QuickBooks 2020 – Section 1 Transcript
The transcripts below come from the QuickBooks 2020 course on Simon Sez IT. You can follow along for free by watching the free QuickBooks 2020 course.
Welcome and Overview
Cindy: Hi there. Welcome to QuickBooks Pro 2020. My name is Cindy McGuckin and I’m going to be here to help walk you through this series of videos. I wanted to go ahead and film this welcome video real quick just to make sure that you knew what to expect as you go through this series. I’ve actually been teaching QuickBooks for about 20 years now and I find QuickBooks to be a really user friendly software program. I want to make it really easy for you as you go through these so I’m going to go ahead and break these down in very simple terms.
I’m going to start at the very beginning. I’m not going to assume you know anything. And that way you’ll have a good foundation as you move through to the next video. Make sure you watch these in order so that it will make sense. And if you’ve been using QuickBooks for a while and you just want to see some of the new features you can go ahead and skip over to section four if you have a PC or section five if you happen to have a MAC.
Once we get through the module one, which is the intro module, we’ll actually go into module two and actually get started setting up your company file. Go ahead and make sure you have pen and paper so you can take some notes, and like I said watch these in order and if you have questions as you go along feel free to shoot us an email and let us know and we’ll get right back to you.
Let’s go ahead and jump right in to section two and I want to talk to you a little bit about the desktop version versus the online version.
QB Desktop vs. Online Version
Cindy: Intuit offers both a desktop version of QuickBooks and an online version. I wanted to take a few moments and tell you a little bit about each one. That way you can make an informed decision when you get ready to decide which one you’d like to use. Let’s start with the desktop version.
Every year in September they come out with the next version. Usually it’s the first or second week in September. Currently they’re on the 2020 version. They only support three versions back. Right now they’re supporting 2019 and 2018. That means if you have a previous version it will still work but you won’t get any of the updates, maybe they have a patch that they want to send out, maybe you’re signed up with the Intuit payroll service, you wouldn’t get updates. So you want to think about at least upgrading to the current version every third year.
They do make a MAC version as well. There’s also a U.S. version and a Canadian version of QuickBooks. We’re going to be using the desktop U.S. version for these videos.
Now let’s take a minute and talk about the online version. This is subscription based. That means that you will have to sign up for a monthly subscription and pay that fee every month. And they’ve got several different ones you can choose from. The advantage to having the online subscription is that you can access your QuickBooks file from anywhere in the whole wide world. If you happen to have a virtual assistant then they could have a login, you could access it when you go on vacation. It’s really a nice little feature in that respect.
If you don’t need that I always suggest you go back to the desktop version because it’s a lot more user friendly, it’s got a lot more options than the online version has. But I do want to take you to the Intuit website where you can compare some of the subscription pricing and see what’s available. Give me just a second and I’ll pull it up.
This is a comparison of all of the online subscription services that they have to offer. If you want to see this screen just do a quick Google search. You can type in the Search box QuickBooks Online Comparisons and this will be one of the links that you can choose.
I want to go ahead and talk to you a little bit about each one of these. That way you’ll know what each one has to offer. And notice that you can try any of these for free for the first 30 days. You may want to start there. But these are the monthly prices they have right now and you’ll notice they’re all 50% off for the first three months. So that price is going to increase.
Let’s start with the Simple Start. This is designed for the person who’s just starting their business. You really don’t have a lot of expenses yet or you don’t have a lot of customers yet, that sort of thing. You can see that it allows you to have one user that can log in. It will track your income and expenses, your mileage. You can go ahead and invoice customers once you start getting some new customers. You can actually run some really basic reports. You can actually do sales tax, 1099 contractors, but some things you can’t do that I feel are really important and one of them is managing your bills. The bills are the things that you have to pay monthly that may come in the mail or they may be automatic payments but they’re still bills that you owe and you need a way to track those. I suggest you at least move up to the next one called Essentials where you can manage your bills and track your time.
Now you’ll notice that this one does not do inventory. If inventory is something you need then you’ll need to move up to the Plus subscription, which is the most popular one. And you can see here that it includes your inventory and you can track what they call Job or Project Profitability.
You’ll notice that the last one, the Advanced one, this is actually designed to do everything in QuickBooks and the one thing I want to point out for all of these is you’ll notice this one allows you have up to 25 users. That means there are 25 people that can have their own username and password and actually login. Whereas this one allows you up to five, this one up to three, and this one up to one. Most people don’t need more than three to five. I do actually suggest most people start with this one and then upgrade later if you need to.
The other thing I wanted to mention is you do have this full service Live Bookkeeping over here and you can see it says it starts at $235 a month. This is really a great feature for someone who wants to be out in the field or needs to be on the road and they need someone else do their books for them. This is just like hiring a bookkeeper.
The neat thing about this is that both you and this bookkeeper can actually talk live and you can also both be in your company file at the same time while you’re discussing what’s going on with your books.
Those are going to be your options right there for signing up for one of the different subscriptions for the QuickBooks online.
One other thing I wanted to mention is if you currently have the desktop version and you wanted to actually take your data and move it up to the online version you can do that fairly easily. However, if you decide you’d like to go the other way, maybe you start with the online version and you really don’t like it and you want to go back to the desktop version Intuit will have to get involved and they’ll have to actually go ahead and back up your file for you and then they’ll help you actually restore it back to your desktop version.
That’s pretty much all I wanted to tell you about the two different versions of QuickBooks, the desktop and online. I do want to move into section three and talk to you about the different versions of the desktop version of QuickBooks because there’s several different choices you’ll have when you go to make your purchase. Let’s go ahead and flip over to section three.
Desktop Versions Explained
Cindy: There are several different versions of QuickBooks desktop and I want to go through a broad level of all three of these just to give you a little bit of information so that when you’re out to make your purchase then you’ll know which one works best for your company. Let me just head over to Intuit’s website. I want to show you a QuickBooks desktop comparison and we’ll go through some of the options.
If you’ve decided you want to go with the desktop version of QuickBooks you need to know that there are three basic tiers of levels for the desktop version. If you go to QuickBooks.Intuit.com/desktop then you can see this same screen right here and it will help you make your decision a little bit easier, but let me give you a little bit of information about each one.
The Pro version is typically where most small business owners start and it is the version we’re going to be using throughout this set of videos. You can have up to three users in a company file in the Pro version.
When you go up to the Premier version you can have up to five users and the Premier edition actually has some industry specific tools as well. And what that means is that they actually sell different versions of the Premier. For example, there is a contractors edition, there is a real estate edition. And that means they will set up a lot of the lists based on that type of business. Now you can set up your own list with the Pro and use it for those particular industries but Premier has a lot of it already set up.
When you get to the Enterprise edition you’re going to be able to set up up to 30 users and this is the one that has the most power right here. If you’re just starting out though you’re not going to want to start with Enterprise. It’s way to expensive. You would start with the Pro and upgrade if you need to.
But I want to show you that there are a lot of features that they all have. For example, they all have the ability to track income and expenses, you can do invoicing, run reports, send estimates, track your sales tax, manage bills, and track your time. Let’s see what else is down here. You can also track your inventory, you have list limits and you can pay your 1099 contractors. And that’s really all the stuff that the average small business owner would need anyway, but let’s look at some of the other options that you only find in the Premier and Enterprise and that’s the forecasting, which allows you to basically look at how your business is doing now and forecast how it might do in the coming months or years. You also have industry specific features. If you happen to purchase the real estate edition then you would already have some of the features specific to real estate built into it. You only have these last features available in the Enterprise edition. That’s your mobile inventory barcode scanning, you have access to the QuickBooks priority circle which is a group of other users and support available for Enterprise users, you have the advanced pick pack and ship option and you can have up to 30 users as we talked about.
Go ahead and check out this site. Again it’s QuickBooks.Intuit.com/desktop. And check this out before you go out and make your purchase just to make sure you’re getting the one that will work best for you.
Let’s go ahead now and go over into section four and we’re going to talk about some of the new features in the PC version of the QuickBooks 2020.
QB 2020 New Features Overview – PC Version
Cindy: QuickBooks 2020 had several new features for the PC version and the MAC version this year. I wanted to go ahead and talk to you about the changes for the PC version and over in section five we can talk about the MAC version changes as well. Let me go ahead and show you the six new changes. I’m going to give you a quick overview and then I will actually take you into QuickBooks and we’ll look at each one of these.
Of the six changes none of these are really earth shattering but let’s go ahead and go through these quickly.
The company file search is new. If you happen to open QuickBooks and you’d like to see a particular company file that’s not on the list you can actually search from within QuickBooks now and go find that company file. I’ll show you how that works.
The second thing is we now have automated customer payment reminders. You can actually send reminders to customers who owe you money and it’s really not automated because you still do have to go in and actually tell QuickBooks which customers you’d like to send it to, but it is a little bit nicer that you have that feature now.
The next thing is that in your emails you can actually now add a customer PO to the subject line. I’ll go through and show you how to do that because that’s very helpful when you have customers that work with purchase orders.
You now can also collapse your columns in your job and class reports. Job and class reports are typically really long from left to right, so it’s a really nice feature that you can go in and collapse those columns.
You also can look at the payroll status for a direct deposit. You’re going to be able to see, for example, if the payroll has been processed yet, if the money has been sent to the bank, or if your money has been sent to the employee.
And the last thing I want to mention is the ability to combine multiple emails for single customers and jobs, employees, or vendors all at one time so you don’t have to send multiple emails.
Let’s go ahead and flip over to QuickBooks and I will show you how these things work.
You’ve opened QuickBooks and you’d like to open a company file that’s not on this list here. You could go ahead and use the Open option and search your computer but you now you have an option called Find a Company File that will look through QuickBooks and then search your computer for it. All you have to do is type the name of the company file you’d like here and then go ahead and hit the Find option and you’ll see that is has found that file for you. Notice that it tells you all the information like the date it was modified, the location. All you have to do is click on it and then you can choose Open. And by the way, if you wanted to look on a flash drive, for example, or some removable type of media or on the network you can choose those options over here. I’m going to go ahead and hit Open and it’s going to open my new company file. And that’s really all there is to that.
The next new feature in QuickBooks is the ability to have automated payment reminders sent out to your customers. These are not really automated because you still have to go in and tell QuickBooks to actually send them but I want to show you where the feature is and give you an idea of how it works. We’re going to go in depth into this particular option over in module four, section six. The option happens to be under Customers on the menu, then you’ll want to come down to Payment Reminders. There are three things you have to set up, starting with the mailing list. This is just a list of all of the customers that you have predetermined are going to get an overdue invoice notice when they’re 30 days overdue or one day overdue in this case. You would have to create those lists and that’s what I’m going to show you how to do when we get to module four.
The next part of this, going back to Customers and back to Payment Reminders is to schedule those payment reminders. And this is for you. You can actually set it up so that if anyone is over one day due, and that’s based on that list I just showed you, then it will remind you and show you a list of all of those customers. The same thing with the 30 day ones.
The last part of it is actually going in and telling QuickBooks that you’re ready to send those reminders via email. That’s going to be the Review & Send Payment Reminders option. This is a list of the three customers that met my criteria. In this case it looks like they are one day past due, but you can see over here that it has the person I’m clicked on, it has their email address, their invoice that’s overdue, and then it has a little body for the particular email. And all you have to do is go in and edit it as a one time thing if you would like to. You’ll notice if I click on the second one over here that the invoice changes and also the email address changes because it reflects the particular customer you’re sending it to. And then you would just say Send Now and that’s how those work. Like I said, we’ll go in depth in that over in module four, section six.
QuickBooks will now pull the purchase order number if you have one set up on your invoice. It’ll actually pull it into the subject line if you’re going to email this to your customer. If I come up here and click Email and I Email Invoice you’ll notice that right here it shows me the PO number. Now it won’t automatically do it unless you’ve set this up in the Preferences first. I’m going to Cancel and just show you quickly where to go to do that.
You’re going to click on the Edit option from the menu, come down to Preferences, you’ll choose Send Forms on the left and make sure you’re on the Company Preferences tab. Now in here typically you will see the basic invoice already set up. It will not let you edit that one. That means you’ll have to create your own and you’ll do that by adding a template. You’ll notice that when I click Add Template it pulled in all of the information from the basic one so I don’t have to type it over but I could if I wanted to edit any of this information. But I wanted you to notice the subject line currently does not have the PO number. I’m just going to put a little space in there and then come down here where it says Insert Field and I’m going to choose the customer PO number and that’s all you have to do. Just hit Save and now I’m going to go ahead and click OK. When I go look at the email now you’ll notice that it actually has a field for the PO number there. And like I said, it will pull it if you’ve got it right over here. And then all you do is send it out.
Collapsing your columns and rows in your reports is now really easy to do. I’m looking at a profit and loss by job and in a report like this it’s very long from left to right. If you notice here’s Mike Baalak and Mike has two jobs and then there’s the total for Mike Baalak. All I have to do is come up to this new option that says Collapse Columns at the top and now I’ve collapsed all of my columns and you’ll see I only see the total for Mike Baalak and all of his jobs. If I wanted to expand these I’d go back and expand the columns.
There are a couple of new things as far as payroll is concerned. The first one is if you have QuickBooks 2020 and a brand new subscription for payroll then the employees will be able to go in themselves and actually fill out their payroll information, like their name and their address and their withholdings and so forth. If you have an existing subscription they’re going to be rolling this out over time so you may not have it as soon as you get QuickBooks 2020. Make sure when you open QuickBooks and it asks you to update it that you do that in order to get some of these changes.
Let me go ahead and go real quick up to the Employees you’ll see the Payroll Setup. This is where you’ll be able to go and send your employee an email asking them to go ahead and set up their profile.
The other thing you’ll be able to do is if you have automatic deposit set up there’s going to be a place where you can go in and check to see that that money has actually gone through. A lot of times when you pay employees through direct deposit you don’t know if there was a problem or if they actually got their money. So this is a great feature they’ve added to the QuickBooks 2020.
This last little feature is kind of nice. Basically what it allows you to do is if you’re going to email any form, like an invoice, an estimate, then you have the ability to combine all the ones that go to the same customer or vendor into one email, where before you had to send them separately. The way you do this is go up to File on your menu and if I go down to Send Forms it’s going to give me a list of all of the in this case invoices that I’ve checked the little box on the invoice that I’d like to email them later. There are several different customers in this list. Notice at the bottom this little option to combine forms to recipient in one email and you’ll see now that it’s actually separated these and it will send one email to each of these customers. The only thing you need to know about this is that if you’ve got it set up where you can receive an automatic payment from your customer then that feature does not work if you send this out.
Notice also at the bottom that it’s going to take a minute to send these emails once you hit Send Now. So just know that you won’t be able to use QuickBooks for just a couple of minutes till they’re all sent. And that’s all there is to the Send Forms option right here.
Those are some of the changes, like I said, that are in the new QuickBooks 2020. These are across all the versions so no matter if you have QuickBooks Pro, if you have Premier, if you happen to have the Accountant version or the Enterprise version these are all the ones that are standard across the board.
The one thing I want to say as well is for the Canadian version some of these options may not be in there so just kind of know that.
Now that you’ve had a chance to see the new features that are in the PC version let’s go ahead and head over to module five and talk a little bit about some of the new features that the MAC version has this year.
QB 2020 New Features Overview – MAC Version
Cindy: Intuit did come out with a MAC version this year and they did have some enhancements to the software. I wanted to go ahead and go over a few of those with you just to give you an idea of some of the new features that are in the MAC version 2020.
The first enhancement I’d like to talk about is the dark mode user interface. If you’re a MAC user and you’ve been using the Mojavi operating system 10.14 or anything newer then you’ve probably discovered there is a theme called the Dark Theme that most people are absolutely in love with. What it basically does is shifts nearly all of your onscreen visual elements to dark grays and blacks and many MAC users actually upgraded their operating system just to get this dark theme. Well you’re going to like the fact now that Intuit has totally redesigned their support for this dark mode. It allows customization of your viewing mode within your QuickBooks Pro for MAC. Go ahead and try it out. If you’re not familiar with how to get to the dark mode and turn it on this is all you have to do.
Go to your Apple mode, go to System Preferences, go to General, you’ll see Appearances, and that’s where you’re going to find the Dark Mode. It’s going to allow you a lot of customization of your viewing mode within QuickBooks Pro for your MAC.
Intuit has really spent some time modernizing the reporting features in QuickBooks. You’re going to find that they’re a lot more customizable now, they’re a lot more easy to navigate. And one of the things they’ve done is they’ve actually added a sidebar to your reports for searching. You’re going to see it show up on the same screen as your report on the righthand side and you’re going to be able to easily go in there and look for something, if you want to make a change to something, it’s going to have real time reporting, and those updates show up automatically. You’re really going to like the new modernization they’ve done with all the reporting.
The Company Snapshot feature has really been enhanced as well. What the Company Snapshot allows you to do is see in one central location your most critical business data. And they’ve enhanced this by offering some new customizable data ranges, they have new layouts, new widgets. You’re going to be able to configure the information you want and have it show up exactly the way you want it to and that way you don’t have to run lots of different reports to get some of the information you could see on this one screen in the company snapshot.
You’ve also got a feature in QuickBooks for MAC where you can search through your attachments for different things you might be looking for. And they’ve really improved that search feature a lot. You’ll want to make sure you try that out because you’re going to be able to find things much easier than you used to be able to.
One of the things that most QuickBooks users don’t really know how to handle is a bounced check and they’ve actually enhanced the bounced check processing feature now in QuickBooks for MAC. What happens now is you’re going to have peace of mind because you’re going to know how to handle those bounced checks correctly and with ease. It also avoids you having to contact your accountant to take care of that for you. They’re just going to walk you through that whole bounced check processing and then you’ll see how to enter it in QuickBooks the correct way.
Another new feature is the ability to use the iPhone scanner. It allows you to upload text and searchable images to QuickBooks with your iPhone camera. And what this is going to do is save you a lot of time and money because you can quickly scan through some of your key documents and you can search for some text that might be in some photographed bills, you might have some receipts or invoices you had taken pictures of, purchase orders, tax forms, and you’ll be able to actually search through those images a lot more quickly now that you can actually upload those with your iPhone camera.
Another new feature that you see both in the PC and the MAC version is the Company File search. When you’re actually opening a company file if you don’t see it on that initial screen then you have to go to the Open option and search your computer for that file. And sometimes it’s hard if you have filed your QuickBooks files all over the place in your computer. With that company file search it will search your computer for all of your QuickBooks files, give them to you in a list, and that way you can search that list for the one you might be looking for. That’s a really, really handy feature when you’re looking for different QuickBooks files.
The last one I want to mention is the automated payment reminders that is both in the PC and the MAC version this year. What it allows you to do is easily set reminders for customers that they have invoices that are due. And what that does for you is it allows you to get paid faster. It also reduces time you have to spend following up with customers. They also have very flexible customized reminders that you can send for specific customers. And this is really going to help you out a lot and increase the cash flow in your business.
Those are some of the new features that Intuit has come out with the MAC version this year.
That’s going to ahead and wrap up module one. Let’s go ahead and go over into module two and we’re going to talk about getting started setting up your company file.
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.
