How To Setup Preferences in QuickBooks 2019

Watch QuickBooks video tutorial below. In this lesson, you will learn how to set up preferences that you can modify to make it easier for you to work with QuickBooks 2019. Among the options, we will look into are accounting, general, items and inventory, jobs and estimates, payments and payrolls and employees.

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We’re actually starting now on module three and this is the module where we’re going to talk a little bit about customizing the QuickBooks environment.

You want to go through and look at all the preferences before you get started because there are some things you’re going to want to turn on or off to make QuickBooks a little bit easier for you as you’re getting things set up.

The other thing is I mentioned to you when we went through the Easy Step Interview that you could go back and change every one of those answers you put in there. Most of those answers are going to be in the Preferences.

So I want to take a few minutes, go through all the preferences with you.

We obviously won’t have time to hit them all because there’s so many, but we’ll hit the high points and if there’s some you want to come back and look at later you can certainly feel free to do that. Let’s go ahead and flip over now and I’ll show you how to get to the Preferences in QuickBooks.

All the preferences are located under the Edit option on the menu. And you’ll see Preferences at the very bottom of the list here.

The way this screen works is you have these options on the left and typically when you come in it’s on the General Option automatically. And each one of these will have a tab that says My Preferences and also one that says Company Preferences.

You’ll want to look under both when you’re looking for your options.

I want to start at the very top with the one that says Accounting and just goes through a couple of things with you. And I’m going to start on the Company Preferences tab.

There are actually three things here that would be of interest to you and let’s go ahead and start with this first one. It says Use Account Numbers. I’m going to Cancel this for a moment.

What we’re going to do a little bit later in this particular module is we’re going to go through the Chart of Accounts and get all that set up. And if you remember I told you that the Chart of Account is the most important thing in QuickBooks.

It’s located right here on your Home screen. Let me show you what it currently looks like and then I’ll turn that option on and show you what it looks like then.

Right now your Chart of Accounts is set up by type and you can see when the type is the same for these then they’ll be alphabetical. For example, if you look down here where these expense accounts are starting right here you’ll notice they are alphabetical here.

Some people like to use general ledger numbers. You’ll notice there aren’t any right now but we’re going to turn those on.

I’m going to go back to the Preferences. Again they’re under Edit, Preferences. I’m under the Accounting option on the left and I’m going to choose the Company Preferences tab.

Right here is a checkbox that says Use Account Numbers. I’ll check that and click OK. And now you’ll see you have general ledger numbers.

This is just an option. You don’t have to use them. Like I said if you’d rather not then they’re going to be set up alphabetical by type. Let me go back in here and go back to Preferences.

On this same screen, there’s another option that says Use Class Tracking for Transactions. Let me explain what this function does.

This will allow you to actually take each transaction and segment it by a different list. Now here’s what I mean by that. Right now you can run reports on the company as a whole. You can see if you’re making money, losing money, all the numbers in all your different accounts. But what if you need to break your business down even further?

For example, maybe you have different departments in your organization and you need to run a profit and loss per department or maybe you have two locations and you’d like to run a profit and loss for each location. That could be your class list.

If you turn this feature on what will happen is each transaction will have an extra field and there will be a dropdown for you to pick the class. The class can be any list you’d like to set up.

As I said, it could be locations, it could be departments, whatever you’d like that list to be. And then you could run reports based on those. Not every business will use this feature but it is a great little feature if you need it.

The other thing I want to mention on this screen is down here you have an option to Close The Books. If you’re not familiar with this term this is what happens when you close the books. Typically in accounting you close the books at the end of every month and then you’ll close them at the end of the year.

Let’s say you’ve closed the books through the end of July and you happen to be looking prior to July and you see an entry you’ve put in twice. You can’t just go delete that entry. What you need to do is make an offsetting entry in the current period. And that’s the correct way to do your accounting.

QuickBooks does not close the books for you. It doesn’t warn you. You have to know to come to this screen. You would set a date and a password for that closing. And then what would happen is if you tried to make a change prior to that it would actually pop up and warn you.

All right let’s go look down the list at some others here. Let’s go down to the General option. And when you make some of these changes it will ask you if you’d like to save them.

I’m going to go back and click the My Preferences tab here and remember this is the one that pops up automatically when you first come into the Preferences option. Everyone will want to check this box right here. Pressing Enter moves between the fields.

If you’ve used QuickBooks before one of the things you’ll find is when you start typing in a form, let’s say you happen to be in an invoice, for example, and you hit the Enter key thinking you’re going to move to the next field you actually save and close that transaction and it’ll really confuse you if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

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In this case, you’ll notice that I can press Enter now or the Tab key to move between the fields.

There’s a lot of little options here. Like do you want it to beep when you record a transaction, things like that. You might want to turn off your popup messages for products and services that Intuit wants to try to sell you.

I would also choose this one here, Automatically recall the last transaction for this name. What this does is let’s say that you write a check and you make it payable to your electric company and you fill all the information in on the check.

The next time you write you check and you pull in that same name it’ll prepopulate the whole check with the last entry and then you can change anything that you need. It’s really a great time saver and it keeps your accounting consistent that way.

The other thing is you probably want to Use today’s date as default. That means that on every transaction you’ll have the current date but you can change it if you need to.

The only time that I like to use this one is if I happen to be going back several months, maybe doing a whole year’s worth at a time. It’s a little bit easier if I have the last entered date on those transactions. But I’m going to put it back on Use today’s date as the default.

Moving along on the left here I’m going to go down to Items & Inventory and I’ll save my changes. I’m going to click the Company Preferences tab this time. If you remember in the Easy Step Interview one of the questions was, “Do you want to track inventory, yes or no”.

If you say Yes these will be checked already and they will actually show up on your Home screen. Let me show you what I’m talking about. I’m going to cancel this for just a moment and then we’ll come back.

Let me flip back to my Home screen. Now you’ll notice in the Vendor section here there’s only an Enter Bills and a Pay Bills option. There’s no options there for purchase orders or receiving inventory.

Let me go ahead and change that option. Again I’m going to Edit, Preferences, Items & Inventory, the Company Preferences tab, and I’m going to check these. Now when I click OK QuickBooks will close all the windows to change this particular preference. Now you’ll notice I have options for purchase orders, receiving inventory, and entering bills against inventory.

Let me go back to Preferences again. Jobs & Estimates is the next one on the list. Again I’ll choose the Company Preferences tab. If you happen to work with jobs and construction is a prime example.

Then, you’ll want to track somewhere in QuickBooks that certain jobs might be pending, they might be in progress, those types of things. And you might have different terminology for those jobs and here’s where you can change that.

If you remember in the Easy Step Interview it did ask us if we want to create estimates. Here’s those options right here. You could say Yes or No. It also asked if we wanted to do the progress invoicing. And again here are those options.

Let’s take a look at Payments over here next. There’s one option here that I just want you to be aware of and that is I’m under the Company Preferences tab, that’s this option here, Use undeposited funds as default deposit to account.

Now this may not make sense right now but it will later on when we talk about receiving payments from customers. If we have this turned on all of the payment money will automatically go into the Chart of Accounts in this account called Undeposited Funds.

If we uncheck this we’ll be able to choose the account we’d like to put the money into. We will be coming back to this so you can see the difference when we get to the section where we talk about working with customer payments.

Also be aware that you have this option here where your customers can actually pay you online through Intuit. Intuit has a service that’s very much like PayPal where if you want customers to be able to click a button on an invoice you send them and then actually pay you that way you would have to go and actually set that feature up.

The next thing is Payroll & Employees over here on the left. One of the questions it asked us in the Easy Step Interview was, do you want to use the payroll feature, yes or no.

Here I can turn on full payroll options, I can choose no payroll or you can see some of the other options down here. If you want to see the employees listed by first name, by last name, there’s just a lot of different options here.

Let’s go ahead and stop this video at this particular point and what I want to do is come into part two and we will continue talking about some of these preferences.

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