welcome to the quickbooks online crash course where you can self-teach quickbooks
and be able to keep books and records of your company spending the least amount of possible time
this video will be an overview of the course as well as informing you about what records and
documents you will need to prepare before you even start using quickbooks online
if you have any questions about this topic you can leave them in the comments section below and
i'll do my best to help you and of course if you feel the video helped you i hope you will click
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course is a very easy fast and summarized way of doing the minimum amount of bookkeeping required
for a small business in this quickbooks online crash course you will be able to quickly and
easily record all necessary transactions that are required by the irs or any other regulatory agency
for the purposes of keeping proper financial records and creating accurate financial reports
so what must you prepare for this course well that's as easy as one two three
you have to prepare all your expense categories all your income sources and all of your financial
accounts now the expense categories that's very easy all you have to do is make a list of what you
spend money on specifically in order to run your business these are things like utilities supplies
transportation and repairs things that you must pay for in order to provide service to
your customers you need to have a list of these categories prepared and each category will be a
separate record you will have to have a separate record of each of these categories to record each
of the transactions that go in those categories for example if you pay for utilities you would
write that down in an account called utilities expense but if you every time you pay for repair
you should write that down in a separate account called repair expense and so on so have a list
of your expenses prepared before you get to quickbooks online you should also identify
each income source that you have in the same way that you identified each expense
now if you want you could have just one account called income and no matter how
you earned that money you could just record each transaction one by one into the income account
this is because the irs does not require that you separate the transactions of each income source if
you don't want to it may help you for management purposes but again we're trying to do the absolute
minimum amount of bookkeeping so you may need for someone else or yourself if you want to see
where your money is really coming in from so this would help you with management purposes and there
might be a day that you might have to report your financial records and documents to someone who
might need to see the difference between how much you're earning from one service compared to how
much you're earning from another so have that list handy right before you go to quickbooks online
the third set of information that you have to prepare is all your financial accounts
any account with a financial institution would be considered a financial account
anything that behaves like a bank account or credit card account for example
paypal behaves like a bank account so you would have to prepare the company's paypal information
any line of credit you have behaves like a credit card so in my example i have both a paypal account
and a paypal line of credit and my paypal line of credit behaves the way a credit card would
and my paypal account or any other pay type of platform that i can both collect money
into and pay out from would behave like a bank account
so anything you have that fits that description you need to gather the information before you open
up quickbooks online basically anything that you get a monthly statement for where the statement
lists the transactions during the month and declares an ending balance
so the statements are what you will use when doing crash course minimum bookkeeping
you will read the transactions from these statements and enter them into quickbooks online
this is the fastest and most summarized way of doing minimum acceptable bookkeeping
please note however that in theory statements are not the best place to record the transactions from
each transaction at the moment it happens usually has a source document
like a receipt or a check that documents the details of the transaction in other words it
records the date and the amount and so on at exactly the moment the transaction happens
the source document is really what you are supposed to use
when recording the transactions into quickbooks online however for practical purposes the
statements can be used unless there is a question that can only be answered by the source document
and by the way many business owners never save that document but you
should for yourself or for your bookkeeping client if you're doing the books for someone else
here are the sample accounts that we will use in our example wedding video company in order
to learn quickbooks during this crash course notice we have a separate record for each of the
different ways that we earn income we have four separate expense accounts where we will record the
appropriate transaction as needed and these are the three financial type of accounts that we have
so these are all the accounts that we are going to add to the chart of accounts in quickbooks online
each one of these is a record it is simply a list of transactions that go into that category
and you may ask about this last one at the bottom cash on hand we haven't really spoken about that
well cash on hand could physically be a lock box where you put the cash from the bank into the box
so that you can pay cash related expenses it could simply be the owner's wallet in other words
it does not have to be an actual physical place it's simply an account or a record of the incoming
or outgoing cash if we use that method of payment to receive money from customers or pay money to
vendors in order to operate our business and the final question should be what if we pay money
but it's not for a regular expense what if we buy something that we will have for a long time into
the future how do we record asset purchases well don't worry because quickbooks online
already comes with sample accounts and some of those are fixed assets and current assets
and we will lump them into one asset account that will be given to the accountant so any
asset that we purchase we will just use one of the existing accounts or use a summary asset account
and then the asset account will be given to the tax professional at the end of the year
to handle managing the assets or at least the tax related issues for the assets before
submitting the tax return so you can have just one account that says all other current assets
another account that says all other fixed assets and as long as you have the receipts and the
details of those purchases you don't have to put them into quickbooks online once you've prepared
everything you're ready to move to the next video and you can start working in quickbooks online