Preferences in QuickBooks 2019 – Part 2

During this QuickBooks 2019 training tutorial video, we will continue to look into more of the options found under preferences such as reminders, reports and graphs, sales and customers, send forms and time and expenses.

We are still talking about the Preferences in QuickBooks. This is actually part two of the first section, which is Preferences.

Let’s go ahead and look at the Reminders next. I’m under the Company Preferences tab and what you see here is a list of things that QuickBooks will remind you that you have to take care of. You can show the summary, the list or say Don’t remind me.

The summary basically means instead of listing out each individual check to print, for example, it will say Checks to print and it will say you have five and tell you the total amount of those checks. If you say Show the list you will see each one individually.

Some of these you’ll also notice that you can be reminded of X amount of days ahead of time and you can change that number.

What’s a little different here is unlike other programs where you actually have a popup that tells you that something is due on a particular date and time this won’t pop up.

What will happen is when you open your company file on that date and time you said to remind you-you’re going to have a window that pops up that just kind of lists all of these things in there.

The next thing down is your reports and graphs. We’re going to be looking at a lot of reports a little bit later on, but one thing I wanted you to notice is that your reports are automatically shown on an accrual basis.

And if you don’t know what that means, it basically means that it will show income as soon as you create an invoice, for example, whether it’s paid or not.

And it will show your expenses when you put the bill in as an expense already occurring even though you may not have actually paid that bill. We’ll talk more about that when we get to the actual section where we’re looking at reports.

Sales & Customers is the next one down. You’ll notice that if you’re under the My Preferences tab there are a couple of things that you can have QuickBooks talk to you about. For example, you have a feature called Time/Cost in QuickBooks.

What that basically means is that if you incur expenses that you need to be reimbursed for you can actually have QuickBooks popup and remind you of those expenses when you’re on an invoice putting in a customer name and job, for example. And we’ll see how that works when we start talking about invoicing.

Now I’m going to skip a couple down here. I’m going to go down to Send Forms real quick. I’m on the Send Forms option now and you notice I’m under the Company Preferences tab.

One of the features you’ll find in QuickBooks is that you have the ability to email a form to a customer, a vendor, etcetera. For example, I might create an invoice for a customer and instead of sticking it in the mail I might actually just click a button to send them an email and it will be attached.

This is the generic what I call coversheet that goes with it. You can see they’ve got a basic one here and I can edit that one if I’d like. And you’ll see that it pulls in from certain fields in QuickBooks, the person’s first and last name.

You can kind of see what’s here and you can edit this as I said. You can also go in and add your own templates and create your own if you want to do that. All the way down to Time & Expenses. That’s the last one I want to mention to you.

Remember in the Easy Step Interview when it asked, Would you like to track the time in QuickBooks? You could say Yes or No here. And also set the first day of your work week.

You’ll see also down here that if you have some expenses you can mark them as billable automatically or you can have it track reimbursed expenses as income.

That’s really all of your options there that I wanted to go over with you. There’s a lot of them we skipped over. Make sure that when you’ve gone through these that you go back through them and see if there’s any you missed that you might like to go ahead and turn on.

Some of these you may not be able to turn on or off until after you start using QuickBooks and you realize that you need or don’t need them.

I’m going to go ahead and click OK now and I’m back to the Home screen.

That wraps up the Preferences part of this particular module.

The next thing we’re going to talk about is how to work with the users.

Cindy McGuckin

Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education.Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.