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About this lesson
In this lesson, we explain what is seen on the home page, what areas to go to for given tasks, and how the graphs can be modified.
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Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
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Quick reference
Home page
This is the landing page when you first log into QuickBooks Online.
When to use
This dashboard or home page is a great starting place to get to know QuickBooks Online. The menus we'll be discussing are static and will be available no matter where you are within QuickBooks Online.
Instructions
- Left Navigation: Plus Sign (+) New
- The actions menu (aka quick create)
- Left Navigation: Transactions
- Banking and receipts
- Left Navigation: Expenses
- Expense transactions
- Vendor transactions
- Left Navigation: Sales
- Sales transactions
- Client transactions
- Left Navigation: Accounting
- Chart of accounts
- Reconcile
- Upper Right Menu: My experts
- People who can help you
- Upper Right Menu: Help
- Searchable help menu
- Upper Right Menu: Magnifying Glass
- Global search
- Upper Right Menu: (Big) Gear
- Settings
- Lists
- Tools
- Titles and Graphs: Invoices
- Last 365 days unpaid
- Last 30 days paid
- Cannot change
- Titles and Graphs: Expenses
- Predefined date ranges only
- Titles and Graphs: Profit and Loss
- Doesn't include pending transactions
- Predefined date ranges only
- Titles and Graphs: Sales
- Predefined date ranges only
Hints & tips
- Graphs cannot be changed, moved or customized
- The hamburger (three lines in the upper left) will collapse the gray menu
- The privacy toggle in the upper right will display/hide financial information
- Clicking on the logo will take you to the place to change the logo
- 00:04 Hi, what I'm going to talk to you about today is the QuickBooks Online homepage.
- 00:10 The homepage for QuickBooks Online is also known as the Dashboard.
- 00:13 In the upper left hand corner of the Dashboard,
- 00:16 you have the name of your business.
- 00:18 So my business in this example is the GoSkills QuickBooks Demo Account.
- 00:22 As we go through this video series,
- 00:24 we're going to rename that to our make believe business.
- 00:27 In the upper left hand corner, we have a gray menu or a gray option bar.
- 00:31 In the upper right hand corner, we have additional menu.
- 00:34 In the middle, we have these graphs that we can reference.
- 00:37 So I want to walk through what you see with each of these things.
- 00:40 In the upper left-hand corner, you have this kind of gray pale button.
- 00:45 This is the the plus new, it used to be called the quick create button.
- 00:49 This quick create button is what I like to describe as the action button.
- 00:53 If you want to take an action, you'll come up here to do it.
- 00:56 When I click on the plus sign, a pop up menu will appear.
- 01:00 So when I do this,
- 01:01 I see a list of actions I can take with relationship to my customers.
- 01:05 A list of actions I can take with relationship to my vendors,
- 01:09 a list of actions for my employees, and a list of action for other.
- 01:14 When you pop out or when you click on this plus new, if you don't see all these
- 01:19 things, you might see something different, and I'll show you what that looks like.
- 01:23 In the lower right-hand corner, if I click on the blue hyperlink that says Show less,
- 01:28 I now see just Invoice, Estimate, Expense, and Check.
- 01:32 If I click on Show more, then I see all four.
- 01:37 In the upper right-hand corner is a couple of things I want you to see.
- 01:40 There's My Experts,
- 01:42 when you click on that, the first option I have is LIVE Bookkeeping.
- 01:46 That means hire somebody from QuickBooks to handle your bookkeeping for you.
- 01:51 The next one is Upgrade your service to QuickBooks Advanced.
- 01:55 That means that you get a higher level of technical support if you have questions.
- 01:59 And the last is Accounting pros,
- 02:01 this is where you can hire somebody who's certified to work with QuickBooks Online.
- 02:06 Over to the right we have the Help button.
- 02:09 When you click on Help, this is going to be a searchable database.
- 02:12 Some of the info in the database is going to be stuff from
- 02:15 the community where community members have answered questions, and
- 02:19 some stuff will be pre-written by Intuit.
- 02:22 To the right of that is this magnifying glass, and
- 02:25 I really like the magnifying glass.
- 02:27 When you click on the magnifying glass to the right of Help,
- 02:31 you end up with various search options.
- 02:33 So up here at the top where the blinking cursor says Search, you can search for
- 02:37 customers, vendors, transactions, or reports.
- 02:41 If you wanted something different, you can come down and
- 02:43 click on the blue hyperlink for Advanced Search.
- 02:45 So that's a pretty helpful trick.
- 02:48 I'm going to skip the bell, and go to the right of that.
- 02:52 Now we have this gear, later we're going to see other gears, so
- 02:55 I refer to this as the big gear.
- 02:57 When you click on the big gear, you have a handful of options.
- 03:01 So I'm just going to highlight the ones that I think
- 03:03 are the most important for now.
- 03:05 Under your company, there's Accountant and settings, so
- 03:08 it's basically the settings for your business.
- 03:10 There's Manage users, that's how you can add additional users to your account.
- 03:14 And there's Chart of accounts,
- 03:16 we're going to spend more time on Chart of accounts later.
- 03:18 And it's actually accessible in a couple of places, this is just one of them.
- 03:23 In the second column is the List column, here you have All lists,
- 03:27 you have the Products and services list and the Recurring transaction list.
- 03:32 We're going to cover these in more detail later.
- 03:35 In the Tools column is a couple of things that I want you to see.
- 03:38 There's Export data, there's Reconcile, just like Chart of accounts there's
- 03:44 a second spot for Reconcile, there's budgeting, and then there's Audit log.
- 03:49 To the right of that is stuff for your Intuit profile, and
- 03:51 I don't think it's very useful, so we're not covering it during this tutorial.
- 03:56 On the left hand side, we have this gray menu and
- 03:58 I want to kind of give you a sense of what's happening in the gray menu.
- 04:02 First, the word Dashboard that just takes you right back to here,
- 04:05 you don't need to click on it, but you can click on it.
- 04:09 Below that you have Banking, this takes you to various transactions and
- 04:13 things you can do within Banking.
- 04:15 You have expenses, you have Sales meaning customers, I'm going to skip down.
- 04:21 You have Reports, so the reports is stuff like your profit and loss, and
- 04:25 your balance sheet, and who owes you money, and who you owe money to.
- 04:30 The Taxes, that's your sales taxes not your federal taxes.
- 04:34 Mileage, that's mileage for your vehicles, and then Accounting.
- 04:39 Earlier, I talked about how there's two places to go for the Chart of accounts.
- 04:43 One was in the big gear in the upper right hand corner, and the other is over here to
- 04:47 the left where it says Accounting, you can then click on Chart of Accounts.
- 04:51 You can also use this field as a way to get to Reconcile.
- 04:54 Reconcile has a handful of ways to get there,
- 04:57 these are just kind of the two most common or the two easiest.
- 05:01 Now I want to talk to you about this middle section that you see.
- 05:05 First, in the upper left hand corner,
- 05:07 you have a hamburger, the three lines in Internet speak, they call it a hamburger.
- 05:11 When you click on these three lines in the upper left hand corner, it's going to take
- 05:15 this gray menu that you see and it's just going to collapse or hide it.
- 05:19 So that's useful if you're working with a small monitor,
- 05:22 maybe you want to hide that so you have a little bit more space on your screen.
- 05:25 So I'm going to unhide it.
- 05:28 Just below that, I have a spot for the logo.
- 05:30 In later videos, we're going to go ahead and add a logo to our company file.
- 05:34 Now I have this option for Invoices.
- 05:37 In Invoices, I can say Create an invoice or I can see my overdue and past due.
- 05:42 The sample file that I've created doesn't have any invoices yet, so
- 05:45 there's nothing to see here.
- 05:47 In later videos when we start to make invoices, we'll come back and
- 05:51 see what it looks like on this homepage.
- 05:53 Same thing with Expenses, you have expenses and
- 05:55 then these represent the three most common expenses.
- 05:58 And in this case there are none, so there's no most common.
- 06:02 With the expenses, and you can't do this for invoices,
- 06:05 you can click this drop down, you can say I want to see my expenses for
- 06:09 the last 30 days, or I want to see the last month, or so forth.
- 06:13 These are the only date ranges you get to pick from.
- 06:16 You also don't get to change these tiles.
- 06:19 So if you say this is really great, but
- 06:20 I'd rather see a different graph, no can do.
- 06:24 As we scroll down, you have couple more things to see.
- 06:27 Here's your Profit and Loss, and it says over the last 30 days,
- 06:31 here's your net income, $0.
- 06:33 Here's your Income and Expenses, and
- 06:36 then you kind of see this hashmark and it says 17 to review.
- 06:41 What that means is that we've connected our bank account to QuickBooks, and
- 06:45 there's 17 expenses pending that we haven't dealt with yet.
- 06:50 And those 17 expenses are sitting here in the last 30 days.
- 06:54 So that means that no matter what this says for Profit and Loss, we can't know
- 06:58 that it's accurate until we take care of whatever is sitting here pending.
- 07:03 Over to the right of that, we have sales, same thing with the Income and
- 07:06 the Expenses on the invoices.
- 07:08 Once we have some data in here, we'll come back and look and
- 07:12 kind of see how these graphs change.
- 07:13 Now a moment ago, I said that your expenses you have 17 things to review,
- 07:17 I want you to see what that looks like.
- 07:19 In the upper right-hand corner of our screen,
- 07:21 the last box we haven't talked about is this one.
- 07:24 In this box,
- 07:25 it says Bank Accounts and underneath it you'll have various bank accounts.
- 07:29 What I've done for the purpose of this video is uploaded some data just so
- 07:33 we can see it.
- 07:34 So when I click on this hyperlink for bank accounts, it's going to tell me I have 201
- 07:39 things to review, and it's going to start to show me those 201 things.
- 07:46 I will explain what these mean later, but I just want you to see what's going on.
- 07:50 A moment ago,
- 07:51 the dashboard said we had 17 things to review, there were some sort of expenses.
- 07:56 So all QuickBooks knows is within the last 30 days, there are 17 things that probably
- 08:02 are an expense because it's money spent, but it doesn't know where to put it.
- 08:06 So when it thinks about your profit and loss, it doesn't know how much money was
- 08:10 spent or anything, it just knows there's 17 things.
- 08:13 So this right here, this is all dates and it goes back quite a ways.
- 08:17 But you can kind of look and say yeah,
- 08:19 there's probably 17 things in the last 30 days that are sitting here pending.
- 08:24 To get back where we just were,
- 08:25 I'm going to click on Dashboard on the left hand side.
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