pay late, you'll see suggestions like updating the payment terms or even adding late fees. Clicking on any of these suggestions will change the terms of the invoice. You'll see a preview first and then can choose to apply it or not. Let's close this AI window with the X and scroll down to the invoice line items. Here, you can add products by clicking in the blank space under the Product Service column header. If you are selling consulting services, you might choose Services. Otherwise, if you're adding a product, select Add New. First, type the name of the product. For our donut shop, we'll make this a glazed dozen donuts. Next, choose the item type. If it's a service, leave it as Service. If it's a product, choose between Non-Inventory Item and Inventory Item. Inventory Item is only available on the Plus plan and higher. That's because QuickBooks has a tool to help you track your inventory. You can also use Bundle for package deals. For this product, I'll use Non-Inventory Item. If you have a lot of different products, you can also put them into categories here. You can add a SKU number and even an image of the item. Unfortunately, as of filming, the image doesn't show on the invoice. You can add more sales-related information below. Perhaps the most important piece is the default price or rate for this item. Our default is 20 bucks for a dozen donuts. Then, make sure to set the income account. This is the same as the transaction category that we covered earlier. It just makes it easier to track your income streams. Finally, if you resell this item, you can check this box. I purchased this from a vendor. This way, QuickBooks can track the estimated costs automatically. When you're done, click Save and Close. The product's name, default description, and default rate show up in that line item. And you can add many more line items using the same process. You can change anything about the line items except for the name. The most common change will be the quantity of the product. Now, this might be good for some of you, but most of us need to collect sales tax. QuickBooks has a ton of sales tax calculations built in. To start using them, click on the Setup link next to Sales Tax. It's pretty straightforward. You click this green button to set up automated sales tax, and then you confirm your address. Once you confirm, it'll take a few seconds, and then you'll see sales tax reflected on the page. Now you'll see that you can tax individual line items. So let's go ahead and check both of these as they're both subject to tax. You might've seen that sales tax line item increase, and that's reflected in the invoice total too. Now, if you followed along with me, you may see that you need to finish your payment setup. Save your work first, and then click Let's Go. You'll just confirm information about you and your business, and you'll be on your way in a couple minutes. You will need to connect a bank account for where the funds will get paid. If you set this up earlier, then you should be taken care of here. Otherwise, click on the Add button next to Add a Bank Account and follow the prompts. Afterward, that setup message should disappear. Now let's go through the rest of these options. If you want your customer to pay in a different way, type those instructions here. Provide any other notes to your customer in this text box. Make any internal notes about the customer here. Add statement-specific notes here. And if you have any other documents to send, you can attach them here. If you click on Manage in the top right, you'll also see a lot of customization options. To learn more about those options, check out the video in the top right. One new feature since last year is the ability to create a recurring invoice. To do that, click the Make Recurring link in the footer or open the scheduling options and scroll up to Recurring Invoice and Recurring Payment. A recurring invoice is when this invoice gets copied and repeated on a schedule. You can set that schedule up top near the Customer section. That still means that customers have to pay manually. If you wanna auto-charge on a schedule, instead of making a recurring invoice, set up recurring payments. On the Options page, you'll choose the start date of those payments, the end date of the payments, as well as the schedule. There's a lot of flexibility in this schedule. You can charge monthly, but you can even go weekly, yearly, or even daily. I'd love to send the Kevin Cookie Company a daily invoice. You can also elect to send reminders to the customer or not. Keep in mind these reminders are not payment reminders. They are reminders to accept the payment request. This recurring payment request is sent once when we click Review and Send. From there, the customer needs to accept the request in order to start payment. By the way, if you're ever worried about what your customer's gonna see, click on the Views in the top left. For recurring payments, you'll see the initial email in this email view. Then this is what they see when they click Set Up Recurring Payment, and this is the receipt. Let's turn this back into a normal invoice by clicking back on Recurring Payment Settings and then turning off this switch. Notice you still have access to the email view and the payer view. To send this out, click on Review and Send in the bottom right. You'll send your invoice by email and optionally text if you have permission. To text, fill in your customer's phone number up top and check the I have my customer's permission to send invoices by text checkbox. If you don't have permission, turn this setting off and then scroll down to focus on your email content. Here you can make changes to the From line, the To line, the Subject, and the email body. Once you're done, click on Send Invoice. If you wanna create an invoice quickly on the go, you have to check out this feature in the mobile app. Tap on the plus button in the bottom right and then tap on Invoice. On the phone, you can draft an invoice based on a voice command. Tap on Autofill and then tap on Voice. Then tap the microphone to start. Invoice for the Kevin Cookie Company, five orders of glazed dozen donuts, and five orders of apple fritters. You can tap the keyboard icon in the bottom left to make any adjustments. Then once you're done, tap the Done button and then tap Submit in the bottom right. After a minute or two, you'll see the invoice pop up on your screen. This was a much faster way to create the same invoice. And just like the web version, you can tap Review and Send to send it out. What goes up must come down. At some point, you'll have to pay bills and pay your taxes. Let's see how QuickBooks can help. Back on the homepage, this time we'll click Expenses and Pay Bills and then click on Bills. Most bills you'll get through your email. And a quick way to import them into QuickBooks is to send them to this email address. Here's an email with an invoice from our flower supplier. I'll forward it to that email address and we'll see it pop up in QuickBooks in just a few seconds. You'll know it's working because you'll see the email received and the invoice being processed in the bottom right corner of the screen. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute to process and then you can see it on the For Review tab. To pay the bill, you have to click Review first. That's to check that the bill extraction actually worked properly. In this case, we still need to add a vendor ourselves. This time, add bank account numbers for the vendor so you can make an ACH transfer. Make sure the rest of the invoice is correct, especially the amounts and the expense categories. And when you're satisfied, click on Save and Schedule Payment in the bottom right. Now, QuickBooks BillPay is technically a separate product, but you get the basic version for free as part of your plan. The great thing is that that includes five free ACH payments a month. Choose the plan which works best for you and then follow the prompts to complete your payment. So we've tackled bills, now it's time for sales tax. Move your mouse over to the All Apps button in the sidebar, then go to Sales Tax and click Overview. To get the most help from QuickBooks, we'll need to tell it our filing frequency. We can do that by going to Sales Tax Settings. I'm here in the state of Washington and we've already got that agency set up for us. If no agency appears, find the Add Agency button somewhere on this page to add one yourself. To finish the agency setup, let's click on Edit. Now, make these settings reflect what your business actually does and then click Save. And with the agency set up properly now, you can head back to sales tax. Now, hopefully you don't have any sales tax payments overdue, but you can see below how much you're accruing towards the next pay period. Now, as of filming, if you're on the Plus plan or higher and you need to file sales tax in one of these states on screen, you can actually use QuickBooks e-filing service to do so. It can save you a lot of time, especially if you need to pay across multiple states. Now for the real question, have you made any money this month? Let's check out QuickBooks Report Suite to find out. Move your mouse over the Reports icon in the left sidebar and then click on Standard Reports. Now, the plan you're on will determine how many reports you see in this list, and that's mainly due to what features you have available. For example, the Plus plans and higher are the only ones with inventory capabilities, so it makes sense you only see inventory reports on those plans. We won't go through every report here, but let me show you a few which you'll find the most valuable. That starts with the Profit and Loss report, which you should find under Favorites at the top of the list. Now, if you're on the Plus plan or higher, you'll get AI-powered insights on your P&L. We'll cover those in just a bit. This is a pretty no-frills P&L statement. You can see your income, your gross profit, and of course your expenses and net income after those expenses. And this is all for the current month. If you wanna change that, go to the filters at the top of the screen. Your date settings will be in the top left. In the center, you can change between cash and accrual rules, and there are some other cool settings in the top right. For example, you could compare this to a previous period, that means last year at this same time, and you can break down this data by a number of different pivots. Let's see what that looks like by vendor. This can get a little unwieldy, but it's good to know you have flexibility like this. Now, what if you wanna save all of these customizations as a new report? You can click the Save As button in the top right, then give the report a name. We'll call this one P&L Previous Period, and then click Save. You'll see that in your custom reports list, which you can access by moving your mouse to Reports, then Custom Reports. Now, let's go back to the straight P&L by clicking back to Standard Reports. We'll head back to the P&L, and this time check out the insights that AI found for us. Again, you can only access these on the Plus plan and higher. These insights do something called anomaly detection. They look at trends of expenses and income and see if anything looks off in the data. Things might be off for a completely plausible reason, or it might point to a problem you need to address. Fortunately, you can drill in further by asking a question of the AI. Now, this feature is in beta as of filming, but I found you can ask just about anything about your financial history. So let's find out how much we actually paid in salary and wages over the past six months. This question took about 30 seconds to answer. It was pretty cool because you can see the thinking process along the way, but we've got our monthly breakdown. Beyond that, we get some key insights about the payment variation, as well as a visual to help us understand that variation. Now, if you were following along and you couldn't find this experience, don't worry, it's not just you. It's not available in all accounts as of filming, but hopefully that will change soon. Back on the Standard Reports page, don't miss the Balance Sheet Report. Use this to track your assets and liabilities and see the health of your business at a glance. You will be asked for this if you apply for a loan. Finally, this last report is only available on the Advanced Plan. It generates a CFO-level executive summary of your financials for the last month. We're talking performance highlights and lowlights, income trends, COGS trends, gross profit margin, total expense, and net income trends, balance sheet information, as well as cashflow data. This is great for presenting to clients and executives. You can export it to a PDF by clicking the Export button in the top right, and it allows most customizations like deleting tiles or even modifying their text. My friend, now you have all the tools. It's up to you to use them. Sign up for QuickBooks Online using the link in the description below. It would really help us out. I'm David, and I'll see you in the next video.