QuickBooks Online (QBO) makes it easy to track your business income and expenses as well as make financial decisions in real time. Adding an accounting firm or bookkeeper to your QBO account will allow them to assist you with your finances and increase efficiency within your company. Here’s how to add an accounting firm to QuickBooks Online (QBO).
Why are you looking to get started with QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online isn’t right for every business. If you work with a CPA, then QuickBooks can provide a lot of great functionality and automation, but it might be overkill if you don’t. In that case, a traditional desktop installation could be better suited for your business. Getting started with QuickBooks Online is relatively easy because once you have set up your account, everything just kind of clicks together automatically we are talking about QuickBooks after all. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some tasks and hurdles involved in getting started with it.
Next steps once you’ve signed up for QuickBooks
QuickBooks offers a variety of training tools and tutorials to help you quickly get up-to-speed on how to use QuickBooks. On their site, you can access: Videos: Short videos will walk you through using QuickBooks on many different levels and give you plenty of tips along your way. The in-depth lengthier videos are all high quality and ideal for more advanced users looking for depth in their instruction. Online Help Desk: The help desk provides answers to basic questions related to using QuickBooks but is also great if you need more details or clarification than what’s offered by your course material.
Setting up your chart of accounts
Most people start with a list of all their business-related income and expenses. However, you should go a step further and organize them into broad categories called chart of accounts. For example, if you are in retail sales, you might have accounts for shoes, dresses, clothes and accessories. The chart is like your framework; it tells your financial software how to categorize each expense and income item into one overarching category such as shoes or clothes or accessories. It also helps ensure that everything is categorized consistently year over year when it comes time to do your taxes or update your inventory. If you get really ambitious, you can set up additional charts of accounts for things like cash flow analysis.
Connecting and syncing data from your prior accounting software
Since QuickBooks Online is cloud-based, you’ll need a secure connection between your computer and your company’s QuickBooks Online account. If you don’t already have one, create one using security information provided by Intuit. Then use that username and password to log into QuickBooks Online. Because of its cloud-based features, QuickBooks Online does not include some software features that are common in older versions of QuickBooks; for example, there is no entry for journal entries. If you run into data transfer problems from other software to QuickBooks, see our section on Data Transfer or check out these troubleshooting steps . In addition
Creating customers, vendors, items, and bills
Typically, you’ll need to create a customer, vendor, and item for your financial bookkeeping. However, there may be times when you want to use QuickBooks as a project-management system—in which case you’ll also want projects. Or maybe you just have a few items if so, it might be easier just to use Item List view instead of Item List by Name. Either way, items are connected in that they all reside within either customers or vendors. You can’t add an item if there’s no customer or vendor; if you try to do so, QuickBooks will simply prompt you with a dialog box asking whether you’d like to create one.
Setting up payroll in QuickBooks
If you’re a QuickBooks Online subscriber, then you can set up payroll for your account and handle all your employee’s salary details in one place. It might seem daunting at first but once you understand how it works, it’s pretty straightforward. Here are some basic steps on setting up payroll for your new business. Quick note: You need a Pro subscription if you want to access Payroll.
Applying tax settings and other business settings
The other settings you’ll see for a business are tax and other business-specific settings. By default, QuickBooks sets up all new companies as a Nonprofit 501(c)(3) with single-member LLC. If your organization isn’t set up as one of these, you need to change some of these settings. The quickest way is through Edit Preferences Company Preferences Accounting Permissions . You can also edit them from Company Preferences but that requires you find each section individually.
Creating reports and tracking budgets
Once you’ve got your books organized, making sense of your numbers is a whole lot easier. If you want help keeping track of your money and understanding how you can spend it better, hiring an accountant might be a smart move. An accountant can help you make sense of all those numbers and get ready for tax season, too. A good accountant should also be able to give you reports that will help with budgeting and forecasting; after all, if you don’t know where your money is going now, how will you predict where it needs to go in six months?
Conclusion
Once you’ve got your chart of accounts all set up, it’s time to start adding and recording data. The process for doing so can vary depending on what type of bookkeeping you plan on doing with QuickBooks. If you use another program, or don’t have much experience as a bookkeeper, consider reaching out to a professional accountant or consultant who can help guide you through every step of setting up your business. What seems like a small step might actually reveal something more serious about your business than meets the eye, especially if it falls outside of general guidelines for entering information into QuickBooks. A trained expert will be able to address any issues immediately before they snowball into bigger problems later on down the road!
