QuickBooks Online For Dummies. Elaine Marmel

in the Navigation bar that runs down the left side of QBO to visit the App Center and explore available apps (see Figure 2-2).

      FIGURE 2-2: Take a trip to the App Center to search for additional functionality for QBO.

Click any app to navigate to a web page that describes the app, provides pricing information, and often provides a video about the app (see Figure 2-3).

      FIGURE 2-3: When you click an app in the App Center, you see details for the app.

Although add-on apps can provide additional functionality in QBO, some functionality is still missing; no doubt, that functionality will appear over time. For example, using QBO, you can’t

       Track your balance sheet by class.

       Process more than 350,000 transactions annually without QBO Advanced.

       Manage a robust inventory.

      But apps are making inroads to eliminating these limitations. For example, Lettuce, an app that provided advanced inventory management features for QBO, did such a fine job of handling inventory functions that Intuit acquired Lettuce for the purpose of integrating it into QBO.

Part 2

      Managing the Books for the End User

IN THIS PART …

      Become familiar with the QBO interface.

      Manage list information needed to use QBO.

      Enter transactions in QBO to update your company’s books.

      Use reports to examine the condition of your company.

Chapter 3

      Creating a Client Company in QBO

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Signing up for a QBO account

      

Setting up a new QBO company

      

Understanding the interface

      

Working with company settings

      

Updating the Chart of Accounts

      

Working with multiple currencies

      

Examining QuickBooks Labs

      After you sign up for QBO, you log in. QBO then prompts you to set up your company. With certain limitations, you can import a company if you’ve been using a QuickBooks Desktop product. Or, you can use the QBO Setup wizard, as shown in this chapter.

      For details on importing a company, see Chapter 12 (or ask your accountant to help you with the import). And, don’t worry; if you don’t import your entire desktop company, you can import just the list information from that company, as described in Chapter 4. And importing lists will still save you a lot of time and setup work.

      

Don’t have an accountant and need one? You can visit the ProAdvisor marketplace to search for an accountant who is familiar with QBO. Visit www.findaproadvisor.com. Or try the QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping service at https://quickbooks.intuit.com/live.

Signing Up for QBO

      After you complete the sign-up process for a QBO account, Intuit, by default, logs you in to your account and walks you through the process of setting up your QBO company. The process is short — much shorter than the one you go through when setting up a QuickBooks Desktop product company — and you will need the following information:

       Your company’s name and address

       The industry in which your company operates

       Whether you want to import company information from a QuickBooks Desktop product

       The way you want to handle payroll

      To sign up for a QBO account, follow these steps:

      1 Visit http://quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing.You might get redirected; double-check the address in the browser’s address bar to make sure you’re on the “pricing” page.

      2 Scroll down the page to find three boxes describing each version of QBO —Essentials, Plus, and Advanced. Intuit offers QBO Advanced, a version aimed at users who have outgrown QBO Plus. QBO Advanced is not available as a free trial. For more information, see Chapter 2 and https://quickbooks.intuit.com/accounting/advanced.

      3 To use QBO as a free trial, click the slider button above the versions of QBO to change the slider’s position from Buy Now for the current promotional price to Free Trial for 30 Days (see Figure 3-1). Be aware that the price you ultimately pay for QBO depends on whether you choose the Buy Now option or the Free Trial for 30 Days option. If you opt to “buy now,” you pay less for your subscription because discounts don’t apply to the free trials. And, be aware that promotional pricing usually ends after 3 to 6 months.

      4 In the version of QBO that you want to try, click Try It Free.The page in Figure 3-2 appears.

      5 Fill in your email address (and confirm it), a mobile number if you want (it’s optional, but Intuit uses it as a way to verify your identity if you need help recovering your account), and a password.Your password must be between 6 and 32 characters and consist of a mix of letters and numbers. The password can also contain some special characters; we included an exclamation point (!) in our password and it was accepted. The user ID and password you supply are the ones you use each time you log in to QBO. If you’ve previously created an Intuit login, you can use the same one again.

      6 Click the Sign Up with Email button below the boxes you completed in Step 5.At the time that we wrote this, a window appeared that offered the option to skip the free trial and buy the product at a discounted rate. You can buy, but we opted to click the Continue to Trial button.