Have you suddenly become your own bookkeeper? Managing your QuickBooks banking for the first time and unsure where to begin?

You’re in the right place if your QuickBooks is already set up and your bank accounts synced.

In this blog post you’ll larn about:

• Workflow
• Money in/out
• How to review banking in QuickBooks Online

I’ll show you where to start and best practices to keep your books in order.

Dashboard

When you sign in to QuickBooks Online, you’ll see the Dashboard. The dashboard shows you an overview of your business, including income, expenses, bank accounts, and more.

Feel free to click around the dashboard and check out the various information it provides. 

I won’t be doing a full dashboard overview in this tutorial. Instead, I’d like to focus on how most people use QuickBooks. To record money in and money out.

Workflow

When I begin working with clients, I first like to review a workflow to ensure they don’t make mistakes. 

The workflow begins by recording money in and money out.

Then, a check ensures no transactions get missed or duplicated. Finally, another check ensures the transactions are in the correct categories.

It can be more complicated than that. But, beginning with making sure money in and out is correctly recorded, will ensure you’re on the right path.

Money In and Money Out

When a bank account is connected to QuickBooks, it provides a one-way sync. The data comes from the bank, is entered into QuickBooks, and then sits in a holding spot for you to process. 

This is the “money in/out,” a list of what you’ve received or spent.

These transactions reported by your bank need to be properly categorized and then added to the register.

Navigating to Banking

There are two ways to get to banking to see these transactions.

From the dashboard under BANK ACCOUNTS on the right-hand side, you can click on the account you’d like to work in.

If you’re not on the dashboard, click Transactions -> Bank transactions in the left-hand menu.

Either of these methods will bring you to the banking section of QuickBooks Online.

Here, you’ll see the bank accounts you have connected to QuickBooks.

When an account is selected, you’ll see all the transactions imported from that account into QuickBooks.

The bank accounts can appear on the screen in two different ways. You may see a view that looks like this, where there’s a dropdown you use to switch between bank accounts:

Or you may see tiles for each account like this:

I prefer the tiled version.

For Review

The “For Review” tab should be selected. Click on DATE to get the oldest transactions at the top of the list.

In this example, there are 21 transactions to process. 

Twenty-one is not a big deal. In the real world, you might have a backlog of a hundred or more transactions. That could be overwhelming and not doable in one sitting. Start with the oldest to ensure you’re always working towards getting caught up.

Let’s go over the columns on this page:

• Date
  This is the date that the transaction showed up on your bank statement.
• Description
  This is the transaction description that appears on your bank statement.
• Payee
  This column shows the person or business you spent or sent your money with.  QuickBooks won’t force you to fill this in, but if you want to do your accounting right, you should fill this field in.
• Category or Match
  QuickBooks will make category suggestions, often very poorly. I suggest reviewing the category for every transaction and ensuring it’s correct.
• Spent / Received
  Shows the transaction amount and whether the money went into or out of the account.
• Action
  This is what you click on after reviewing the transaction. This moves it from the “For Review” section into the register.

Reviewing a Transaction

Let’s go over reviewing a transaction. I’ll start with the one at the top of my list for Chin’s Gas.

Clicking anywhere on the transaction expands it and allows me to edit it.

The first box you’ll see, “Vendor/Customer,” is where you enter the Payee. 

When the amount is in the SPENT column, vendors are at the top of the list. You’ll see customers first if the amount is in the RECEIVED column.

If you don’t see the vendor/customer you want, click “Add new” at the top of the list to add them.

For this example, I’ll pick “Chin’s Gas and Oil.”

Next is the Category box. The category is how you tell QuickBooks why you spent or received the money.

One thing you never want to do is select the account you’re in as the category. For example, I’m in a checking account.  I would not choose “checking” for the category; this doesn’t make sense.

For this example, I’ll pick the category “Utilities: Gas and electric.”

If you’d like to enter any notes about the transaction, you can do so in the Memo field.

Once you’re satisfied, click the green “Add” button.

Once you click that button, the transaction is removed from your “For Review” list. It’s been added to the register.

The money gets deducted from your checking account. Not in real life, that’s already happened. Finally, the expense or income on your Profit and Loss report gets updated accordingly.

That’s the end of part one. In the next part, we’ll go over reconciling your bank accounts.

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If you’d like to watch me walk through this process check out the video below: