this crash course is so good we might be able to get you the software for free but this video
is all about preparing your quickbooks online account
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
like and don't forget to subscribe to get updates on new videos that come out all the time preparing
your quickbooks online account most software courses require that you purchase the software
in order to follow along that's if you choose to learn by repeating what you see step by step
i will try to help you get the software for free i cannot promise that you will have a free account
the free versions are only available in the united states if you cannot get one free then
you must purchase the quickbooks online software if you choose to follow along step by step
you need a separate quickbooks online account for this course you should not enter the transactions
that you see in this course into your actual quickbooks online company file
so this will be a demonstration of exactly how to sign up you can get the plus version
for 30 days free this is what we will be using in the course and what will be shown here
in this demonstration of how to sign up you could instead watch the following video
that will show you how to sign up for free for the accountants edition
the accounts and accountants edition is free indefinitely and looks similar enough for you to
use for this course so you must sign up by using an email address that has never been used before
with a quickbooks online account the web the website address to sign up will always change
so you have to be patient and flexible if the web address is different from what you see
here because you are watching this video after they changed it well then don't worry
the new address to sign up will be in the description text of the page of this video
they may have even changed the exact steps or change the interface that you see
this will happen all the time when you use quickbooks online just use your best judgment
to try to activate the fewest features possible so we can go faster with the rest of the setup
on the day that i am making this video this is the website address to sign up for the free 30-day
trial version don't forget to save your username and password i suggest that you prepare them in a
text document and then keep them separate from the login information for your real quickbooks
online company account so i come here and i paste it paste this is exactly the web address
hit enter and you will come to this page now in order to get don't worry about the chat
in order to get the three free 30-day trial version you know a lot of stuff pops up this
center button will give you the ability to do that because if you select any of these right now
quickbooks online will assume you're ready to buy but if you click this button for free 30-day
trial then after you click for the free 30-day trial they'll ask you about payroll or at least
lately they will and uh you don't want any payroll there so we just click select for the plus version
actually now they're asking you if you want to add payroll and we will click continue without payroll
so it explains a little bit about the plan under the assumption that you will buy it after 30 days
and then you click checkout so now we're ready to sign up and i have my username as the email
address that will be associated with the account and of course mobile number and my password i
already made in advance a password that i know satisfies the conditions that they're asking for
now that we have everything we click sign up with email and give it a moment now remember
they think you're trying to buy the software be very careful click continue with trial
now they're going to ask us a few basic questions but we're just going to put in the minimum amount
to be able to get right into the account to start working so this is vonda video
and spelling doesn't count how would you describe what your business does
in a real situation you would type in whatever is necessary but you do not check the box that
we're transferring over from desktop click next now we might want to do these things
but not during the crash course during the crash course we select as little as possible
so we can get directly into the software to start working so don't click on any of these click next
now we do not have employees so click no and click next now the quickest and easiest way
to manage this is to click that you're the owner this way you're the main administrator
and you can simply use all the tools without a problem so double click owner now do you have
an account into a bookkeeper in our course we click no i do it all myself then click next now
we don't want to use bank feeds at the beginning you will learn a little bit about bank feeds later
on but the proper way to learn at the beginning is to manually add transactions now we click all set
and we could take a quick tour later i'm going to close this out and you're welcome to pause
the video and take a quick tour but basically this is the quickbooks online interface this is what it
looks like when you first sign in you're at the dashboard and everything else is using one of
the menu choices that you will learn about to navigate and there are really only three main
areas that you have to concern yourself with the plus sign on the left that says new the cogwheel
on the top right for long long term information and this left panel of menu choices here
now here's a little advice before navigating around the software
quickbooks online changes the position of features all the time cloud-based software can have the
features moved to a different place to click in order to open the feature this often surprises and
even frustrates the quickbooks online users have faith the feature you're looking for
or are learning is definitely there just patiently try clicking the options you see
and you will soon find the place to open the window that you need
they may just be waiting for me to make a video that shows the feature so that they can change
the place you click to open it up and sometimes i feel that way but if you see small differences
be aware that the reason i did not remake the video is because after i remake the video they
might move the item back to its original place and that's happened before so here's
how you navigate around quickbooks online ever lost in quickbooks online there is more than
one way to open most windows but for some things there's only one way to open the windows you need
there are three main menu sets in the quickbooks online interface
first there's the cog wheel in the top right and the cog wheel is for menu choices that you would
click on for things like setup windows tools that you will use and general administration
the most important main menu is the new transaction main menu in the top left
right by the plus sign these are for every possible transaction that you could possibly have
in quickbooks online and then of course there's the third main menu the left panel
now the items listed in the left panel are simply repeats of the same windows that you could open
from either the cogwheel or the new transaction window when you click the plus sign but
some of these things you can only open from the left panel for example
the only place that you can open up quickbooks reports is the report tab in the left panel
and that's the most important menu choice because it will be the custom reports that will allow us
to easily navigate through quickbooks online during this course then of course there's the
sale to sales tab for customer data and customer data management so if you want to add a customer
remove a customer or change the customers permanent or set up information
the only place that you can do that is by clicking the sales tab in the left panel before we move to
the next video let's see some live action with the interface when we click the cog you can see
that all of these relate to permanent information or tools or any kind of thing that relates to
setting up quickbooks online as well as using tools to manage your quickbooks online but on the
top left you have the plus sign next to the word new that's the main menu that you would click on
if you want to record any type of transaction in quickbooks online and then of course we have
the left panel here now of course some of these things you will find are just repeats
but the most important item on the left panel is the reports because we're going to
navigate through quickbooks online using the custom reports that we will set up very soon
you