A QuickBooks Guide for Austin Small Businesses and Startups

Step1: Enter basic business information

After signing up and logging in, you’ll need to set up your company preferences and information. From the dashboard,click the gear icon and select ‘Account and Settings.’ Choose the ‘Company’ tab to add details like your company name,type, contact information, address, and logo. You’ll also be prompted to import financial data from any other bookkeeping or accounting software you were using.

Step 2: Choose your financial preferences

In this section, you can adjust your financial preferences related to sales, expenses, and advanced settings. Update items such as credit card payments, VAT details, invoice automation, and your company’s year-end date to ensure accurate reporting.

Step 3: Import your business data

In case you already have business data in the form of MS Excel files, CSV Files, Intuit Interchange Format or Web Content file. You can automatically import it to your QuickBooks online app. In this way, you don’t have to start from scratch. You can import information such as your Charts of Accounts, bank transactions, employees, customer, budgets, or vendor data.

Step 4: Configure your chart of accounts

A chart of accounts is a fundamental tool in double-entry bookkeeping. It’s a categorized list of all your company’s financial accounts, used to track income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and equity. In QuickBooks, a basic chart of accounts with 250 optional accounts is set up by default.

Income accounts track revenue from sales, services, or other sources. Expenses accounts record costs associated with running your business, such as salaries, rent, and supplies. Assets represent items of value owned by your company, like cash, inventory, and equipment. Liabilities are debts or obligations owed to others, such as loans and accounts payable. Equity represents the owner’s stake in the business.

The complexity of your business will determine how many accounts you need. Startups and freelancers may find the default chart sufficient, while larger enterprises might require more granular sub-accounts to track specific financial activities. You can customize your chart of accounts by adding or deleting accounts, creating sub-accounts, and modifying account types.

Need help configuring your chart of accounts? Schedule a free consultation with Austin Bookkeeping Hub to discuss your specific needs and get expert guidance.

Step 5: Connect your bank and credit cards

At this step, you can sync your bank accounts and cards with your QuickBooks online account. QuickBooks will save your time by automatically downloading and categorizing your previous transactions from your accounts.

For connecting bank and credit card accounts, Head to ‘Bank Accounts’ on your dashboard and click ‘Connect account’. Look for your bank and sign in. After successful connection, you will be able to see all of the accounts you hold with this bank, so select your business account, and then select the transactions you want to transfer over to your QuickBooks account. Select the transaction, approve it to be added and categorized.

Step 6: Set up payroll

By adding your payroll to QuickBooks you can categorize your payroll expenses. In this way, you don’t need to set up a separate bookkeeping system for payroll. It allows you to see exactly what your monthly spending on staff wages is.

For this step, go to ‘Payroll Settings’ and then ‘Setup Overview’. Here you can add vital information for your QuickBooks Payroll, such as Pay policies (your payment schedules and vacation policies), Tax setup, Deductions (in case you have standard deductions for all employees, like health insurance or retirement plan ) and preferences.

Once you are done, head to ‘Accounting’ from the setup overview screen, choose ‘Company and Account’. Decide which account will be used to track payroll expenses. You can add employees in the Employee’s section at your dashboard. From here you can add your employees’ details.

Step 7: Reconcile regularly

To make the best use of your QuickBooks Online you need to keep it up to date. For this purpose, you should reconcile your accounts regularly. Reconciliation helps you to match your bookkeeping records with your bank and credit card statements. Regular reconciliation (weekly or monthly) will save you from headaches further down the line. For reconciliation, click the gear icon and select ‘Reconcile’. Choose the bank account and enter the ending balance and end date from your statement. After that click ‘Start Reconciling. Check the transactions in QuickBooks against those on your bank statement. At the end, the difference amount should be zero. If it’s otherwise, you need to find missing transactions, check the date of transactions or the amount of each transaction.