Although QuickBooks bookkeeping software is simple to use, some people report a steep learning curve before they felt at ease. While there are many QuickBooks for small business guides for sale on the Internet and elsewhere, free QuickBooks online guides and tutorials are available today. Here are the guides that will help beginners get a productive start with the tool.
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How Long Does It Take to Learn QuickBooks Online?
If you watch QuickBooks tutorial videos online, you could learn some program components in 2 to 3 minutes. However, if you need a complete overview, some videos run for about 1 hour and nearly 20 minutes while others are 4 hours long. How long it will take to master QuickBooks varies from user to user, depending on a person’s background in bookkeeping and how comfortable they are with business management software.
QuickBooks Tutorials for Setting Up
The following are a collection of free tutorials to help you set up your QuickBooks account and get acclimated with the tool’s interface.
1. How to Create a Company File
This post takes you through signing up for a QuickBooks account (with a 30-day free trial for new users), how to set up your company profile and your chart of accounts.
2. Online Banking Overview
This introductory video walks users through the process of connecting their bank account to their QuickBooks account and explains how to categorize transactions for accurate accounting from the get-go.
3. How to Add and Manage Users
In less than 4 minutes, this video will teach you how to add a user, set their permissions and edit an existing user’s privileges as needed.
QuickBooks Online Training for Accounting
QuickBooks’ accounting tracks your business’s income and expenses over time, allowing you complete visibility of your cash flow and overall financial circumstances. The program also uses this and more information to automatically prepare your company’s tax forms when the time comes.
The following resources can help you learn this QuickBooks function:
4. How to Set Up Expense Settings
This video from QuickBooks helps you access multiple profitability views, set options for bills and expense tracking and turn on purchase orders. In addition, you can access a link for another QuickBooks tutorial on how to make expenses billable.
5. How to Reconcile Accounts in QuickBooks
This post from Fast Capital 360 breaks down the process of balancing your accounts. Follow these steps and corresponding screenshots to learn how to link your business bank accounts with QuickBooks and then ensure the program’s reported balances match your checking or credit card transactions.
QuickBooks Online Tutorial for Payments
QuickBooks Payments allows your business to receive credit or debit card payments or ACH bank transfers from your clientele. You can also process your customers’ payments online, by phone or via a mobile card reader.
Companies that offer recurring or subscription services can also set up automatic payments with their frequent customers.
As an added service, QuickBooks Payments also promises next-day deposits, regardless of how the transaction was completed. This ensures that backend processes won’t interrupt your business’s cash flow.
Here are some QuickBooks online training free resources to guide you in using the payments function.
6. How to Set Up and Use QuickBooks Payments
This video and accompanying guide will walk you through setting up your Payments account and preparing to process your first payment. You’ll see the steps to enter business and owner information and be able to connect your bank account or Intuit merchant account.
7. How to Create an Invoice
This QuickBooks tutorial is a free guide for crafting invoices for customers. You can access stored customer names and prior product or service information to customize invoices. You can also add new details for the invoice and learn your options for sending them to customers.
8. Receive Payments
Here, you’ll learn how to receive and log invoice payments with QuickBooks. You can accept and track customer payments and choose where to deposit the funds. Another video link will take you to a QuickBooks online training video about how to record a bank deposit.
9. How to Make Partial Payments on Invoices
This video tutorial will take you through the steps to appropriately record partial payments from customers.
Learn QuickBooks for Payroll
With QuickBooks Payroll, you can essentially get your payroll processes running on autopilot.
This includes:
- Defining salaries and pay periods
- Adding deductions to paychecks as necessary
- Remitting payment in the employee’s preferred payment method
- Tracking tax-related information and preparing reports for easy filing
Here’s what you can learn with QuickBooks:
10. QuickBooks Online Payroll — Full Tutorial
With a more than 30-minute runtime, this video is longer than some other QuickBooks Online training content. However, it’s also incredibly comprehensive and walks you through everything you need to do to launch your payroll initiative, from choosing your paid payroll option to adding basic employee information to managing salaries, deductions and payment methods.
QuickBooks for Time Tracking Online Tutorial
With QuickBooks Time, managers and owners have full control and visibility over their employees’ schedules.
This allows you to quickly tackle the following:
- View and approve hours as submitted by employees
- View and approve PTO
- Develop and manage schedules for individual employees and your entire team
With this increased visibility and flexibility, you can identify friction points in your schedule and schedule-related processes—and make changes to reach maximum efficiency.
11. How to Use Track Hours with QuickBooks Time
This video from QuickBooks’ library of tutorials on YouTube can help you get your timesheet processes up and running. The time-tracking function is available with Payroll Premium and Elite levels. The video demonstrates how Time is a collaborative tool where employees can access the program and record their own hours.
QuickBooks Tutorial: Free Training on Business Insights & Reports
Each QuickBooks tool also allows users to dig deep into collected data to make purposeful improvements to various processes moving forward. In turn, your company will run more efficiently — making more revenue while spending less.
QuickBooks provides 3 types of reports:
- Line reports provide the raw data
- Detail reports provide contextual information to the raw data, allowing you to get a more “real-world” understanding.
- Summaries are automatically generated reports that explain the key findings of your line and detail reports.
12. How to Create Custom Reports
This video gives an overview of how to create custom reports in QuickBooks Online Advanced. It will take you through the steps to create and run your reports and save them to periodically run again.
13. How to Use Reports Center: Categories, Insights and Information
This tutorial explains how to navigate the QuickBooks Reports Center. You’ll learn how to retrieve a report and review the data, drilling down to more details that provide additional context.
14. How to Use Reports: Understanding When to Use the 3 Types
This free QuickBooks training video explains the different types of reports and which type will be the most helpful for stakeholders’ review purposes.
