and now we are going to learn how to find everything here in your contractor QuickBooks
file the trial balance is the main financial report it shows the balance of every account
in your chart of accounts it shows the current balance of your bank account it shows the total
of each expense for the whole company regardless of job it shows the total of each income account
that were billed from the items that were put on the invoice you can double click any balance and
get the detail of every transaction for that balance let's take a look from the main menu
click reports accountant & taxes trial balance notice you don't see anything the reason you
don't see anything is because the trial balance by default opens up showing only the results of
whatever the previous month is I am recording this video in July of 2016 my windows clock says
July of 2016 so therefore the trial balance opens automatically showing everything that
happened during June of 2016 but in our little story of this course everything happened during
2017 the way to make sure the trial balance always includes everything regardless of
date is to click from the top left corner the date pulldown choice scroll all the way up and
click the choice that says all now the trial balance is showing the accumulated totals of
all transactions regardless of date notice the cash and chase bank balance is 7000 notice we
have two different income accounts that's because some of the items that we put on the invoices are
connected to this account income from heating repair and the other items that are on the that
we put on invoices are connected to this account income from plumbing services accounts receivable
represents all of the unpaid open invoices at this moment now these are accumulated totals
one of the best things about the trial balance is that it makes it easy to find things if you
know which account in your chart of accounts the transaction has been recorded into so if I want to
see every single transaction that led up to this 7000 balance in cash and Chase Bank I can double
click on the 7000 and I can see there were three payments that we received during this course and
I can see the date and I can see whom I received it from so this is the detail explaining why the
summary or the total is in the trial balance for the balance of cash and bank if I want to see any
of these individual transactions I could double click right there and I can come right back to
the window that I recorded that transaction and I could make any change I want and then save it
and QuickBooks will adjust the results in the report for anything I change in this window
the same is true for the income accounts what about this income from heating repair when I
double click I see that the reason the balance of income from heating repair is nine thousand
six hundred thirty five well that's because of all of these different invoices some of them went to
Kirschbaum and some of them went to brown for the different jobs and of course you could always make
the columns wider or the window wider but these are the transactions listed in date order yes I
have a mistake for invoice number seven and of course if I fix the date here it would show up
down but the point is that it also shows you the running balance if it were correct and I could
double-click on any one of these invoices and at the moment I see it in front of me if I need to I
could change any piece of information on this invoice and save it and as soon as I save the
change the results in this detail would change and of course the results in the summary of the trial
balance would change since the trial balance is such a helpful report let's pin it up in the icon
bar everybody click view add trial balance to the icon bar and click OK now we have a shortcut to
the main financial report another helpful way of finding things in your file is using the history
that every transaction window has for example invoice history shows every payment that has been
ever applied to that particular invoice so for example if we open up income from heating repairs
and we double click the January 9th invoice to brown company we can see that this invoice is
paid in full now if you keep your ribbon open you have main menu choices that lead you to different
ribbon choices choose the reports tab in the ribbon and then go to transaction history when
I click transaction history when this particular invoice is open I can see a window that shows me
every payment that has been applied to this particular invoice and it shows the running
balance of the invoice the invoice was originally 1,350 and that was back on January 9th then on
January 20th we applied $1,000 and the balance of the invoice went down to 350 then on January 23rd
we applied another 350 and the balance of this invoice became 0 if I want to see payment from
check number 61 I can click on it and then click go to and the payment itself will open up and I
can see what's going on and even adjust or change anything and if I change something when I save it
the results and the reports will fix immediately another helpful thing about the history feature is
that estimate history shows every invoice that has been made for that estimate to see every
estimate in the file open up the estimate by job report now let's say for example the Mockingbird
Lane job under Brown company will choose this estimate for January second estimate number two
when we double-click we see that the ribbon is already open and we choose the reports tab in the
ribbon to find transaction history notice this particular estimate number two has been billed
by invoice number three has been billed by invoice number four and if you scroll down has been billed
by invoice number five unfortunately you do have to scroll up and down to make sure that you found
every invoice applied to this estimate what's good about this window is it shows the running
balance of the estimate at a particular moment in time unfortunately it will not consider the
change orders it will only consider the invoices for example January 2 the balance of the estimate
was 67 50 that was the unbilled amount then as of January 9 because January 9 we build
them with invoice number 3 the balance of the unbilled amount went down to 5400 january 14
we build them again with invoice number 4 and the balance went down to 2700 and when we come
down here we see that on January 17th we sent them invoice number 5 against this particular estimate
and now the unbuild balance of this estimate is 1,350 we can always click the go to button and
we will go to whatever invoice is selected and this is the invoice we made on January 17th to
see if any payments were applied to this invoice we can click the invoice transaction history and
it says sorry no payments have been applied to this invoice you should know that in QuickBooks
there are other transactions in QuickBooks that are linked to other transactions history always
shows the related transaction for example if you were using the undeposited feature and then you
made deposits you could look at the history of deposits to see every payment that was included
in that deposit so whenever one transaction follows from another the history window will
always show the related transactions you should watch the bonus video is about the fine window
the search bar the journal report and the audit trail these are four things in QuickBooks that if
you're comfortable using them and they're very easy you will never be lost you will always be
able to find anything you're looking for by using what I show you in this video or one of these four
tools the advanced find will help you find all the estimates in the file even though estimates
are not transactions you can view the transaction list by customer report and that would be another
way to see all the estimates of course if you use this report that means that you're seeing
everything in a list for that for that customer including the estimates let's take a look from the
main menu click reports customers and receivables transaction list by customer make sure the date
pulldown says a for all so for example under brown company here's every estimate and invoice for the
Hanson place job look at the Mockingbird Lane job under brown company it has the estimate then the
invoice then the payments same thing for the Kerschbaum job on South Woods Road we have the
invoices the estimates and payments aligned in date order unfortunately it does not give
you the running balance but it will show you the estimates included in the list with invoices and
payments if you saw the video on the search tool you know that you can use the search tool to find
change orders the search tool is pretty much the only thing in QuickBooks that will help you find
change orders or help you specifically find change orders because they're not separate documents they
will not show up in the journal they will not show up in the fine window and they will not show up on
any specific report so you have to use the search tool to find all of them the search tool will look
through the entire file and try and find the text that you type into the search bar in the icon bar
type in change order it's not case-sensitive so after we type in change order and hit enter
we will see every instance of the word change order in the file notice on the estimate for
Kirschbaum there's the word change order and we could always click open and see the estimate
that has the change order and when we scroll all the way down we can see the change order
is listed here at the bottom of the estimate also notice that the same change order shows up on the
invoice that relates to that estimate if we click open and we open this invoice where the history
shows that it's related to the that estimate we can scroll down and we can see the change order
that relates to that particular invoice because that invoice relates to that estimate this is
simply because we put the word change order here and it has the word change order in the file list
because I named one of the files change orders so the search bar is very helpful if you're looking
for any kind of text and that's written in any transaction or any of the list items in QuickBooks