Intermediate QuickBooks Online

Without a doubt, inventory tracking is usually one of the more difficult areas for most businesses to track. In this lesson, you'll learn how QuickBooks Online (QBO) tracks the purchase and sale of inventory items. You'll also dive much deeper into some of the more advanced inventory features, such as using product categories, bundles, and price rules.

Inventory is one of those assets that is frequently mishandled and even stolen. Regardless of what accounting system you use to track inventory, it's imperative that you build in some solid internal controls surrounding the flow of inventory into and out of your business. In this lesson, you'll learn how to record inventory purchases, receipts, credits, payments, and refunds. You'll also learn how to adjust inventory quantities on-hand should your accounting balance get out of sync with your actual inventory count.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to customize your sales forms to give them a more professional look. You'll also learn how to utilize the class and locations feature when entering transactions. These features are optional but can be used to provide an extra layer of detail to your entry tracking and reporting.

In addition to their overall profitability, some companies also like to track the profitability of a particular job, project, or customer. To help make this easier, QuickBooks has a built-in Projects feature to track this information. In this lesson, you'll learn how to create and track the profitability of a project in QuickBooks.

When it comes time to invoice your customers, there's no "one size fits all" approach. Some companies can avoid invoicing entirely, while other situations may warrant a lengthier invoicing procedure. In this lesson, you'll enter the world of progress invoicing. You'll see how progress invoicing is used in conjunction with the project tracking that was introduced in the last lesson. In addition to progress invoicing, this lesson is going to dive into the difficult topic of recording bad debts.

In this lesson, you'll learn what QuickBooks's capabilities are for processing payroll. Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks, charges additional subscription fees to fully take advantage of processing payroll using the program. You'll also learn how to record the sale and redemption of gift cards in your business.

In this lesson, you'll practice with recording both new and existing fixed asset balances. Since fixed asset balances are often large in nature, such as the purchase of a building, equipment, or a delivery truck, businesses may acquire a loan to assist in the purchase. You'll learn how to enter these loan balances, any related down payment amounts, and payments on these loans when the time comes.

In this lesson, you'll learn a bit more about different business entities and how those differences impact the way you'll set up and interact with QuickBooks Online. This lesson will also cover those seemingly frequent situations where the owner of a business mixes business and personal funds or invests or draws funds directly to or from the business.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to create bank rules that will help you streamline the reconciliation process. You'll also learn how you can enter a forecasted budget for your business and how to generate some great reports that will allow you to evaluate your actual business performance against your planned budget information.

In this lesson, you'll explore how QuickBooks handles receipts and payments in a foreign currency. You may or may not end up using this feature on a daily basis, but with the rise of online commerce, even many small businesses are selling their products (and sometimes services) internationally. You'll also learn how to track and record vehicle mileage for your company vehicle or vehicles. For some businesses, mileage tracking can get a little tedious, but it's a necessary task as you can usually convert the cost of these miles and use it as a tax deduction at the end of the year.

In the final lesson, you'll learn how to finalize your numbers at the end of each month (or year) and how best to evaluate your business performance. If you're new to accounting, you'll get an overview of the accounting cycle. You'll learn more about what steps in the cycle you are responsible for and which steps the system will handle for you. Then, you'll learn some tips on how to identify some common problems that may occur in your day-to-day bookkeeping and how best to resolve these problems. You'll also learn what it means to adjust and close the books at month-end and how to create those critical Financial Statements.