In this QuickBooks tutorial, I will be showing you how to use QuickBooks to improve your business growth and manage all your finance in one place.
Before we get started, let us take a good look at some important definitions and terms about QuickBooks and its importance.
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What is QuickBooks?
QuickBooks is one of the most popular small business accounting software that businesses use to manage income and expenses and keep track of their financial health.
QuickBooks, you can easily invoice customers, pay bills, generate reports, and prepare taxes, payroll and so many related business activities that will improve your business efficiency.
The QuickBooks product line includes several unique business solutions to help support different business needs, such as QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Payroll, and QuickBooks Time.
While QuickBooks offers several top-notch accounting software options for busnesses, we however recommend QuickBooks Online for most new businesses.
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Why You Need QuickBooks for Your Business
Here are some of the reasons why you need to get QuickBooks right now for your business:
1. To Create, Send, and Track All Invoices
With QuickBooks, you can easily create invoices and, either print them or even email them to customers; all from one dashboard. QuickBooks will professionally record the income and track how much each customer owes you automatically.
From your QuickBooks dashboard, you will be able to view the number of your outstanding invoices—known as your accounts receivable (A/R)—and how many days they're overdue by running an A/R aging report.
You can also create a custom invoice from scratch or by converting an existing estimate into an invoice. Then, you can easily customize the invoice by making changes to it, like changing the color and adding your company logo.
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2. Pay Online Bills Easily
You can easily pay any online bills you may have by using the QuickBooks online bill payment feature.
QuickBooks Online Bill Pay benefits small businesses in so many ways. First, you'll have the ability to pay bills via bank transfer or check directly from QuickBooks in a few seconds and pay several bills at once. It also allows you to pay any vendor or supplier with a credit card.
The QuickBooks Online Bill Pay is integrated with QuickBooks Essentials, QuickBooks Plus, and QuickBooks Advanced.
To pay your first bill, you need to enter your bank account information, the payment method you'd like to use, and how your vendor would like to receive their payment.
After updating these information, QuickBooks Online will then use this information automatically to process future transactions, reducing data entry. QuickBooks Online will mark your bills paid automatically and will remove them from the list of outstanding bills.
Note: You must first enter your bills in QuickBooks Online and then pay them online by clicking the + New button and then selecting Pay bills online.
3. Keep Track of Your Bills & Expenses
QuickBooks helps you and your business to keep proper track of your bills and expenses automatically by connecting your bank and credit card accounts to QuickBooks so that all of your expenses are downloaded and categorized.
If you need to track a check or cash transaction manually, you can easily record it directly in your QuickBooks in a few minutes.
We advice that you enter bills into your QuickBooks when you receive them so that QuickBooks can help you track upcoming payments. You can ensure that you pay your bills on time by creating an A/P report.
Having this report recorded properly by QuickBooks will provide you with the details of your current and past-due bills. This is very essential to business financial growth.
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4. Manage & Print Financial Statements for Your Business Anytime
By managing all of your cash inflow and outflow activities in QuickBooks, you can print financial statements that provide useful information about how your business is performing. Lenders often require financial statements when you apply for a small business loan or line of credit.
You can produce three primary financial statements in QuickBooks: Profit and Loss report, Balance Sheet report, and Statement of Cash Flows.
Below is a sample of different generated financial statements with QuickBooks.
The QuickBooks Profit and Loss report will show you how profitable your business is by summarizing its income minus its expenses. The generated report shows you the bottom line net income (loss) for a specific time period, such as a week, a month, or a quarter.
The QuickBooks Balance Sheet generated report will show what your business owns (assets), what it owes (liabilities), and its net worth (equity) at a particular point in time.
The Generated Statement of Cash Flows in QuickBooks will show you all of the activities that affect the operating, investing, and financing cash inflows and cash outflows for your business.
5. Effectively Track Employee Time & Expenses
With QuickBooks, Your employees or subcontractors can enter their own time as they progress through the day, or a bookkeeper can enter their weekly time if the employee submits a manual timesheet. Time entered and assigned to a customer will be available to add to the customer's next invoice.
Also, any expense entered can be marked as billable and assigned to a customer. Just like time, these billable expenses will be available to add to the customer's next invoice. You don't need the payroll add-on to track employee time for billing purposes.
6. Monitor Each Project Profitability
You can use QuickBooks Online Plus or the QuickBooks Advanced to create and manage projects, assign income and wages to a project, and track expenses associated with labor and materials.
The QuickBooks Online's project accounting module also allows you to generate project estimates and include inventories, labor, and sales taxes. While you can't compare actual and estimated costs, QuickBooks Online allows you to monitor the profitability of each project you're working on by creating a project profitability summary report.
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7. Manage Your Company's Payroll Like a Pro
Business or Company Payroll is an area that you don't want to skimp on and try to do manually. Mistakes made in calculating paychecks can result in steep penalties and unhappy employees.
QuickBooks do have its own payroll function that can calculate and run payroll as often as you need automatically.
When you enter employee time as discussed in the above point, the hours not only flow to your invoices but also to the payroll module. This way, you can be confident that every hour you pay your employee is also considered for billing to a customer.
The best thing about using QuickBooks Payroll is that it's integrated with QuickBooks so that your financial statements are always up to date as of the latest payroll run.
To use this payroll feature, you will have to purchase a QuickBooks Payroll subscription to run payroll, and there are several levels of services to choose from that will fit your business needs.
Running your payroll through QuickBooks will allow you to:
- Pay employees with a check or direct deposit
- Calculate federal and state payroll taxes automatically
- Have QuickBooks fill in the payroll tax forms for you
- E-pay your payroll taxes directly from QuickBooks
Alternate QuickBooks Payroll Service
Papaya Global is a good alternative to QuickBooks Payroll Service. Any one you choose amongst them will give you super effective results.
8. Simplify Your Business Taxes
One of the best and most important thing that QuickBooks can do for your small business is to simplify tax time. By far, the largest headache in preparing a tax return is compiling your income and expenses.
As a QuickBooks user, all you need to do during tax time is to just print your financial statements. Better yet, with QuickBooks Online, you can invite your tax preparer to access your account directly so that they can review your numbers and print whatever information they need to prepare your return.
9. Track Your Business Inventory
QuickBooks can help you keep quality track of the quantity and cost of your inventory. As you sell inventory, QuickBooks will allocate a portion of your inventory to the cost of goods sold (COGS) automatically, which is an expense account that reduces your income.
This allocation is a requirement for calculating taxable income and it is very cumbersome and stressful to do it by hand. Also, QuickBooks can also remind you to order inventory automatically when quantities are low.
10. Accept Online Payments (QuickBooks Payments)
One of the best ways to improve your cash flow as a business is to offer customers the option to pay their invoices online. You can add QuickBooks Payments (formerly known as Intuit Merchant Services) so that customers can pay online directly from their emailed invoice.
QuickBooks Payments is similar to other merchant services. However, because it's integrated completely within QuickBooks, the sale, credit card fee, and cash deposit are all recorded automatically as they occur.
11. Scan Receipts
Another key to making your tax time a breeze is being able to organize your receipts in QuickBooks. All QuickBooks Online subscribers can download the QuickBooks app to their mobile devices for free, take a picture of a receipt, and upload it to QuickBooks Online in a few minutes.
QuickBooks allows you to attach a receipt to the corresponding banking transaction. You can upload an unlimited number of receipts to QuickBooks Online as the receipts are stored in the cloud along with your data.
12. Track Mileage
Many self-employed individuals and employees use their personal vehicles for business purposes. This provides a generous tax deduction of 58.5 cents per mile. However, to receive the deduction, you're required to keep a record of the date, miles, and purpose of your trip.
QuickBooks Online makes this incredibly easy and flexible to use. With the QuickBooks mobile app, you can use the GPS in your phone to sense every time you're in a moving vehicle automatically.
You can then review your trips, classify them as personal or business, and mark them as billable to a customer. Billable mileage expenses will then be available to add to the next invoice you create for that customer automatically.
Other QuickBooks Product Features
Being one of the best and top accounting software providers in the market today, QuickBooks offers supplementary products to augment your overall QuickBooks experience.
These Features include:
- QuickBooks Payroll: Manage your payroll easily with QuickBooks Payroll. Track employee hours and billable time effortlessly with QuickBooks Payroll and QuickBooks Online.
- QuickBooks Payments: Integrate payments seamlessly on QuickBooks Online through QuickBooks Payments. Get paid easily and process online payments effortlessly.
- QuickBooks Time: Formerly known as TSheets, QuickBooks Time offers time-tracking features for employees for tracking client or project billable hours.
- QuickBooks Live: Do you need help with keeping your books? QuickBooks Live is an online bookkeeping service wherein you can get a ProAdvisor to work with your bookkeeping needs.
- QuickBooks Capital: Get additional financing options up to $150,000 with QuickBooks Capital.
How to Use QuickBooks
To use QuickBooks is very easy and simple, all you need to do is visit: www.quickbooks.com and sign up for an account based on the type of business you are doing or based on the features you need for your personal finances.
Here's a preview of the service types and prices:
QuickBooks Pricing Options
QuickBooks comes in both a cloud-based online platform and a traditional desktop program. Most of the online and desktop versions will perform the tasks discussed above, but they come with an extensive variety of advanced features and a wide range of prices.
| QuickBooks Product Type | Best For | Price Range |
| QuickBooks Online | SMBs needing flexible access to financial data | $30 to $200 per month |
| QuickBooks Desktop | SMBs in any industry | $349.99 to $1,340 per year for one user (Pro) |
| QuickBooks Self-Employed | Independent contractors, real estate agents, and Uber and Lyft drivers | $15 per month |
| QuickBooks for Mac | SMBs in any industry requiring a Mac solution | $349.99 per year |
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Frequently Asked Questions
Conclusion
There you have it, understing how to use QuickBooks, and the benefits of QuickBooks for your business and personal finance. With this very article on QuickBooks, if you take advantage of the 30% Discount for the next six (6) months, you will drastically grow your business finances and stay tax complaint without stress.
We covered so many things in this article, including the QuickBooks Payroll which is very important in every business.
If you find value in this article, do us a favor by sharing this post with your friends on social media. Also let us know in the comments if you have any questions or comments.
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