084 QBO Secrets Revealed: Turbocharge Your Bookkeeping with Game-Changing Automation Hacks
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In this episode, we dive into the essentials of managing your data in QuickBooks Online (QBO) to ensure you’re using it efficiently and effectively. You've got your data, but now what? We'll cover how to ensure it's accurate and how to make the most of it.
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00:00:00
Welcome back to another episode of Money. Through ease. I'm your host, Regan Bashara. Today we're talking about data management, and now I promised that this would not be a boring episode. But if it helps, I do have a companion video for this episode and for last week's episode. And that is over on my YouTube channel.
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If you didn't know already, yeah, I have a YouTube channel where I'm actually showing you step by step tutorials and instructions for using QuickBooks Online for setting and achieving your goal.
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In your business.
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Yes.
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It's good stuff. So head over to YouTube, search for all ease accounting and you'll see my picture and make sure you get subscribed. So if you don't want to listen to.
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This episode because.
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You're like, I don't know what you're talking about. Unless I can see it. Go watch the YouTube video. It is pretty much the same information here, and it may be helpful for you to actually see what's going on in QuickBooks.
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Online and I totally get that.
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But if you're going to stick around and listen to the rest of this episode, I super Duper appreciate it. And be sure to subscribe, leave a rating and a review. I really appreciate it so much. It helps the podcast get pushed to more business owners just like you. That need help with their bookkeeping and with QuickBooks.
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Online. So today we're talking about data management and like we talked about last week, managing your data is necessary in order for you to use QuickBooks Online efficiently. We know that the data exists.
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Just for the simple fact that we are making and spending money, we are transacting in our businesses pretty much every day. So the data exists now what do we do with it? How do we make sure that it's correct? I also teach you how to make sure your data is correct inside the bookkeeping foundation kit, and this episode is sponsored.
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By the bookkeeping foundation kit.
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This is an essential tool kit of videos, questions, samples and resources to help you set up a bookkeeping system and for you to stay on top of it for your small business. If you have trouble with consistency, go grab the bookkeeping foundation kit. I help you with that. It's $77, and you can purchase it by clicking the link.
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In the show.
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Notes. As a bonus, I'm offering 30 days free inside my private virtual community. That way you can have support from me and my other clients as you work through the material I already have hours of live content available and tutorials inside the group and I go live twice a month for more.
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Q&A And financial organization tips. I also host Co working sessions on zoom that are exclusively available to members of the community.
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So these are kind of like a study hall where you can work silently alongside me on or off camera, or even bring questions and get support from me on the call. Grab your bookkeeping foundation kit by clicking the link.
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In the show notes.
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Today we're talking about database management because that's what QuickBooks Online is. It is a database. It is just a collection of data. And last week we talked about how it's just a bunch of lists.
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If you have ever seen a spreadsheet in your life, you've seen a set of data, essentially a database. Now my husband may argue with me about that and he doesn't listen to the episodes, so I'm just going to say that I'm right and that a split sheet is a database and QuickBooks Online is like a glorified.
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Spreadsheet on steroids. So today we're going to talk about the key features that QuickBooks Online has to help you manage your data.
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As a reminder, I am not an employee of Intuit. I am not paid to promote their products to you. I've never been their employee. I simply am an advanced certified QuickBooks Online Pro advisor, which means I use QuickBooks Online for my own business and all of my current clients use QuickBooks Online, so I help.
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Them with that.
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To teach them the tools that they need to use QuickBooks Online effectively. And today we're going to talk about these features that can seriously make your life so much easier. Number one is templates, and this is one of the best areas of QuickBooks Online that you do.
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Once set up a template and then you never have to change it if you don't want to. It doesn't need updating because it's a template where information just gets plugged in as needed, so the templates for QuickBooks Online are available for your invoices, for your estimates and for sales receipts.
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And this is super important because this is the information that gets sent to your clients asking them to pay you money.
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So it's pretty important that you look at your templates that you customize them for your forms for your business, and it can really help you have a lot of brand consistency. I know that folks use like Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF to like make invoices and they use QuickBooks Online, but they insist on continuing to use.
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Microsoft Word or put it into like the PDF or a spreadsheet.
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Blows my mind.
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Because QuickBooks Online is set up for you to use the invoicing part of their software. And like I said, you set it up once and you don't have to do it again. So make sure you check out those templates. You can click on the settings of your QuickBooks Online and they have a custom form style option that allows you.
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To upload your brand's logo to use your brand.
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Customized colors and fonts because it's really important that the invoices and the communications that are going out to your clients are consistent across platforms, right and under the templates you can also customize what the emails look like whenever you're emailing your clients your invoices.
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If you're not emailing invoices to your clients.
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But I'm going to need you to go ahead and purchase the bookkeeping foundation kit, because you need to have that **** set up to be automated, right? We all want to save time and make more money, and especially make money in our sleep and changing our templates and automating things is the way to do that, right? So make sure you go into QuickBooks Online.
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Check out their templates. Customize it for your data for your business, for your brand and your clients.
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And you do it once, and then you're done. The second key feature of QuickBooks Online that can help you manage your data better is using the recurring transactions. Now, recurring transactions can be anything from an invoice to an expense to a journal entry to a bill like it is.
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There are so many options for you to set up recurring transactions, and especially if you have things that go out every week or every month or need to be created on a consistent regular basis.
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If you're not using recurring transactions, what are you even doing? Especially because so many businesses out there are putting together some sort of subscription or membership service nowadays, and you can automate all of that inside QuickBooks Online. I understand wanting to use an app that is specific to your industry, and I get that.
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But if you want to use QuickBooks Online for your invoicing and recurring membership, pricing and all of that, then it's already inside your bookkeeping. You don't need to transfer that data from anywhere else.
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The third feature of QuickBooks Online that helps you manage your data is the rules. Now this is different from recurring transactions and I did have a YouTube video that explains the difference between recurring transactions and rules and when do you use one or the other. So make sure you go subscribe to my YouTube channel but rules.
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Are the way that we kind of automate some things in QuickBooks Online. It's not necessarily artificial.
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But if you know anything about coding, it's telling QuickBooks. If this happens, then do this. So if QuickBooks sees a transaction that that it downloaded from your bank account and it looks at the criteria that you have on the wall and it.
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That transaction then it's going to do most.
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Of the work for.
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You if I have a big backlog accounting.
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Project the rules.
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Area of QuickBooks Online has saved my *** more times than I can count.
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And I teach you how to set up rules on YouTube and inside the bookkeeping foundation kit.
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I give you.
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My top tips on setting up rules, some common traps that people fall into with that, but rules make everything so much faster when you're doing bookkeeping. And finally, one of the most overlooked features of QuickBooks Online.
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Is the reconcile area which most people don't reconcile their books that they're doing it themselves. They're like afraid of it for some reason.
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But inside the bookkeeping foundation, can I teach you how to reconcile your books every single month, and I teach you how to troubleshoot whenever you're not able to reconcile because it does happen, especially if you're just starting out. You'll be like, wait a minute, why is this not reconciling? I take you through all of the different scenarios as to why your books are not reconciling.
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Inside the kit. So you definitely want.
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To grab a copy.
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That but reconciling is how we take care that our data is correct inside QuickBooks Online when it comes to data management, we got to have a way to check our work. We got to have a way to make sure that the data is actually correct before we look at our reports and make any choices or decisions based on that data and reconciling.
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That's how we do that. It is checking our work against the bank. It is checking our math. If you remember in, you know, algebra whenever you solved for X, the way to check your work was to take the value of whatever you found.
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Was X the value of X and you plug it back into the?
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Original equation that's.
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Kind of like what we do when we're reconciling. We are checking our math to make sure that the math is matching, we want to.
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Make sure everything adds.
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Up and that those numbers are correct and that is how we manage your data, making sure that it's correct is.
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You know, probably the most important part.
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And that's why I tell you, even if you're not going to be using QuickBooks Online, you need an accounting software that is going to let you reconcile and not all of them do, which is crazy. How can you call yourself an accounting or bookkeeping software if you don't have a way to reconcile the books that doesn't make any ******* sense inside the bookkeeping foundation Kit I guide you.
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Through these areas in your QuickBooks Online company and this helps to automate your bookkeeping, which is what we all want, right? You want to save time and you want to make more money. Automation means that you are clicking less buttons and you're giving yourself more time for sales. And but.
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Growth or maybe even taking a vacation once in a while, right? So grab your bookkeeping foundation kit today by visiting the link in the show notes, you'll get immediate access to all the content, plus a free 30 day trial of my private virtual community. This is where I'm going live twice a month with more tutorials, content, and Q&A.
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For my clients.
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And we're all here to support you doing this.
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Work.
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Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast and leave me a rating or review. Have an amazing week, everybody.