QuickBooks Online

Why use QuickBooks Online versus QuickBooks Desktop?

• The freedom of having access to your QuickBooks Online file anytime, just log in from your computer or phone or tablet.
• Using your QuickBooks mobile app on your phone, you can create and send estimates or invoices from anywhere.
• With QuickBooks Online, all receipts can be scanned into your phone and attached to its corresponding transaction in QuickBooks Online. Fast and easy, available when you need to view.
• Never have to think about backing up your QuickBooks Online file.  Backups are done automatically.
• Share your QuickBooks Online file with your Accountant.  Send an invite to your Accountant, so that he/she can log in anytime and share your file.
• Automatically download your bank transactions.
• Connect your QuickBooks Online to over 300 possible cloud based apps that may expand your use.
• You will have access to latest product and feature updates.
• This version of QuickBooks allows up to 5 users simultaneously access – Essentials up to 3 users, Plus up to 5 users.

QuickBooks Online Features

Track Income and Expenses

QuickBooks Online is an accounting system that will track your Sales and Expenses.  Sales, money coming in to a business can be from Sales Receipts or Paid Invoices from customers or clients.  Expenses, money leaving your business, such as payments by Checks or Credit cards to vendors. To find the Profit/Loss for your business, take the difference between Sales minus Expenses to see how you are is doing.

Maximize Tax Deductions

Income and Expense transactions can be kept organized in tax categories you set up.  These categories can be tax based for tracking and making it easier for tax reporting.  With your invitation, your accountant can share your QuickBooks file, for easy review and get your questions answered in preparation for tax time.

Create Professional Sales Receipts and Invoices

If your customer pays you immediately, then you create a sales receipt.  Otherwise, if payment is in the future, create an invoice and email to your customer with request for payment. All sales receipts and invoices can be customized for a professional look. There is an option in QuickBooks Online to sign up for accepting immediate payments for your invoices.  Your customers/clients will get an easy way to make their payments. Do you know which customers have paid or which customer needs a reminder?  This is easy to see in QuickBooks Online.

Run Reports

You will find in QuickBooks Online the following reports: Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Company Snapshot, A/R Aging Summary, A/P Aging Summary and many more.  All reports can be customized to meet your needs.   When you customize and save your report, add it to a report group so you can run it again in the future.  There are 53 different reports in QuickBooks Online Essentials and in the Plus version there are 75 and all can be customized to meet your businesses specific needs.

Send Estimates

Estimates in QuickBooks Online are easily customized to meet your business needs.  Create and send Estimates to your customers and get there signature online, if you accept mobile signatures. Your customer will use their finger to sign the estimate they just received online. The work has been completed on this customers job, it is time to turn your estimate into an invoice for payment with one click.

Track Sales and Sales Tax

Run Sales by Customer or Sales by Customer detail reports quick look at your customers purchases over a period of time. You can customize, run and analyze your report to view your Sales. Automatically calculate taxes on your sales receipts or invoices.

Syncing Your Accounts

Connect your bank accounts and credit card accounts to sync your monthly transactions into QuickBooks Online.  Once your transactions are downloaded,  you sort them into the categories that are meaningful to your business.

Reconcile

It is important to reconcile your bank account or credit card account monthly. The process of reconciling is to balance what QuickBooks Online shows for each transaction to what your bank has actually processed.  These transactions should match or you may need to find the discrepancy.  You compare the transactions on your bank statement or credit card statement to what has downloaded into QuickBooks Online.  Usually, if you manually reconcile your accounts it could take up to an hour for each account.  However, if your accounts are connected to QuickBooks Online it may take you 10 – 15 minutes.  That is a savings of 45 minutes that you can recoup.

Payroll

QuickBooks Online users who want to run payroll from QuickBooks must add one of these subscriptions, QuickBooks Online Payroll or QuickBooks Full Service Payroll.  Both products can be set up with a payroll expert on hand. These two products work with both Essentials and Plus versions.  Your employees can receive printed pay check or direct deposits into their bank account of choice, whichever is preferred.  With Full Service payroll all you need to do is enter time for up to 50 employees.  Intuit handles the quarterly and end of year payroll taxes and forms for you.

Payments

So you have QuickBooks Online set up.  However, you want to start accepting credit cards or ACH online payments.  You will need to set up a QuickBooks Payments subscription that will work with your QuickBooks Online.  As soon as your payments account is ready to go, run credit card payments straight from QuickBooks Online.  Also, get faster payments from your customers, when they can easily click on the pay now button on their invoice that you have set up.  Saves you time on every invoice.

Budgeting

QuickBooks Online has the feature for creating a budget. You will find it under the Gear Icon.  In both versions, Essential or Plus you have this feature.  There is a Budget interview to walk you through to start you on your budget.  Simple questions like, are you creating a budget from scratch or from historical data already in QuickBooks Online?  Do you want to subdivide your budget by location, class or customer?  Also, which fiscal year do you want to budget for?  A budget helps track and compare your expected income and expenses with your actual income and expenses.

Audit Log

QuickBooks Online comes with an Audit log that will keep track of every transaction from its creation, to whether a transaction  was added, changed or deleted. The log will, also, state which user made the change and when the transaction was changed. The audit log can be found under the Gear icon.

Strong Security Measures

Intuit makes sure your data is safe by using advanced security safeguards.  Whether it is password protected logins for users, firewall protected servers or data encryption, Intuit is doing what is necessary to defend your data.

QuickBooks Online Essential Features

Manage Bills

Never miss a payment again. If you pay the same vendor every month set up recurring bills. Keep track of bills and track which bills have not yet been paid. Create a check to pay a bill anywhere you can log in (phone, computer, tablet) and print those checks when you are ready to mail them.

Multiple users

Easily work together with your Accountant by inviting them to share access to your QuickBooks file. Set up user permissions to prevent access to sensitive data where needed. Employees permissions allow them protected access to enter their time will minimize possible time errors when running payroll.

Track time

Within QuickBooks Online  you can keep track of client billable hours and apply those hours when creating your client’s invoice. Allow employees to track their hours for easy access.

QuickBooks Online Plus Features

Inventory Tracking

Any user must have QuickBooks Online Plus version in order to handle inventory.  Important:  Under Products and Services make sure you have turned on – track quantity and price/rate and track quantity on hand. Inventory can be organized by adding categories and moving products into those categories.  Track your products, cost of goods and QuickBooks Online will notify you when your inventory is getting low.

Paying 1099 contractors

If you need to prepare and print 1099 Misc forms at the end of the year and you are deciding on which QuickBooks Online version to use, QuickBooks Online Plus is the right choice.  This is the only Online version of QuickBooks that can handle 1099 preparation.  The best way to handle your contractor payments is to set them up correctly in QuickBooks from the beginning.  Always request an IRS W9 form to be filled out and returned to you from each contractor/vendor you do business with.  The W9 form will have your contractors Full Name and address and their tax identification number, whether it is the business tax id or a social security number. You can then enter this information into QuickBooks and make sure you mark the check box for tracking 1099s.  Now QuickBooks can keep track of every contractor payment that needs a 1099 at year end.