Webinar - QuickBooks (Desktop) for New Nonprofits - 2017-03-08

Becky: Welcome, everyone, to QuickBooks Desktop for New Nonprofit Users. Thanks so much for joining us for today’s TechSoup webinar. We’re glad to have you on. And before we get started with the content, we want to make sure everyone’s comfortable using ReadyTalk, the platform we’re using today to host this webinar. You can chat at any time in the box on the lower, left side of your screen to let us know if you have any questions. If you have any trouble with the audio or the video on your scree

n, or if you just want to chat in to say, “Hi,” we’ll be here on the back end reading those questions and trying to help you with any challenges or questions you may have. We will keep all lines muted today, so we get a clear recording for you to refer to later on or to share with friends and colleagues. Most of you are going to hear the audio play through your computer speakers. So if you’re hearing an echo, you may be logged in more than once, and you’ll need to close additional instances of R

eadyTalk. If at any time the audio and the video are not in sync, or if you have any trouble with the streaming audio, we recommend dialing in to the alternate, toll-free number that Susan has shared out. You can use that at any time during the webinar. If you have a problem with your video, if it goes blank, or if you just aren’t seeing things correctly, we recommend closing out and opening it up again from the confirmation link that you received in either the confirmation or reminder. For thos

e of you registered this morning or received the reminder a little while ago, we do have the slides attached on the right side of that email that you would have gotten, and it’s listed under “Downloadable Files.” It’s a link to the presentation. But keep in mind that during today’s event a lot of the content that will be shared will be done live, sharing a desktop. So it’s not reflected in the slide content. But for any links that we may have in the slides, you’re welcome to open up that deck to

follow along or click through. We are recording today’s event, and you’ll be able to find it, along with our list of upcoming events and past webinars, on techsoup.org/community/events-webinars. You’ll also be able to find it on our TechSoupVideo channel on YouTube. Within a few days, you’ll get an email that follows up from today’s webinar with that full recording to watch at your convenience, the presentation, and any links that we discuss. You can also tweet us @TechSoup or with the hastag #

tswebinars. My name is Becky Wiegand and I am the webinar program manager here at TechSoup, and I’m glad to be your host for today’s event. I am joined by Gregg Bossen who I love doing webinars with because he’s just a lot of fun and super knowledgeable, real seminal pro on using QuickBooks in the nonprofit environment. So I’m happy that he’s joining us today. He is a practicing CPA out of Atlanta and an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. He has a full-service accounting firm and is the f

ounder and CEO of QuickBooks Made Easy, which has a partner program with TechSoup, making his training products available to you, our users, at discounted rates. Since 2000, Gregg has traveled around the country teaching QuickBooks seminars in person. He also teaches them on webinars that they offer directly through QuickBooks Made Easy and also through our programs here at TechSoup. So we’re really glad to have him joining. You’ll see on the back end, helping answer questions in the chat: Debra

Kilsheimer from Behind the Scenes Financial Services; Megan Tarnow from Mobius Group; David Webb from QuickBooks Made Easy; and Susan Hope Bard from TechSoup. We will all do our best to help answer your questions. We are going to have a big crowd today. Right now, we’re over 400 people with that number continuing to climb. So during this 90 minutes, we’ll do our best to answer questions that we can. But keep in mind that this is not intended to be tech support. This is intended to be an opportu

nity to learn, hopefully, some of the basics of the setup. And just looking at the objectives of what we hope you’ll come away with today is that you’ll understand which QuickBooks products are available and which may be best for your needs. So if you’re brand new to QuickBooks, we want to make sure you know where to get them and what option is best suited to accommodate the specific needs that nonprofits usually encounter or need, like reporting grants or tracking funds, reporting in-kind donat

ions. We won’t cover all of those topics in detail, but we want to make sure you know which one is right for your needs. We also hope that you’ll come away having gained some confidence in navigating QuickBooks Premier. We’ll be doing this in 2017 version of the desktop installed product. So if you, maybe, are already using QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks for Mac, we won’t be in those environments during the presentation today. Gregg may show those just so that you get an idea what the differenc

es are on a broad sense, but we will be doing the live demo in QuickBooks Premier 2017 Desktop installed version. We hope that you’ll also get the basics of properly setting up your organization in QuickBooks. And when I say properly setting it up, we know some of you may already come into the environment at your organization with QuickBooks already being used, and it may be set up, but it may not be properly set up. So we want you to have some time to understand why things are set up the way th

ey are in Gregg’s examples, and that you’ll have an idea of what those basic things are, if you’re brand new to using QuickBooks, or if you’re setting up your organization for the first time. I’ll also go over the agenda of what we’ll be covering in just a couple of minutes. But before I do that, I just want to talk a little bit about TechSoup. If you are not familiar with us, we are also a nonprofit, and we help serve civil society organizations like nonprofits, libraries, community foundations

, all around the world, every place on this map that’s blue. So if you’re joining us from the U.S., you’ll want to pay attention to the TechSoup.org programs where you can get QuickBooks donations, and you can get QuickBooks Made Easy trainings. If you’re joining us from outside the Unites States, you’ll want to look at your local or regional representative of TechSoup to see if those are available in your area as well. But I’d love it if you’d chat in to let us know: where are you on this map?

I’m located here in our TechSoup headquarters in San Francisco. And Gregg and David are way over in Atlanta, Georgia, and I believe Debra is someplace in Florida. So let us know: where are you joining today? And like I said, if you’re joining from outside the United States, I recommend visiting TechSoup.Global and choosing your country from the dropdown, so you can see what’s available as far as donations to you. We have some folks joining from the United Kingdom, from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wyomin

g, Tennessee, Pennsylvania. It’s a veritable basket of people from all over the United States, primarily. So, glad to have you on. Looking at the agenda really quickly before I hand it over to Gregg. He’s going to take us through really quickly before starting the live demo, what is QuickBooks for and what it’s really not for. Because that’s a key piece to understand in knowing if it can do what you want it to do. We don’t want to have to shoehorn a tool that’s not the right tool to try and make

it do something it’s not intended for. So he’s going to cover that quickly. And then he’s going to talk about which products are available and which ones are best for nonprofits and libraries. And then we’ll get into the live demo where we hope to have enough time to get through getting around the desktop; the proper setup of your Chart of Accounts; how to track your programs; how to enter donors; how to enter budgets; getting your Budget to Actual reports out, so you can present them to your b

oard meetings. And we hope to answer a lot of your questions during today’s webinar. Before I hand it over to Gregg, just quickly, for those of you who are looking at Intuit donations which Intuit is the company that makes QuickBooks, you can find the different products available through techsoup.org/intuit. You can find the 1-user QuickBooks Premier license, 3-user license, Mac, or QuickBooks Online. And like I said, Gregg will talk to you about which of those may best suit your needs. These ar

e the types of organizations that are eligible for the donated version. So if you’re a legislative or political advocacy group, you are not eligible for this. If your operating budget is over $10 million per year, you are not eligible for the donation, but lots and lots and lots of other orgs are, so we hope you’ll check it out if it’s something you need to fill access for your organization. So with that, I’d like to go ahead and have Gregg tell us a little bit about QuickBooks Made Easy and him

self and then start us off on that demo. Thanks so much for joining us, Gregg! We’re glad to have you on. Gregg: Hello! How is everybody doing? I want to make sure, first of all, that everybody can hear me. So say, “Hi,” in the chat because I can see the chat right now. So everybody say, “Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi,” because I want to see that everybody can hear me. And there was one person from Alaska, by the way, so good morning to you. I think it’s – Oh! We’ve got funny people. They’re like, “Hi. Hi.

Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.” That’s cool. Cool. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Now, this is not going to be your normal webinar. You’re not going to be listening to other stuff, multi-tasking. We’re going to have some fun. I promise you; It’s going to be interesting. If you do stop listening, though, that will hurt my feelings. I’ve got some emotional issues, so it’s very important that you continue to stay engaged. Otherwise, I’ll have to add time to my lifelong therapy sessions that I’m constantly

in. First of all, I have an accounting firm in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m a CPA, and I’ve been in practice for about 25 years. Then I also own QuickBooks Made Easy. Alright, in QuickBooks Made Easy, what we’re all about is we’re all about teaching people how to use QuickBooks in specific industries. And the main industry that we’ve been involved with over the last few years - primarily because I love nonprofits - is the nonprofit industry. So how do we train people how to use QuickBooks if you’re a

nonprofit? Well, three main ways: we have training products; we have tech support; we do live seminars, and then we do webinars. We’ll talk a little bit at the end because I’m gonna have a pretty nice deal for you to get training products and tech support at a much cheaper price than anybody else is going to be able to get it. We’ll talk about that at the end. But before we do that, you need to see whether or not I’m any good, right? If you are lucky enough to be in any of these cities - and we’

re adding more - these are some of the cities that we are going to be in this year. We don’t have the dates set for a number of them, but if you go to our QuickBooks Made Easy website, you’ll see we’re going to Montana for the first time this year, which is kind of exciting. Texas, we’ve been to before. We have some webinar series, Philadelphia, Atlanta. Anyway, that’s some of the places that we’re going to. I think what I’ll do – Let me get here. We’re having – There we go. We’ll talk about th

is discount thing later. I kind of want to get moving here, so we’ll talk about the discount off the products. We’ll worry about that at the end. The first thing that I want to do, because I like diving right in – Don’t worry. We’re going to spend the vast majority of this webinar in the program, talking about how to set things up, so don’t worry about that. But I did want to find out from you guys what kind of product that you have. I think we have a poll here. I’m not sure. Becky, can I start

this poll, or did it start? Who starts the poll? I’d like for somebody to start that. Becky: Yep. It’s already started. So go ahead and answer: how new are you to QuickBooks? Yep. Just opening it up starts it. Tell us which one of these most applies to you. Gregg: Yeah, this is a webinar for people that are brand new. So we’ve got: Never seen it! Scared! - And every, single person needs to answer, and I’ll know if you didn’t answer, and it’ll make me feel upset - Saw it, closed it. Super-scared!

Kinda know QuickBooks, but not well. The fourth one. Listen to me: Knows QuickBooks but not for nonprofits. Let me tell you: the setup for a nonprofit is extremely unique from all other businesses. So you may know QuickBooks really, really well, but not know how to use it for nonprofits, and that’s why it’s so important to go to webinars and get trainings like this. So many people out there, they’ll go, “I know QuickBooks!” And then they screw it up when it comes to a nonprofit. Knows QuickBook

s for nonprofits, lots of questions though. I’m a QuickBooks master, here to heckle, and then Other. Let’s see who we have. Go ahead and display the results now. Or is it being displayed as we go? It looks like it. Becky: Yes. As people submit, they should see the results coming in. Gregg: Alright, cool. Becky: We can leave it open for a couple more seconds, so everyone can get a chance to vote. Gregg: We’ve got over a hundred people that are either never seen it, or they’ve seen it, and they’re

scared. So that’s like almost a quarter of the people that are on the line. So don’t worry guys; we’re going to baby through the very beginning. We’re just going to show you what the screens look like. We’re going to make this very calm and easy for you. Most people, 170 people, know QuickBooks, but they don’t know it that well. Then another 40 - so that’s a total of over 200 people - kinda know QuickBooks, but don’t really know it for nonprofits. We got about 50 people that know it for nonprof

its but have questions. And then, of course, there are six people that are masters, and they’re here to heckle. That’s always nice. I’m going to go ahead and skip to the results. I assume I push that. There we go. That’s pretty interesting. We got a chunk of people that don’t know QuickBooks at all. Those of you that know it well, rather than feeling like this beginning part is a waste of your time, please look on it as a way to make yourself feel good about yourself. And I promise you; you’re g

oing to learn. Let me tell you: I learn every time I teach. So I don’t care how well you know QuickBooks, you’re going to learn today. I promise. And we’ll be able to do questions through the chat, and then also I’ll stop occasionally and do some questions live that Becky will ask me. This is basically the agenda that we’re going to cover. We’ve already covered the first topic which is – Let me get the little mouse here – is what QuickBooks is for and not for. I don’t think I saw that slide. Let

me go ahead and talk about that real quick. Becky, I didn’t see that slide on here. Ah, here we go. Okay, great. This is what QuickBooks is for: it’s a financial software package. It’s an accounting package, which means you can create financial statements, a Balance Sheet, a P&L Compared to Budget. But you can also invoice customers and track your receivables. You can track your payables. You can print checks. You can do payroll and process credit card transactions through it, but there is an e

xtra fee that you’d need to pay Intuit for that. And the other thing that’s important for you to know is that it is a good donor database. Now, you can get donor reports. You can get donor letters. You can even get a donor thank-you letter out of QuickBooks. We don’t cover the mass details of that during this, but if you are cool with a light donor database to get you year-end letters, thank-you letters, and some good donor history reports, then QuickBooks is actually a pretty good donor databas

e. If we have time, I’ll show you, but that’s mainly what we’re going to do today, is we’re going to talk about setup. I think that’s what it’s for, and then, let’s see. Now, let’s see what else we’re going to cover today. QuickBooks – Which QuickBooks product is the best for you? And what are the products available, because there’s different products. And people have different products that are on the call, so I wanted to cover that. Then the rest of this whole thing is gonna be about getting i

nto QuickBooks, showing you how to get around, showing you how to set up your Chart of Accounts, your programs, your donors, and your budgets. It’s all about setup. Not doing transactions here. What you’re going to be seeing today is kinda like the beginning piece of the training that is on DVD, and we also do it in live seminars. But we’re trying to give you the beginnings of this so that you get a good setup. That’s the main problem that people have with QuickBooks. They know how to enter tran

sactions in it. You get it; you load it; you see, “Ooh, I can write a check,” and then you just start writing a check. Because you didn’t set these things up right, you don’t get good reports out of the software. And that’s the main problem that people have. So I really want to show you how to set these things up so that you can get good reports. Having said that, I’m going to start right now with what the different products are that are available in QuickBooks. When you decide that you’re going

to buy QuickBooks, there are actually five different choices of that software. Actually, even before I go there, I will tell you that every year, they come out with a new version of QuickBooks. The version I’m going to be teaching with is 2017. Now, I will tell you that if you have a version older than ’17, do not worry. You don’t have to have the latest and greatest version every, single year. They make changes, not very many changes, though. Pretty much, the version that you have, you’re goin

g to be able to use as long as it is either version 2017, ’16, or ’15. You want to upgrade at least every three years. And you can upgrade to the latest version with TechSoup; it’s only $50. That’s kind of the deal with that. Anyway, as far as the year goes, as long as you have 2015, ’16, or ’17 - and I’ll show you how you can find that out in a second - you’re cool. After that, there are five different choices of the program. One of them is called QuickBooks Pro - And actually, I think what I’m

going to do is just skip to the slide here - There’s five choices of QuickBooks, and the first three of them, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit, and Enterprise Solutions, these are desktop programs. What this means is you purchase this software; you get it from the store - It’s smarter to get it from TechSoup because it’s much cheaper – and then you download it, but the program exists on your computer’s hard drive. Then you work on it in that hard drive. So these three work as long a

s your computer is not a Macintosh. As long as it’s a PC with Windows, then these three programs will work. QuickBooks Pro is kinda like the bottom of the line. It costs maybe $270 for retail. You can get it at Costco or Sam’s for around $170, and it’s fine. And if you have QuickBooks Pro, you’re fine. You don’t have to get the Nonprofit Edition. But if you have Pro, go ahead and put in the chat, “Pro.” Just type “Pro.” I want to see who has Pro. Go ahead and type in the chat, “Pro.” I just want

to see if anybody has it. Yes. Amy has it. Sue has it. I’m going to be asking you questions. So you guys that have Pro, don’t worry about it. You’re cool. Then they have Premier Nonprofit. Now, Premier Nonprofit is, basically, just like QuickBooks Pro; it’s just that they made a couple little changes, not any big deal. Then, of course, they raised the price. QuickBooks Premier Nonprofit is like $479, almost $500, but you can get it at TechSoup for 50 bucks! So when you do upgrade, go to TechSou

p and get the Nonprofit Edition; it’s $50. Then, the final choice that’s for the desktop is Enterprise Solutions. Does anybody have Enterprise? Enterprise Solutions is for big nonprofits. It costs maybe $12 -$1500. You can’t get this on TechSoup. Enterprise Solutions is for really big nonprofits. It’s just like regular QuickBooks Pro or Premier Nonprofit. It’s the same, exact program, looks the same, smells the same. It just is more robust, more powerful. So for instance, if you have QuickBooks

Pro or Premier – Listen carefully. I’m going to test you on this later - the maximum number of individuals you can put in the customer list if you have Pro or Premier is 14,500. But if anybody has Enterprise Solutions – Anyone have Enterprise Solutions? I didn’t see anybody type it. But in the chat, if you could type it, that would help me - Anybody that has Enterprise Solutions, they can have over 100,000 donors. So Maureen does. So she can have over 100,000 donors. It’s just more powerful, mo

re robust. Let’s see. I think that’s – Yeah, those are the three choices. The one you should get is through TechSoup - It’s the Premier Nonprofit Edition – because it only costs $50. Now, if you have the Macintosh, if your computer is a Macintosh, then these three won’t work for you. Then what you have to have is you have to have QuickBooks for the Mac. So does anybody have QuickBooks for the Mac? QuickBooks for the Mac is just like QuickBooks Pro, and it is fine. It’s the only one that you can

have if you want to have the program loaded onto your computer, and you have a Macintosh computer. If anybody has Mac – Cynthia has a Mac. Claudia has a Mac. Janet has a Mac. Joanne’s Mac is dying. Oh! Hi, Joanne. How are you? I know Joanne. Oh! Jackie says, “The Mac rocks!” I know. I have an iPhone; I understand. But anyway, the Macintosh version is very much like QuickBooks Pro, and your screens are going to look very much like mine when I go to share. So don’t worry about that. Then, the fin

al choice is QuickBooks Online, and I’m going to show you what QuickBooks Online looks like. But people that have the Online Edition of QuickBooks - It’s a completely different program, and it is not what we are teaching today. The people that have this are renting their QuickBooks. So I’ll go in there and show you in a second what the QuickBooks Online one looks like to make sure that you’re in the right webinar. But this is the one that I want you to get, and you can get it from TechSoup. What

I’m going to do now is I’m going to share my screen so that you can see what QuickBooks look like. And I’ll compare it to the Online Edition just to make sure you’re in the right program. Now, once I share my screen, I’ll no longer be able to see the chat. So Becky, if I ask a question, I’m going to ask you to give me the answers that people are giving. And we have 500 people on the call now, so that’s pretty exciting. All right. So let me go ahead and share. Becky, can you make sure to tell m

e that I am sharing my screen, and what you’re looking at is QuickBooks. Becky: Yep. I can see your QuickBooks Home screen right now. And for those of you who can see his screen but it’s tiny, you can select to view full screen or actual size. You’ll lose the chat window temporarily, but you can see it more zoomed in. You can hit escape at any time to go back so you can see the chat window. Gregg: The other thing that I’m going to do, guys, is I have a neat little thing that allows me to zoom in

myself. So I’m going to zoom in like that periodically. I know you all feel better about this. You’re probably typing: “Oh, good! I can see it!” Believe me. I understand how these webinars are. So I’m going to try and zoom in periodically. What you’re looking at now is the Desktop QuickBooks program. It looks very much like the Macintosh one, but it doesn’t look anything at all like the Online Edition. People that have the Online Edition, what they do, is they dial into a website, and they plug

in a username and a password. Here’s the website they go to. It’s called qbo.intuit.com. And after they go in, they type their username and their password here, and then they click Sign In. Their program looks very much like this. It looks completely different. So if this is what your program looks like, you’re in the wrong webinar. So if anybody is, say something to the chat people. Before you chat this question, I’m going to answer it for you: When should I get the Online Edition versus the D

esktop because they look very different? This is the Online Edition; this is the Desktop. Well, presumably, you have the Desktop, and that’s why you’re in this webinar. I’m going to tell you right now, you need to stick with it. It is a more robust piece of software. You can get more reporting out of it. It’s easier to track restricted grants, and it’s easier to split your payroll between different programs. This is what I’ll tell you. This is my answer to whether or not you should be in Online

or Desktop. If you have restricted grants that need tracking, if you have employees, if you’re an organization that’s more than a couple hundred thousand dollars of revenues coming in, probably, you’re going to be happier with the Desktop, which is what this one is and what we’re teaching today. If, however, you’re maybe a small volunteer organization, you don’t have any employees, you don’t really have restricted grants, maybe you’re some sort of social club or something, then you know what? T

his is probably fine for you, the Online Edition. Now, I will change my answer in about three or four years because they change this program, this Online Edition. They’re making it better and better. But at this point, I think you need to have this. Which is what you have. That’s basically what product is best. What I want to do now is really get into the program and start showing you, first of all, how to get around in this program. But does anybody have a question about what I’ve covered so f

ar, before we move on? That Becky, you might want to chat liveE? Becky: Let’s see. We have – Mary asked a question just around what are some of the little changes that might indicate that it’s time to upgrade if you’re on an older version? Like if they’re using 2011. I know you said it’s good to upgrade every three years, but are there little changes from 2015 to 2017, for example, that would make it worthwhile to upgrade? Gregg: Sure. Let me tell you. When they changed from 2015 to 2016, they m

ade almost no changes. When they went from 2016 to 2017, they made less changes. They make very few changes as they go from version to version, and the changes that they make by year don’t usually help nonprofits, to be completely honest with you. So I would say this: I would upgrade every three years. And the reason why is because QuickBooks has this thing called the Sunset Laws, which basically means after three years, a program sunsets. Which means if there’s a bug, they ain’t gonna fix it. I

f you want to download transactions from your bank account into it, or you want to run payroll through Intuit, or you want to sign up for the credit card merchant, any other piece of software or Intuit itself wants to link with QuickBooks. Not gonna work if your software is more than three years old. So that’s why I want you to upgrade every three years. It’s not like there’s some big, fat change. Now, I will tell you, if you’re in 2011, they did change what’s called the user interface. So your

screen probably looks a lot different than this. But again, I think you should upgrade if you’re older than 2014. And like, at the end of May of this year, they’re not really gonna do anything to fix any bugs or anything in ’14. So ’15, ’16, ’17 is what they’ll serve. Hopefully, that answered the question. I’m going to move on unless there’s some other burning question anybody has. Anybody have another question, or no? Becky: You know, we have some questions just from folks asking about, if you’

re going from an Online version, and you want to use the Desktop version, or if you’re going from Desktop to Online, is it difficult to transition between the different versions? Gregg: So, transitioning between the two. First of all, it’s not something you go back and forth with. In other words, you’re on the Desktop and you say, “I’m gonna go to the Online Edition,” and when you do that, you go to this Company menu here, and you click Export Company File to QuickBooks Online. They’re going to

make it real easy for you to do this because they want you to be in the Online Edition because it’s a monthly fee. Of course, if you get it through TechSoup, it’s only $50 a year. But anyway, it’s fairly easy to go from the Desktop to the Online Edition. What happens is it, basically, just uploads the entire file. It’s not like you have to set up another file. Now, you do want to make sure that you run a Balance Sheet and a P&L in the Desktop version. And that’s all accounting is. The whole poin

t of accounting is to create these two reports: the Balance Sheet and the P&L. And you want to run these – Let me move this, so you can see them both at the same time - and you want to run these reports with All Dates, and you want to do this right before you upload the file. The reason why is because then when you’re done uploading the file, then you can compare these two reports to the Online Edition and make sure everything transferred. The other direction. If you’re in the Online Edition, a

nd you decide you want to go down to the Desktop version, then in the Online Edition, it’s fairly simple to do also. What you do is you go to the gear over here, and you click Export Data, and you walk through the screens. You need to be in not Chrome or not Firefox. You have to be in Internet Explorer. And know that what it does is it creates a data file that downloads, and you get it on your email, and then you can open it up in the Desktop. Your budgets, if you’ve entered any budgets, they wi

ll not transfer; you’ll have to enter them again. That’s how I’ll answer that, and then I’m going to move on because this is a Desktop class, and I want to make sure I stay in here. Is it cool if I move on? Becky: Absolutely. Let’s get rollin’. And remember, everyone, this is a 90-minute webinar. So we are here for the next 60 minutes still. So stay with us; there’s still a lot more to come. Gregg: Cool. Yeah, we got all of the types of software and stuff. Let’s get into the meat of this thing

. I’m going to go ahead and close these two windows. The next little topic is: What the heck am I looking at? Basically, you open up QuickBooks once you’ve loaded it. And when you open it up, there’s a little icon on your computer; you load it. And if you’ve never used QuickBooks before, you can open up a sample file. So I encourage you to open up a sample file and play around with it. Then when you’re ready to create your actual company, this little button here on the right that says Create a n

ew company file, you click that. You walk through the little screens. You put the name of your company, the ID number. And it asks you what industry you want to be in, and it’ll give you a listing of industries and make sure you pick either Nonprofit or Church or Religious Organization. Because pretty much everybody on the phone is going to go in one of those two categories. What that does is it gives you some income and expense accounts, so when you go to set up the rest of your company, at lea

st you won’t have a Chart of Accounts with no accounts in it; you’ll have some, and then you can change them. Anyway, that’s just one thing I wanted to cover. But once you set up your company, and again, we’re going to show you what your accounts should be and everything in a minute. This screen here; I want to get you comfortable with it because this is a screen that will open up when you open up QuickBooks. And yours might look a little bit different, but I’ll get to that in a second. First t

hing that I want to point out is this top bar up here at the top, this top bar is called the Title Bar, and it’s telling you two things. First thing it’s telling you is what version of QuickBooks you’re in. We’re in QuickBooks Desktop Premier Nonprofit 2017 - That’s how you can tell what version you have if you don’t know what version you’re in - And the other thing it’s telling us is what company file we’re in. We’re in a company called Sample Synergy Now. The reason why we have the name of tha

t company up there is because – I don’t know if you know this – when you buy the Desktop version of QuickBooks, you can run more than one company out of it. You can have one; you can have two; you can have five; you can have 100. I’m an accounting firm. I have a bunch of different companies. I don’t have to buy a different copy of QuickBooks every time I have a new company. It’s very much like Microsoft Word. You have the program Microsoft Word, and then when you open it, it doesn’t open to a da

ta file. You gotta pick your data file and then it – I’m sorry. It doesn’t open to a Word document. Just click the Word document you want to look at. So there’s the program Word, and then there’s all your documents. Same thing with QuickBooks. There’s the program QuickBooks, and then there’s all your data files, the company files that have all the transactions in them. In Microsoft Word, when you click on the desktop and click Word, it opens up Word, but it doesn’t open up the document because i

t knows you probably have more than one. But since most nonprofits only have – Or most people that use QuickBooks only have one company file, then it’s like, well, we’re going to open up QuickBooks when you click the QuickBooks icon, and we’re going to open up the last company you were ever in. Does anybody have more than one company? Go ahead and chat if you have more than one company. I’m just curious to see. Many nonprofits, they’ll run like a 501(c)(3) and then a 501(c)(6) or something like

that. But anyway, if you’re in – What it does is it opens up the last company you were in, and then if that’s not the right company, you click on File. And I’ll click on Open, and then what it does – Let me move this over. There we go - And then you click Open a company file. And then what it does is it takes you into your Windows Explorer. And look at all the different company files I have here. I have four of them. Actually, I have more than four. So you just pick the one that you want to ope

n, and then you click Open, and it opens that one. So that’s kind of what the deal is there. So people that have more than one – And Becky, are there people that have more than one? I bet there are. Becky: Tons of people are saying they’ve got two or three or five. Lots and lots of people have two. Gregg: Ok, cool. I’m going to throw you a little bone real quick for the people that have more than one. They put the name up here, so you know you’re in the right company. But do you see this color?

You see how it’s dark blue? I’ll zoom in a little bit. The screen’s kinda dark blue. That’s kinda the default color for QuickBooks screen. What you can do is you can actually change that default color for different company files. So I’m in this company, and it’s a dark blue. What’ I’m going to do is I’m going to go up to the Edit menu, and I’m gonna go down to Preferences. Preferences are the little features in QuickBooks that you can turn on or off. There are so many Preferences that they’re in

a category. And by the way, people with the Mac, your Preferences are under the QuickBooks button that’s kinda up here. QuickBooks. Anyway, click it. Then the Preferences – Sorry about that — The Preferences are in different categories. These are all the different categories. And I’m in the General Preferences now, and that’s what you’re seeing over here to the right. If you click on the Desktop View — I’m going to do that right now — Click on Desktop, and then – I’ll zoom in again — And then y

ou click on the thing that says Display – I’m sorry. Not Display — If you click on the thing at the bottom there that says COMPANY FILE COLOR SCHEME, you see how it’s on Default? For this company, I’m going to change this to Purple-Red. You see how the colors changed? That’s an easy way to identify that you’re in the right company when you’re writing a check. I’m going to go ahead and click OK. So this is going to stay this pink color, and then when I go to a different company in a little bit, i

t’ll go back to blue. So that’s a little trick for you. I’m just throwing it in there. This bar at top is called the Title Bar. Everything else you’re seeing here is just simply different ways to get around in the program. There are three main ways to get around in the program. The first main way is this Home page. It’s a big ol’ flow chart. Those of you who have been using QuickBooks six months or less, I want you to use the flow chart when you’re doing stuff. Why? Because it’s not so overwhe

lming. It doesn’t have everything; it just has the major stuff. And also, it’s doing it in the right order. So in other words, first you enter a bill, and then you pay a bill. So it keeps you doing stuff in the right order. That’s the Home page. Now, the second way – Actually before I even do that, I’m gonna click this Write Checks window. And this is why people get so screwed up with QuickBooks because it’s so easy to enter transactions when you first get it that you never set it up right. An

d we’ll set it up in a second. I’m going to go Write Check window. Opens up a picture of a check. This is check 1001. I’ll zoom in so you can see. This is check 1001. Don’t forget that. So that’s one way of getting around. The second way of getting around is this fat bar right here with all these pictures. Anybody know what this bar is called? What are these pictures called? Because that’s the name of the bar. Becky, anyone answering? What’s this bar called? Becky: Let’s see. I’m waiting for th

e responses coming in. I see somebody saying Task Bar. Other person saying Icon Bar. Lots of people saying Icon Bar. Gregg: It’s the Icon Bar, yeah. The Task Bar, that’s something that has to do with Windows, and that’s the bar that’s at the very bottom of your computer screen. That’s the Task Bar. This is called the Tool Bar or the Icon Bar. It gives you the major stuff that you can do in QuickBooks, kinda like the Home page does. If you click on Check, notice how it opens up the exact same che

ck: check 1001. Just highlighting these are different places to get to the same place in the program. Now this Icon Bar or Tool Bar – You’re about to feel better now because I know it doesn’t look like this for you all. I know — But if you click on View, you can make this bar be on the left-hand side of the screen or on the top of the screen. It’s on the left-hand side, most likely, for most of you. This is what it looks like. You’re like, “Ok, good. This is what my QuickBooks looks like. I wa

s really freaking out.” Anyway, if I scroll down, here’s Check. I click on Check. Opens it up to 1001. You got it? So this thing can be on the left-hand side of the screen, or it can be on the top of the screen. If I click Top, it’s on the top of the screen. And I put it there because that’s actually where it used to be years ago. So if you’ve been using QuickBooks for a long time, and then they switch it to where it’s on the left-hand side. We’re accountants; we don’t like change, so we freaked

out. So now they make it to where you can put it up top. If you don’t have it at all, and you’re like, “Gregg, I don’t have it at all. What the heck are you talking about?” You see this thing that says Hide Icon Bar? Somebody’s done that. And then it goes away altogether. So if you never use it, maybe you can hide it. But anyway, I’m going to put it up top because I like to use it. The last way of getting around is this thin, little bar right here. And this, most software has. It’s called the M

enu Bar, and it’s gonna give you every, little thing that you can imagine about QuickBooks. Everything. So this is something you get into once you’ve been using QuickBooks for a little bit. It’s organized by area. So let’s say I want to write a check. What area do you think that would be in? And go ahead and chat an answer, and Becky will tell me. What area do you think that would be in? Anybody know? Somebody does, I’m sure. Becky: I’m waiting for the responses. I see lots of people typing “Ba

nking” because they’re smart. They get gold stars. Gregg: Yes. It’s under Banking. Well, let me tell you something. When I first started learning QuickBooks, I’m like, well you write checks to a vendor. So why isn’t it under Vendor? It’s not. It’s under Banking. I don’t know what to tell you. So you go to Banking, and you click Write Checks, and there it is. It’s the same check number: check 1001. So these are just different ways to get to the same place in the program. So this top bar, Title B

ar. This Menu Bar is the little, thin bar. This is the Icon Bar. It can be on the left-hand side or on the top. And then you’ve got the Home page, which is the flow chart. The only thing that I didn’t point out is this stuff over here on the right-hand side. That’s where the button is where you create a new company. Then there’s a window that has some balances in it. The rest of this is a giant advertisement. “Hey, I want to accept credit cards!” You click it; it takes you to a website where you

can sign up for the Intuit merchant service. Which I like it, actually. I’m just telling that, you know, hey this is kind of an advertisement. So if you’re kind of scared of computers a little bit, and this is overwhelming, then what I would do is just move this off to the side of the screen, and then you’ll feel better, because then you won’t see it anymore! Doesn’t that make us feel better? Let us all relax and enjoy the beautiful screen that is QuickBooks. Anyway, enough of that. That’s bas

ically everything about getting around in the program. So I’m going to stop for a second, and then we’re going to talk about how to set things up. Who has questions? Talk to me. Becky: Sure. Susan asked, “How did you split your screen when you had the two different parts showing at the same time?” Gregg: I know. People always ask that question. It’s very exciting. In order to teach this, let me show you something. So you need to listen because she asks a good question. Hey, Susan. How’s it going

? Anyway. When you have more than one thing on the screen – First of all, let me tell you this. You gotta click on View and make sure that your QuickBooks says Multiple Windows instead of One. If it’s One, you can’t even have more than one window open at a time. But you click on Multiple, and then I’m going to open up two reports: the P&L and the Balance Sheet. The reason why is because that’s really the two, main reports that you need to show the board. Now, when you open them up, maybe they’re

on top of each other and stuff like that, so it’s kinda hard to see. So what I did was, if you go to Window, and you click Tile either Vertically or Horizontally. I’m gonna click Tile Vertically. What it does is it places it perfectly, so that you can see them both on the screen without you clicking and dragging and moving it. Now I’ll be honest with you, Susan. This only works really well if you have two windows open. So if I had a third window open – I’ll just open up something else here. He

re’s a third window. And if I went over and went Tile Vertically, then it looks like – Oh! Well, that’s not bad at all. If I click Tile Horizontally, then I mean, you know, whatever. It’s a little weird. People have a lot of windows open. What sometimes they – The anal-retentive people are gonna love this — If you click Cascade, check that out. Eh? Eh? Look at that! Anyway. Anybody else got a question? Becky: Sure. Well, one thing about changing the colors for the different, like if you have mor

e than one company. I know that this is focused on the Desktop version, but do you know if that feature is also available in Mac or QuickBooks Online version? Gregg: I now it’s not available in the Online Edition. In Macintosh, look at your Preferences and see if you have it. I don’t know the answer to that question. David, if you want to write that down. We might be able to get a question and shoot it out to the Mac users. Anybody else got a question? Becky: We had a bunch of people that asked

if you have multiple companies set up, and they’re set up all wrong, can you just delete them and start over? Gregg: You can. You can delete a company and start over. Well, ok. You know how you delete a Word document, where you just kind of delete it off your computer? You can do the same thing in QuickBooks because it’s a data file that’s on your computer’s hard drive. So you don’t really even need to be in QuickBooks to delete it. So one option, though, when you’re in QuickBooks, is you just g

o to Open Company, and then you just right-click on – It’s gonna open up. It should open up in a second here. Why is it not opening up? Ah, there it is. So basically, say I don’t want this one; you just right-click on it and click Delete, and it deletes the data file altogether. Now that’s one option. But what you may be really wanting is you’re like, “You know what, Gregg? I’m kinda ok with like my list of vendors and donors. I don’t want to lose that. I really just kinda want to empty the tran

sactions out and start all over again.” So if that’s what you want to do – Look. Notice how the color is different. Anyway — I’m going to go over here to the File menu, and I’m gonna click Utilities, and under Utilities you’re going to see something that says Condense, and if you click that – Oh boy. I have to put in my password. Um. I wonder if it will let me do this without. I’m so sorry, guys. [Silence] These passwords drive me crazy. But they’re for our protection. Let’s see. So when you do

that, you’ll get something that says, “What transactions do you want to remove?” That’s what condensed data is. And if you click All transactions, what it does is, it’s like a toilet flushing. It flushes out all your transactions, but it keeps your lists, like your customer list and your vendor list. It also keeps that Chart of Accounts list, which is screwed up, but then you can fix it. So maybe that’s what you want to do. So let’s see. I canceled out and now the screen is broke. Let me see if

there’s any other questions before we move on while I’m waiting for the screen to fix. Anybody else got a question? Becky: Well there’s lots of questions, and we are doing our best to answer a lot of them, but like I said, keep moving forward. We have lots to cover still. Gregg: We’ll move on. Let’s get into what the appropriate Chart of Accounts should look like. And I’m going to do this one more time here. Let me make sure that I’m in the right file here. And I am not, so let me switch to a

different data file. It’s very important that you understand that the whole goal of accounting is to create the Balance Sheet and the P&L and other reports as well, but the main two reports that all accounting is about is the Balance Sheet and the P&L. And the goal is to create these reports and give them to your board of directors, usually once a month. The Balance Sheet you give to them and then the P&L you usually give compared to a budget. So I’m just going to open up these two reports for

the third time. Reports. Balance Sheet. And then the other one is the P&L. And we’ll tile them vertically again. And the whole purpose of accounting is to give these two reports to your board. The P&L you probably want compared to budget. The Balance Sheet shows you what you look like at a certain point in time. It has all your assets, your liabilities. The P&L is like a movie of transactions. It shows you what’s going on during a period of time. So all accounting is, is entering transactions so

they end up on these two reports. And all of these lines, these are accounts in your Chart of Accounts list. So it’s very important that you set your Chart of Accounts up correctly because your Chart of Accounts will determine what these two reports look like. I’m gonna describe to you what your accounts should be if you are a nonprofit. And we’re gonna break this discussion up into three categories. One is the Balance Sheet accounts, and those are pretty easy. They’re not that different for no

nprofits than they are for other businesses, and that’s not hard. And people don’t screw that up too much. When it comes to the P&L — which some people call the Income Statement — those, people mess up a lot. And the reason why they mess it up a lot is because they don’t know how to set up QuickBooks. And maybe you don’t even know very much about accounting. So what happens is, any time somebody runs into your office and says, “Uh, we need to track this thing!” You go, “Uhhh, Ok,” and you set up

an account for it, and you end up with a P&L that has 50 million accounts. I know you know what I’m talking about. And then the P&L is five or six pages long, and nobody reads it. And every new person that comes in to deal with QuickBooks, they add their more accounts, and that’s why it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And you come along, and you’ve inherited a mess. I know you know what I’m talking about. Anyway. What I’m going to do is I’ll show you what the Balance Sheet account

s should be first. Those are pretty easy. And then we’ll talk about what your P&L accounts should be, because there really shouldn’t be very many of those. So let’s start with the Balance Sheet. Balance Sheet – I’m going to zoom in real quick — Balance Sheet accounts, you should have an account for each one of your bank accounts. So even if you don’t know anything about accounting, you’ll need to have an account for each one of your bank accounts. And you’ll need to set those up, and I’ll show y

ou how to set it up in a minute. You’ll need to have an account for receivables if you invoice your donors, members, students, whatever. A lot of us don’t invoice people, but if you do invoice people, and you do it out of QuickBooks, you’ll need a receivable account for that. The other one that most people need is they need an account or certain accounts for your fixed assets. That’s like your furniture, your equipment. Now, if you’re a really small nonprofit, you may just have one account call

ed Furniture & Equipment. Well, you know. That’s not that big of a deal. But if you’re a bigger nonprofit, you might want to split it up: one for furniture; one for equipment; one for land; one for building; one for lease hold improvements, and one for automobiles. You usually don’t break it up any more than that. Now, those are the main ones that you’ll see on the Assets in the Balance Sheet. The Liabilities, every person listening to me needs an account for Accounts Payable. When you set up a

new company, it doesn’t give you the bank accounts or the fixed asset accounts automatically; you gotta create those. But it does give you the payable accounts. If you have credit cards that you use to buy stuff with, you’ll want to create an account for that. This is a mistake a lot of people make. They have a credit card that they use to buy stuff with, but they don’t actually create the account in QuickBooks. And then what happens is, when they pay the bill, they just write a check and spli

t it between a million different expenses because that’s what your bill looks like from the credit card company. And that’s actually wrong. What you’re supposed to do is create an account for the credit card, and then you can either enter the charges individually or download them from the bank, which is really very easy to do. Then what else do we have? On the Balance Sheet, we’ll have accounts for payroll. If we’re using QuickBooks Payroll service, which is actually a really great service, the

n you want to create subaccounts under Payroll for each one of your payroll liability accounts. If you do not do that, if you’re using an outside-of-payroll service like ADP or Paychecks, you’ll just need one account called Payroll Liabilities. You won’t need the subs. Then, if you have any loans, you’ll need a bank account – I’m sorry — You’ll need an account for that. We have one here, Bank of America. Then QuickBooks will give you your Equity accounts; you don’t have to worry about those. So

that’s the Balance Sheet. It’s not that confusing. Not a big deal. Now, it’s true that if you’ve never used QuickBooks, after you set up these Balance Sheet accounts, and I’ll show you how to do it in a minute, you do have to put the opening balances in. And that’s not something that’s a real quick thing to teach you. Actually, maybe it is. I’ll show you where to do it in a second. That’s the Balance Sheet accounts. And to create an account, let me just show you where to go to create an account.

What you do to create an account is you go over to Lists. And you click on Chart of Accounts, and here’s your Chart of Accounts list. Now, when you first set up QuickBooks, it’s going to give you some accounts, but not all the ones that you’ll need. So let’s say we need an account for computer equipment. To create an account, you go to the bottom, left-hand button. You see this button that says Account. I’m going to click on it, and then this is where you go to delete accounts, to edit account

s. I’m going to click New. And when you click New, here’s where you go to create the account. And you gotta pick the right type. This is one thing. Whenever you’re creating an account, the accounting gods have created certain account types, and you can’t change these; these are fixed. This is what’s in QuickBooks. You can’t add your own types, but the types are really important because they determine where they appear on the financial statements. If I pick Bank account, those appear on the Balan

ce Sheet. Whereas if I pick Income accounts, those appear on the P&L. So if you want to create an account for computer equipment, that’s actually a fixed asset, so you gotta pick that type. Now, these account types, they are second nature to your accountant. So whoever it is that’s doing your 990 at the end of the year, and if you have an audit, they will know. If you’re going to create an account and you’re unsure what type it is, ask them. So to create an account, all you do is click this Acco

unt button, click New, pick the right type, you click Continue, and then the only other thing you gotta do to create an account is type the name “Computer Equipment,” and then that’s it. The rest of these fields, they’re optional. People that are in bookkeeping, you have a personality. I know I do. If there’s a field, you feel like you have to put something in it, and if you don’t put something in it, you’re going to freak out. These are optional; don’t worry about it. All I really need is the t

ype and the account. You don’t even need to put in an account number in there. I don’t use account numbers. All you really need is the name and the account type. And when you do that – we’ll click Save – then you can start using that account when you’re entering transactions. So that’s how to add an account. But anyway. That’s the Balance Sheet accounts. Now, what I want to do now is I want to focus on the income and the expense accounts that you should have. And this is where people really mess

up. And this is what I’m going to say to you: I want you to have a P&L Compared to Budget that your board will actually read. In order for that to happen — Most of these board members don’t know very much about accounting. They don’t know how to read these financial statements; it’s not their field of expertise. So if it’s more than one page, they ain’t readin’ it. So you want to make it simple. Which means we can’t have very many income and expense accounts. So if there’s another place to tr

ack something that you want to track, other than the Chart of Accounts, we’re going to track it there. And we’re going to save the income and expense accounts for only the most important things that the board needs to see. The overall board, not the finance committee, but the overall board. We can always get other reports for the finance committee. The best way to show you the right way to set up income and expense accounts is to show you the wrong way. So I hope you’re listening to me, man, bec

ause I’m about to show you the wrong way to set up income and expense accounts. I’ve got a data file that is set up incorrectly, and this person has used way too many income and expense accounts. And I’m going to show you what not to do. That’s why I named this company Wrong Way. So I’m going to go to a Profit & Loss, and I’m going to make it All Dates. Let me zoom in so you can see it. Now, what should your income accounts be? You see this first account on there called Restricted Grants? Go a

head and type “grants.” If you get grants, type “grants” in the chat window because I bet you almost everybody gets grants. I just want to see. Now, what’s the most important thing you’ve gotta track about a grant that’s restricted? At the end of the reporting period, what do you have to tell the funder? Go ahead and chat the answer. What do you have to tell the funder about a restricted grant at the end of the reporting period? What do you have to account for to the funder? Becky, anybody? Beck

y: We have a bigillion people who get grants. They all are so smart and saying, “How did you spend that money that you were granted?” So they all know the answer to that one. Gregg: Right. Notice how this does not answer that question. By having an income account called Restricted Grants, it doesn’t answer that question. And I think when you set up QuickBooks in the desktop, it gives you a Restricted Grant Income Account, and I want you to delete it. I don’t want you to use it because A, it does

n’t help you and B, it’s confusing when you’re doing data entry, because you notice how a little further down here, I have an account called Foundation Grants. Well, what if I get a foundation grant that’s restricted? I don’t know whether to put it up there or put it down here. So don’t do that. Another thing is don’t have a separate income account for each grant; The Green Truth Grant, The United Fund Grant. Don’t do that. If you’re going to do that, then your Chart of Accounts is going to end

up being huge over the years. Let me tell you something: when it comes to tracking your grants, restricted or not, we’re going to use another list for that. We’re going to use the Customer List in QuickBooks, so do not use the Chart of Accounts List for it. So when it comes to your income accounts, this is what I want you to have. Look at the top of your screen. And this is for everyone listening to me, all 500 of you. Individual Contributions, Corporate Grants, Foundation Grants, Government Gr

ants, those four. I think everybody should have those four. And that’s how you account for the money that’s coming in. By the way, if you’re wondering, the word donation versus contribution means the exact, same thing. And the reason why I want you to break it up this way — Individual, Corporate, Foundation, and Government Grants — is because A: that’s how I have to have it on the 990 tax return; B: that’s how I have to report it on your audit; and C: that’s a darn good way to figure out where y

our money is coming from. For people that are on the board that may not want to get into the weeds with this stuff. You can tell this organization doesn’t get very much money from government. Well, maybe that’s an opportunity lost, or maybe it’s because you’re an arts organization, and the NEA doesn’t really have a lot of money to give out. It spurs a discussion in the board meeting. Maybe you don’t want a discussion in the board meeting. But if the board understands how to read the report beca

use it’s only one page long, I promise you, they’re going to be happy. These first four are your income accounts for money that you’re basically given. But then some of you have earned income. In other words, you provide a product or a service, and then you get money in return. Maybe you’re a membership association, and you have membership dues, or you have tuitions that you sell; you’re a school. Or maybe you sell t-shirts or whatever. You have workshops, registration fees, whatever. That’s un

earned income. I’m sorry. That’s earned income. And you want to have income accounts for those. Notice how I have one for Program Fees, one for Membership Dues. Now, if you are a membership association, you probably have different levels of membership. We have one for affiliate members, one for general members, one for retired members, one for corporate members. Do not use accounts for that. Just have one account called membership dues. In QuickBooks, there’s another list for those individual, k

ind of granulated ways of looking at income. That’s called the Item List. And that’s not something that we have time to cover during this kind of initial thing, but it’s definitely something that you’re going to want to learn about. It’s in the trainings. So that’s going to be your income accounts. Not very many. I think I’m going to move on to the expense accounts, and then we’ll stop and take some questions. When it comes to expenses – I’m going to hide this for a second — When it comes to ex

pense accounts, this is the one that people mess up more than anything. And the reason why is the following: when it comes to – Forget about nonprofits for a second. Forget about nonprofits — When it comes to your regular businesses, there’s really only one way that most businesses need to track their expenses, and that is by the natural category of the expense. When I say natural category, I mean the natural way that people think about expenses. How much is salaries, travel, supplies, postage,

printing, contract labor, payroll taxes, insurance? The normal way of thinking about expenses. And nonprofits have to track that as well. But there’s an additional thing that nonprofits have to track when it comes to expenses beyond the natural category. They have to put the expenses in one of three buckets. And funders want to know that most of your money is being spent on bucket one rather than bucket two or bucket three. What are those three buckets? Ya’ll chat me the answer. I know somebody

knows this. What do you got, Beck? Becky: What are those buckets? Yep. That’s ok. You can call me Beck. We have people chatting in program funding, admin, and fundraising, administrative funding, programs. Gregg: Right. Yes. So the three buckets are either it’s a program expense, or it’s an admin expense, which some people call it management and general. Some people call it overhead; it’s the same thing. And then the third bucket is fundraising. Program, Admin, Fundraising. Those are your thre

e buckets. And the reason why you want to put your expenses in one of those three buckets is because then a funder can look and see how much your organization spends on program costs, actually helping the children versus admin costs, like the cost of getting QuickBooks versus fundraising, the cost of doing a direct mail campaign. And they want to know that most of your expenses are for program. That’s how it has to be reported on the audit, and that has to be on the 990. And by the way, if you a

re listening to me now, and you’re thinking of the word “operations” as one of the buckets, take that word and throw it in the garbage can. I don’t know what operations means, and nobody else does either. It means different things to different people, because your programs are part of your operations, so forget that word. It’s Program, Admin, Fundraising. If you’ve got a board member that wants to say something about operations, tell them not in the nonprofit world. I don’t want to hear it. An

yway. This organization is an organization that is all about - the example I’m using – is all about saving, about getting America on environmentally friendly forms of energy. And they have actually three programs that do this. They have a guidance center where you can look at solar panels and windmills and stuff. Then there is an annual conference called the Synergy Conference, and then there’s this Aware Campaign, and that’s kind of like where they have PSA announcements and maybe some lobbying

, and that’s their three programs. What this person’s done, which is wrong, is they’ve created expense accounts for their programs. A: that becomes confusing, because now, say you spend money on postage for the Synergy Conference. I don’t know whether to put it as part of the Synergy Conference or go down here and put it as part of postage. [Buzzer sound] Not good. If I am doing your 990, I need both pieces of information, so don’t do that. And the other thing is, the biggest expense of running

a nonprofit, by far for most of you, is your payroll. And people that do this, create these accounts for programs, for some reason they always put the salaries. They just instinctively know that salaries need to all go to the same account. Well, this is your biggest expense. Now, it makes it look like you don’t spend very much money on program stuff, when in reality, you’re supposed to split the payroll between Program, Admin, and Fundraising. And then you either A: get an accountant at the end

of the year that ignores the fact that you did this wrong, and then they do the 990, which everybody can see. It’s on GuideStar.org, and they’ll see that, wow, this person doesn’t spend very much on programs. Or the accountant charges you to reallocate expenses to Program, Admin, and Fundraising. So you’re not supposed to have expenses like this. And I know you all have this expense account called Fundraising. You’re not supposed to do that. Don’t do that. I want these to be your natural catego

ries. Salaries, health insurance, rent, postage. Pretty much, your expense accounts should be generic. Now, there’s always some exceptions, but for the most part, if I look at your Chart of Accounts List, and I look at your expenses, I should see maybe 20, 25 accounts tops. And they should be pretty generic. They should not be related to your specific nonprofit’s program. Now, we gotta have a way of tracking this, so what’s the list – And I know some of you more advanced users know — what’s the

list that you use in QuickBooks to track your programs? Go ahead and chat the list that you use in QuickBooks to track your programs, while I’m changing data files here. Becky: Getting lots of answers from people saying class. Gregg: Yes. Class is the answer. Class – That is a list in QuickBooks. It’s available in all the versions of QuickBooks including QuickBooks Pro. It’s also available on the Mac. And it’s a list that you may have to turn on. So I’m going to go up to my Preferences, and I’

m going to click on the dropdown list, Preferences. And I’m going to click on the one that says – Let me move this over — I’m going to click on the one that says Accounting. And then I’m going to go over to Company, and then here you’ll see something that says Use class tracking. You want to check that — Let me zoom in here — You want to check that box, Use class tracking, and that turns the feature on. After you’ve done that, then you want to go to your Lists and go to Class List, and you want

to set up each one of your programs as a class, with two additional classes: one for Admin and one for Fundraising. So everyone listening to me is going to have at least three classes: one for your Program, one for Admin, one for Fundraising. If you have more than one program, then you’ll have more than three classes. Now, you’ve bought yourself a little work because every time you enter a transaction – Here’s a check – You gotta point it to an expense account, but you also gotta point it to a

class. I’m going to point this to the Guidance Center. And yes, you can take an individual transaction, and you can split it between classes. There’s actually a way that you can get it to auto-split based on percentages that you have QuickBooks memorize. That’s something we talk about in the trainings as well. But anyway. The benefit of doing that is then you can do a report. You can do a standard P&L, sure. But you can also do a P&L by Class. Check this out. La-la! So this, basically, will give

us exactly what I need to do your tax return, because it gives you rows for the expense accounts and columns for Program, Management, and Fundraising. Now I wouldn’t necessarily give this to the board, but I would certainly give it to the finance committee. And I would look at it all the time, if I were you. Because what you do is all the money that has to do with a program, all the money coming in, you point it to that program’s class, and then you point all the expenses, including the payroll

that you allocate, and then the benefit is you can actually see whether or not your program is paying for itself. This program here, which is the Guidance Center Program, this first column, is losing $13,000. Whereas the next program is making $5700. So you can – This is incredible information that you should all be getting out of QuickBooks, and you can by using the class feature. I am going to stop. I’m sure you guys have been inundating them with questions, but we’ll take a couple of three q

uestions live. We’ll do the budgets real quick, and then we’ll finish up. So go ahead. What do we got? Becky: Well, if you haven’t used a class list before, can you change your method and start at the new fiscal year, or any time? Gregg: Yes. You can start using classes any time; it’s just that when you do a P&L by Class, all the transactions that haven’t been classified for the time period that you pick, it’ll say “Unclassified.” There will be a column that says “Unclassified.” Actually, I thin

k if I pick All Dates here – You see Unclassified? It’ll look like that. So the report won’t be that valuable until you have, you know, except for the new fiscal year. Next question. Becky: You know, there’s some confusion I think a lot of people have around using classes. Can you just say, you know, in one sentence, what is the primary purpose of using classes. Gregg: Sure. Classes are there so that you can look at your P&L on a by department basis. And your classes must be your departments, an

d your departments must be Program, Admin, and Fundraising. And the reason why is so that I can fill out a 990 and do your taxes, because this is how I have to report it on the 990. And it’s beneficial to you so that you can see how much money each program costs and whether a program is paying for itself. You know that you should use a class if you can report income and expenses to it. If you’re saying, “Well, I want to break out my membership dues. I want to see how much of my membership dues g

o to retired memberships,” you’re only going to pointing income to it, not expenses. That’s not a class. Classes are like departments or divisions. Ok? Next question. Sorry it wasn’t a sentence. Becky: No, that’s ok. How do you handle ticket sales or event fees or events that are fundraisers? Where do those get categorized? Do they go into one of these big classes? Gregg: So you do need accounts for your fundraisers. You would have an income account called Ticket Sales and Sponsorship Fees. And

then what class do you put that income to? Well, if the event is supposed to raise money for a program, put it in that program’s class. If the event is just an event that raises money for every program, put it in the Fundraising Class. As a matter of fact, all income, unrestricted donations as well, that don’t relate to a specific program, put to the Fundraising Class. That way you’ll be able to see whether a program is paying for itself, because that is something that you can go out and raise m

oney for, if a program is close to paying for itself but not all the way. And let’s do this. Let me go ahead and move on, Becky. Cause I’m going to cover budgets real quick, and that’ll leave us a good 10, 15 minutes to answer questions. Is everybody cool with that? Are you cool with that, Becky? Becky: Sure. Go ahead. Gregg: I just want to show them where the budgets are. So this is not a report that you would give to the board. This is a report that you would give, perhaps, to a finance commit

tee. But I do think it’s a very beneficial report. What you would give to the board is a P&L Compared to Budget. So I need to show you where to go to enter budgets in QuickBooks. And if you’re not entering your budget in QuickBooks, then you’re probably spending days getting ready for a board meeting, creating it in Excel, and it’s a real pain, and I want to make your life easy. People that go through the trainings that we have end up feeling excited about QuickBooks, believe it or not, because

it really does shorten the amount of time that you’re in the program. And instead, you can be taking donors out to lunch or something like that. So we’re going to go to Company > Planning & Budgeting > and Set Up Budgets. This is available in QuickBooks Pro and the Macintosh as well. I’ll click Set Up Budgets. The very first time you go in this screen, you’re going to get a window that asks you questions. And the first thing it asks you is which year you want to enter a budget for. When you firs

t set up QuickBooks it asks you when your fiscal year begins. If it was January to December, then this would just say 2020 or 2019 or whatever. But in this example, we begin July 1st, we end June 30. So that’s why the years are like that. They’re split, our fiscal years. So we’ll pick the year that we want to enter a budget for. You can enter a budget for a P&L or a Balance Sheet. I’m going to do a P&L. It’s what most people do. Then you’ll see that there is the ability to do a budget that says

“No additional criteria,” and then there’s one by customer, and there’s one by class. I’ll just say this real quick: Your organization-wide budget, the one that you’re going to give to the board, is usually a Budget by Account. In other words, how much does the organization plan on spending on postage? How much does it plan on spending on salaries? Without regard to what program it relates to or what grant it relates to. So that’s an organization-wide budget, and you’re to pick this one. Now, in

our trainings, you can do a separate Budget by Class, if you want a Budget by program as well as by Restricted Grant, if you want to enter a grant budget in. But those budgets are separate and they don’t talk to the organization-wide budget. So everyone should have at least this “No additional criteria” budget. I’m going to go ahead and click it. Then we click Finish. And here’s the window where you enter the budget. Now, the budget has all these accounts, and these are the income and expense a

ccounts that should be in your Chart of Accounts List. If, when you go to enter a budget, there’s not an account listed here for it, but yet you have a budget number for it, that means it’s not in your Chart of Accounts List, and you’ll need to add it to your Chart of Accounts List. You cannot do that here. You’ll need to exit out of this window, go back into Lists, add the account. Then when you come back here, it’ll be here. Now, there’s two main ways that people enter – Oops. There’s two main

ways that people enter their budget. What some people do is they enter their budget by month. In other words, when they enter the budget, they enter a budget number for each month. Does anybody do that? Go ahead and say “Month” in the chat window if you enter by month. To enter it by month, you just simply type the numbers here: 4,000 for July; 6,000 for August; 10,000 for September. Do we have people that do this, Becky? Becky: Yep. Lots of people saying “Month.” Gregg: Now, the reason why peo

ple like doing this is because then when you run a Budget to Actual for July, August, and September, it’s going to be the column for Actual will have three months of actual, and the column for Budget will have your three months of budget. So you’re really comparing actual to budget for the same time period. The reason why people don’t like budgeting by month, is because, well, I mean, we’re lazy people in this life. So really, we like to just enter one number. We don’t want to enter 12. So let

me make this a little bit easier for you. Say, Rent. It’s the same number every month. You see this Copy Across? You click Copy Across; it copies it all the way across; you don’t have to type it 12 times. A lot of people know about that one. Now, the thing that people don’t know about. Let’s take electricity. Electricity is pretty high in the summertime. Let’s say 750, and then it starts going down. Instead of putting in 11 numbers, if you click on this one, click Adjust Row Amounts. And for th

e currently selected month, I’ll decrease it by, we’ll say 5% a month. And we click OK. It does the math for you. How cool is that? So that kind of helps you if you’re in a Budget by Month. If you’re not budgeting by month — which is what most of you do — you budget by year. You would think – Let me go ahead and clear this – You would think that you can put your entire annual budget in this Annual Total column, but you can’t because this is grayed-out. This is simply the total of the other 12 co

lumns. You can push on this thing ‘til the cow comes home; ain’t nothin’ happenin’ here. So what you want to do – And in the interest of time, I’m just gonna tell you — You have to put the annual budget in one of these 12 columns. Now, it would either be the first month or the last month that most people will think. I’ll ask you. I’ll go ahead and ask you. Do you think you would put the whole budget in the first month of year or the last budget of the year, if you budget by year? Tell Becky, and

she’ll tell me. What do you think? Becky: Last. And a couple people saying first, but some people are saying last. Gregg: Anybody who said, “first,” pat yourself on the back. You are correct. If you put it in the last month of the year – And I understand why you think that’s right – But what happens is, if you put a number here, then later on, say two months has gone by, July and August. When you do a Budget to Actual report for July and August, it’s going to pull July and August Actual, and it

’s gonna pull July and August Budget, and you don’t have anything in here, so your Budget column will be blank. And it’ll be blank all the way until you get to the last month of the year. So that’s not where you do it. What you’re supposed to do is, you’re supposed to put it in the first month, because then, no matter what month you’re in when you’re reporting to the board, it’ll always include the first month. So it’ll give you the right number. So you put it in the first month of the year. Af

ter you put your budget in, Reports, and Company & Financial, don’t pick that. You want to go down here to Budgets, and you pick Budget vs. Actual. You pick the budget you want to look at. Now, the very first time you open it up, it’s going to give you a Budget to Actual for each month. July’s Actual, July’s Budget, the variance. Four columns for July. July’s Actual, July’s Budget – I’m sorry – August’s Actual, August’s Budget, the variance. Four columns for August. Big ol’ pain. Big ol’ long re

port that you’d never give to the board. Now, if you’d budgeted by month, you might give it to the finance committee, and the numbers geeks would love this. I’m a numbers geek. But most people budget by year, so this doesn’t really help. And even if you budget by month, you don’t want to give the board this. So you take this Show Columns, and you make it Total Only. And then you have the column for the Actual, the column for the Budget, and then you have the variance. And that’s what you would g

ive to the board. And hopefully, if you don’t have too many accounts, it’s just one page. So that’s our goal. Now, I think it’s 3:24, so what I want to do is, let me go back to the slides. Let’s finish up, and let’s answer questions afterwards. I don’t want to keep you on the phone any longer than you were supposed to be. But I do want to make sure that we have time to answer questions. Actually, you know there is one thing more. Let me do this thing. There’s one more thing. Well, yeah, there i

s one more thing I wanted to share. This kind of has to do with finishing up also. Can you guys see the screen? Can they see the QuickBooks screen? Becky: It’s still loading up for me. Take just a moment though, really quickly, because we’re running out of time. Gregg: Yeah,I know. First thing I want to point out is where TechSoup, on TechSoup’s website, this is where you can get the training product, and it is – This is the one that you’re going to want. This one right here. It’s $109. You clic

k on that, and you’ll be able to purchase the training product. It’s six hours long. It has just all the steps that we covered, but it goes through transactions, reports. It’s basically the Bible. I will tell you that – And I’m just telling you. This is through TechSoup. You need to get this thing. You really do because it becomes the Bible for you. And you’re getting it at a much cheaper price than you would get it from us because we’ve basically donated it to TechSoup. So it’s $109. And the o

ther thing I want to tell you about this is that if you do get this from TechSoup — And every, single one of you should get this — What happens is we are going to — if you purchase this in the next 48 hours, so between now and Friday night at midnight — We are going to tally up everybody that bought one of these, and we’re going to pick somebody, and we’re going to refund your money on it and give it to you for free. So that was one thing. It’s just kind of an incentive for you to go ahead and g

et this thing. Because, I’m telling you, QuickBooks is a great program, but if you don’t have the training, then it becomes very difficult to learn how to use this. The other thing that I want to give you, also, is we do have tech support that we can offer you, not through TechSoup, but through our website. This is our website, and it’s QuickBooksMadeEasy.com. And if you go here to QuickBooksMadeEasy.com and click on Tech Support, we can sign you up for tech support. Now, normally it’s $300. We’

re going to give it to you for $149. You’ll be able to call us for an entire year. We can even dial into your software and answer questions for you. You’ll have somebody that can be at your beck and call. I’m going to go back over to the screens and let Becky finish up. I think that’s it. We didn’t have time for the other polls, but that is ok. Becky, I’m going to go back to you and let you finish up. These are the coupon – There’s the coupon code. Becky: Thank you, Gregg. This is the coupon co

de. I’ll just point to it on screen here. If you want that unlimited tech support for one year, where you can call up and get Gregg or David or any of the other people that help answer your questions one-on-one, this is the coupon code, valid until midnight eastern time on Friday, so for the next 48 hours. You’re going to want to enter this code in when you go to QuickBooksMadeEasy.com and request that tech support. And you’ll get it for $149, which is a $149 discount. So that’s a great deal if

you want that one-on-one support. We’d also like to ask, for those of you who’ve enjoyed today’s content with Gregg, do you want to opt in to get QuickBooks Made Easy’s newsletter. Which, how often does that go out, Gregg? Gregg: It’s a once-a-month newsletter, and it has a quick tip to make life for yourself easier in QuickBooks. It’s basically a link to a YouTube video. And it’s free, and it just comes out once a month, and I think you’ll be pretty happy with it. So go ahead and click on it if

you want it. Becky: Great! And we’re not – That’s why we’re asking people. We are not – We don’t give our participants’ info away to any of our partners here at TechSoup. So we will only have your subscription to that given to QuickBooks Made Easy if you opt in this way, or obviously, if you go to their website and sign up for their newsletter on your own. You can certainly do that as well. I’ll leave that open for just a couple more seconds as people vote for whether they want to get that. I k

now Gregg already showed where to get QuickBooks on our website. I just want to make sure that people remember that QuickBooks, it may be easy to just search for that term, and you can do that. But it is made by the company Intuit. So when you search by donor or provider in our catalog, you’re looking for the provider named Intuit in order to actually get QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks for Mac. Those are all available in our catalog right now. You can get the 1-user or 3-user

licenses. I’m going to go ahead and stop that just so I can show you, again, where you can browse by Product Catalog > By Donor or Company. You can select Intuit. You can also get to Gregg’s products by QuickBooks Made Easy. You can get to that Essentials program to request that. And again, one of you who does that within the next 48 hours will get it for free, or you’ll pay, and you’ll get reimbursed for it. Just to mention again that you can get the 1-user license of QuickBooks Premier, 3-user

license, QuickBooks for Mac, or QuickBooks Online. And you can learn more about the QuickBooks program at this link at techsoup.org/intuit-software-nonprofits. Where you can see helpful intro videos to help you decide which product is the one that you need. Gregg obviously had the ones that he recommends. And I know we are running out of time for questions, but I just want to ask a couple of really specific ones that I think do actually apply to a number of people. We had a number of people who

joined us from churches today. And I guess, what’s the biggest thing or takeaway? Do they need to be using the same product? Do they use it the same way? We’ll share out a link to a recording we did for religious and faith-based organizations as well. Gregg: I will tell you that if you are a church or religious organization, you do do things differently. I won’t share the screen because we don’t have a whole lot of time here. But you want to use your classes to track your funds. And churches or

houses of worship, they run by committee. They don’t need to worry about that Program, Fundraising, or Admin thing, because they typically don’t do 990s. They don’t need that sort of format. So you want to use accounts for your committees and subaccounts for your specific expenses by committee. And then you want to use classes for your funds: Building Fund, Worship Fund, Choir Fund, Youth Fund, whatever. We have a whole, separate training product. The product that you’re going to get through Te

chSoup is called QuickBooks Made Easy The Essentials. And it’s normally $299. You’re getting it for $109. Or maybe it’s $249 or $229. You’re getting it for $109. Beyond the Essentials has actually two chapters specifically for churches. And I would recommend going to our website and getting those. I’m just going to throw this out there: David — If you want to get Beyond the Essentials because you are a house of worship, if you call the 800 number, David will give you a coupon to get a discount o

ff of that too. Go ahead. Sorry about that. Becky: Great! Thank you. No. I appreciate that generosity for those of you from churches who want that Beyond the Essentials. That’s great! We actually do need to wrap it up because we are over time, and I want to just take a moment to thank you, Gregg, for all of these great answers and for the tour of the products. Really appreciate it. And thank you to Debra and Megan and Susan on the back end and David on the back end, for really doing our best to

answer. We’ve answered 130 questions on the back of the tool already. A lot of furious typing there. We would love it if you would, first off, chat in one thing that you learned today that you are going to take back and try to implement at your own organization, using your own QuickBooks. Or maybe the thing that you’ve learned is, “Hey, I need to get this product,” or, “Hey, I need to upgrade.” Let us know what that one thing is that you’re going to take back. We also would ask that you’d share

this content with your colleagues and friends who can benefit from it, and that you’ll give us feedback after today’s webinar. Take a moment to fill out the post-event survey that pops up. Let us know what worked for you, what didn’t, because we do use that information to help improve our program. We would also like to point you to our catalog of TechSoup courses. We have a new learning management system that has a catalog of courses that are available to you. Most of them are totally free on ra

nging topics from graphic design for nondesigners, tech planning, tech training. All kinds of different topics are in there and some specifics on tools like Adobe, Photoshop, and InDesign. So go check out our course catalog because you can go 24/7. You don’t have to show up at a certain time, and you can access free courses and some paid, higher level courses to learn and grow your own capacity in areas of technology. We’d also like to invite you to some of our upcoming webinars. If you’re joini

ng us from a library, we’ll talk about patron privacy in public libraries on the 16th. And for those of you who want to continue this learning with Gregg, join us for QuickBooks Desktop for Existing Nonprofit Users, so you can continue growing. This will be slightly, somewhat more advanced than today’s topic, but I’m sure you can get a lot out of it as well. And then we’ll be talking about how to maximize your tech donations through TechSoup toward the end of the month. You can find all of these

and our archives on our website under Events or Webinars in the top bar. Thank you, all, so much for taking the time today. Thank you, Gregg. Gregg: Can I say one thing real quick? I’m sorry. I just want to say one thing because I still see there’s like 358 people on the call. I cannot tell you how important it is — and again, you’re getting it not from me, you’re getting it from TechSoup — to take advantage and purchase that training product, The Essentials, from TechSoup. You have 48 hours to

get it, and we will refund one of you. We’re going to pick one of you and refund you. But it will become the Bible of your organization. It’s very important. And then I know a lot of you are gonna want some additional help, so I think it’s vital, if you can, to go ahead and take care of the tech support as well. It’s $149 for an entire year. You go to QuickBooks Made Easy for that. And then if you go to QuickBooks Made Easy’s website, it’ll give you the 800 number to call. I think it’s actually

– I’ll shut up now. Becky: Thank you, Gregg. It’s ok. I imagine that the churches are cringing when you say, “It’ll become your Bible,” because I’m sure they may have their own Bible too. Gregg: Oh! I hadn’t thought about that! Becky: That’s ok. Well, thank you, all, so much for joining. Thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor, for the use of the platform. Really, it’s been fun, as it always is when we have Gregg Bossen joining us. Take some time to check out those resources and watch for t

he archive email to come. Thanks so much, everyone, and have a great day. Bye-bye. Gregg: Bye-bye.