Accounting Unleashed! » Video Tutorials

How To Purchase And Download QuickBooks From The Internet

Mike — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:34:56 +0000

One of the most convenient ways to buy software is by downloading it directly to your computer. It sure beats driving to the store and buying a boxed version. You just end up throwing away the box and all of the marketing material that comes with it – it’s such a waste!

Navigating through the Intuit website isn’t all that intuitive, so I thought I would make this video showing you exactly how to buy QuickBooks on their website and download it to your computer (and make sure you get the best price too). You’ll notice that I mention something about a “beginner’s section” in the beginning of the video. Please just ignore that, I originally was going to structure the site differently and have different sections but I changed my mind after recording this.

Video Length:7:17

ShareThis

QuickBooks Training: Bank Reconciliations

Mike — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:35:37 +0000

One of the easiest ways to check the accuracy of your bookkeeping is to do a bank reconciliation. This simply means comparing the items that show up on your bank statement against the transactions that appear in your QuickBooks account register. Any differences should be investigated and corrected, if necessary. Some bank statements are better than others too, I’m not sure what the best bank is but ideally they would list all of the checks in a separate group, then list the debit card transactions all together, the deposits all together, etc. It also really helps if they include images of the checks (some banks even return the actual canceled checks although that is becoming more and more rare.)

Bank reconciliations used to be difficult and confusing when we had to do them on paper, but doing them in QuickBooks is super easy. You’ll see everything in the QuickBooks training video below, but all you have to do is type in the statement ending date, the statement ending balance and then click on each item that you see on the bank statement. It’s literally that easy!

But there are still people who struggle with it each and every month and they always need help getting their accounts reconciled. If you’re struggling with your bank reconciliation it usually means that you haven’t done a good job recording transactions in the first place. You want to do everything you can to make your transactions in QuickBooks mirror how they are going to show up on the bank statement. If you keep that goal in mind, everything will work out to be much cleaner and more accurate.

Some of the things that often lead to troublesome bank reconciliations are:

improper use of undeposited funds (or not using it at all)
data entry errors (recording transactions for the wrong amount or entering the wrong date)
merchant account fees being deducted from each sale
bounced checks
messing with (or even deleting!) transactions that have already been reconciled in the past

Each of these topics will eventually be covered in their own QuickBooks training video, since there’s a lot to say about each one.

Damn! I switched to a different Wordpress theme and it doesn’t have the same column widths as the one I was using, so the videos don’t fit neatly into the left column. Not the worst thing in the world, but it’s something I need to fix. Looks like I get to play around with some more CSS! At least I got the volume at a decent level this time!

edit (7/24/08): I decided to have the videos open in a new window so I can have them be a larger size. I think in the future they will be 800×600 so you can really see what I’m doing with even more clarity. I have changed this video so it will open in a new window.

Video Length:14:42

ShareThis

QuickBooks Training: Using QuickBooks Classes

Mike — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:17:29 +0000

I spent all day today cleaning up a client’s QuickBooks information because they have 3 locations but didn’t do anything to separate them in QuickBooks. So there was no way to pull up a useful profit & loss report, which is what they needed.

In QuickBooks, you uses “classes” to provide a breakdown of income and expenses by location, department, property, or any other criteria that is meaningful in your particular business. You assign a class to each transaction. This allows you to report on each class separately. The built-in “Profit & Loss By Class” report is great as it shows one column for each class, then the grand total. Class is also available as a filter so you can modify other reports to only show transactions from certain classes.

Here’s a quick video tutorial I just put together to demonstrate how to use classes in QuickBooks. I kind of messed up recording the audio so I had to go back and render the whole video over again, which made a pretty large file for some reason. I didn’t go back to fix it so please be patient if it takes a while to load – I promise I’ll do better next time!

Video Length:7:07

ShareThis