Learn How to Setup QuickBooks Online Fast with Our No-Nonsense Guide
As a small business owner, you’ve got a lot to manage at once. While keeping up with expenses, reconciling your accounts, creating invoices, and organizing your records for tax season are essential to your long term financial success, many small business owners find themselves cobbling together this information across multiple spreadsheets, paper receipts, email invoices, and bank accounts. This can quickly turn into a headache, and keeping it all straight presents a challenge.
QuickBooks Online is an easy to use, Cloud-based solution to managing all of the financial aspects of your business. It’s user friendly, and it fits well into the workflow of most small businesses.
But if you’re just getting started with QuickBooks, figuring out how to set it up from scratch can be a bit overwhelming. There are so many menus, buttons, sub-menus, and screens — where do you start? What should you prioritize doing first?
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll highlight some of the most important things you’ll need to do in order to get started with QuickBooks Online. By following these steps, you’ll be up and running in no time.
As a bonus, we’ll offer insight into how to expand QuickBooks’ functionality with the help of BillerGenie. With the added features that BillerGenie brings to the table, you’ll get paid faster and spend less time dealing with customer billing. (Plus: it’s free!)
Ready? Let’s get started.
Enter Your Company’s Info
First things first: before you go any further, you want to make sure that you’ve entered your company information into QuickBooks.
Click on the gear icon in the corner of your screen, and then select Account and Settings. From here, click Company.
It’s important to enter all of your company info here, including the name of your business, your business address, email address, phone number, and website.
Also, be sure to input your tax-related info in the Company Type section. Choose which tax form you’ll be filing based on the form of business you’re running (be it a Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, LLC, S Corporation, Corporation, or Nonprofit). You’ll also have to include your SSN or EIN, depending on how your business is structured.
Pick An Accounting Method
Next up, you want to let QuickBooks Online know which accounting method you intend to use.
Click the gear icon again, then choose Account and Settings followed by Accounting. You’ll have the option to select either the Cash or Accrual method here.
Many small businesses opt to go with the cash method, as it makes for a simpler bookkeeping process. With the cash method, you record income and expenses as they’re actually received or paid. With accrual accounting, you record income expenses when they’re billed or earned, rather than when money actually changes hands. To learn more about cash vs. accrual accounting, check out this helpful guide from QuickBooks.
Select a Fiscal Year Starting Date
Now, it’s time to select the date that your fiscal year begins.
If you’ve already navigated to the Accounting screen as per the instructions above, you’ll see the First Month of Fiscal Year option. This is typically January for most businesses, but your accountant or tax advisor can advise you on what you should choose here.
Choose Your Company Logo
Next, you can add your logo to your QuickBooks account.
Select the gear icon again, followed by Account and Settings. Then, choose Company.
Be sure your logo is formatted correctly: it should be in a common image file format with a white background, and must be smaller than 1MB in size.
Setup Payment Terms
How do you want your customers to pay you? With QuickBooks, you can set default payment terms for all future invoices.
Select the gear icon, click Account and Settings, then Sales, and finally Sales Form Content.
Here, you’ll have the option to select either Due On Receipt or a specific number of days following receipt. These payment terms will then be attached to all invoices by default.
Customize Invoices and Payment Processing with BillerGenie
Typically, the next thing you would do to setup QuickBooks Online (aside from setting up sales tax) would involve creating your first invoice. If you do so, you’ll notice the invoice is minimally branded. While QuickBooks offers some limited invoice-branding functionality, your invoice will still look like it’s come straight out of QuickBooks.
From here, you might send your first (minimally branded) invoice to a customer — but a couple of weeks later, you realize you haven’t received payment. As a result, you have to log into QuickBooks, find the invoice, and send a manual reminder. There’s no way to automatically add a late fee, either, which means there’s less incentive for your customer to actually pay their invoice. This process is time consuming, and you’ll have to do it repeatedly if you want to send multiple reminders.
This is where QuickBooks offers limited functionality. Chasing down invoices is a time consuming process, and many small business owners end up wasting countless hours each week on this tedious task.
What if there were a way to:
- Harness the functionality of QuickBooks, including its full accounting feature set
- Customize your invoices
- Automate payment reminders and late fees
- Give your customers a secure portal where they can make payments and access copies of invoices
…and more?
Actually, there is! It’s called BillerGenie.
With BillerGenie, you can turbocharge your QuickBooks experience. Once you’ve setup your QuickBooks Online account, BillerGenie integrates with it effortlessly. All it takes is a few clicks to get started. You can customize your invoices with your company logo and color scheme, set up automatic invoice reminders and late fees, and launch a secure, branded payment portal for your customers — all in just a few minutes!
Best of all, BillerGenie is free!
Want to see what BillerGenie can do? Request a demo now.
Ready to get started with BillerGenie? Sign up now for free!