Identifying the Components of the QuickBooks 2019 Environment

Watch QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial. In this lesson, you will learn the different components of the QuickBooks environment. We’re also going to demonstrate how home screen works and how to edit it according to your preference.

Hey there. Welcome back. I thought I would take a few minutes and just take you on a quick tour of the QuickBooks environment, basically what the Home screen looks like and how to work your way around the screen. This section is called Identifying the Components of the QuickBooks Environment.

The first thing you’ll see at the very top of your screen is your title bar and that’s where it has the name of your company right here, also which version of QuickBooks you’re using and what screen you happen to be on. Currently, you’re on what we call the Home screen.
The next thing you’re going to notice is your menu bar. And that’s where you see File, Edit, View, all the way across.

A couple things that I just want to point out real quick. If you click on the Edit option I want you to notice the Find option. You’re going to use the Find option all the time because you’re going to be looking for something, whether it’s a customer name, maybe an invoice number, did you pay this particular bill, there’s always something you’re going to be looking for.

You can use the Find and the Search options to look for those things. Also notice the Preferences, which we’re going to be doing over in module three, but that’s where all the options are, a lot of those things we talked about in the Easy Step Interview.

You’re going to see also there is an option that says List. All the lists that are in QuickBooks will be here, like your Chart of Accounts, your customers, you’re going to see your memorize transaction list. All of that stuff is going to be in this screen. It makes it a little bit easier sometimes if you can just find the list of those things.

You’re going to see an option here that says Company. There’s one for Customers, Vendors, Employees, and Banking, all the way across. The next thing I want to point out here on the left is what we call your Icon Bar. You would just click on the different options to get to those particular things that you might want to look at or change.

However, what if you don’t like it here on the left? I personally think it takes up room on the screen. You can click this arrow and collapse the pane as they call it and then use the arrow again to pull it back out. But here’s another option you may want to turn on.

If I go to the menu where it says View and click on Top Icon Bar now it’s moved those options to the top of the screen instead of the left. And then I can go ahead and maximize this window and it will fill up the screen.

Now the other thing you will definitely want to turn on, I do not know how people work without this, is what we call the Open Windows List. If you go back and click View on the menu you’ll see it on the left here. And this is the Open Windows List. What it does is every time you open a window you’ll see it here. That way if you don’t want to close the current window you can just click on a window you’d like to work in.

If you do want to close one, let’s say I want to close this Bill Tracker I opened, all I have to do is go to the top of that window and click the X. Don’t click the X up here because that’ll close QuickBooks. Close this X right here and then that will close that particular window.
The next thing I want to point out is the fact that you’re on the Home page and you’re going to spend most of your time on this Home page but let me just show you the Insights.

Basically, if you know what a dashboard is that’s what Insights basically are. If you actually had your information already set up you’d be able to see all on one screen what your profit and loss look like, you’d be able to see if you had any income, if you have any expenses, that type of thing. It’s just a quick look at what your books look like. A little bit later when we get some data in here we’ll take a peek back at this. For now we’ll go back to the Home page.

Let’s take a peek at how this Home page is actually set up. You can see it’s divided into five sections. This first section right here where it says Vendors, this is your accounts payable section. If you’re not familiar with that term this has to do with the bills that you get in the mail that you have to pay.

This is where you’re going to set up those bills and pay those bills. And we’ll look at some other options as well.
This is going to be your accounts receivable portion. This is where you’re going to handle any invoices or customers make payments, things having to do with customers will be in this section. And this section down here will have to do with time and your payroll.

Over here you have a company section. These are options that don’t have to do specifically with customers or vendors but they have to do with the company file itself. Like this Chart of Accounts, for example. Get really, really, really familiar with this Chart of Accounts because this is the most important part of QuickBooks. We’ll be spending some time on that a little bit later as well. So just remember where that is. And also notice there is a banking section. These are options that have to do with banking, like recording deposits or opening your check register.

That’s your five different sections. Now let’s go back and look at these buttons here. Do you see where it says Vendors, Customers right here, Employees right here? These are what we call Centers. This would be the Vendor Center, the Customer Center, and the Employee Center. And basically what a center is, if I click Vendors for example, it’s going to take me into a list of all of my vendors. And if I had these populated they would show up. I would see the vendor name, any transactions for that vendor.

I’m going to go ahead and close that window and you would have the same thing if you looked at Customers or Employees.
There are always more than one way to get to some of these options. We just talked about the Vendor Center being right here but another way I could get to it is to go right here and click on Vendors.

The same thing with Customers. I could click here and go back and click Customers. That’s two ways to get to some of the same options. And as matter of fact you know of another way, going to List. We saw Customers right here, Customers here, and also Customers and Vendors right here. So just know there’s more than one way to get to some of the different options.

Way over on the right hand side you’ve got a couple of options. The first one is your Account Balances. Once we get your checking account set up, your savings, your credit card, all those things that would run a balance you will see those listed here. And a quick way to go one of those registers would be to double click on Checking, for example. If you don’t want to see this you just hit this little arrow that points up and that will hide or show that portion of the window.

This right here, these are all things that Intuit can sell you. If you’d like to run your payroll through them you can. If you’d like to set merchant credit cards through Intuit you can.

You can order checks and tax forms. Or you can use T sheets to track the time you and your employees spend on a particular job. These are all sales. You do have to pay for them. None of them are free. But just know they’re available if you’d like to use them. Again, if you don’t want to see that use the arrow and just hide that part of the window.

Now let’s talk for just a minute about the Backup Status option here. We are going to talk later on in these videos about how to backup your company file. If you’re using the desktop version of QuickBooks you will want to do this on a regular basis because if something happens to your data you need something to restore it from.

You can actually do that manually or you can have Intuit do it for you. They actually have this feature called Intuit Data Protect that you can sign up with and it’s not free. You do have to pay a monthly fee for it but they will go ahead and just back it up for you. That would just be your option.

So those are your options that you have over on the right hand side of your screen here. The other thing is if you happen to see these yellow boxes around, those just show up when there’s new features.

You can just X out of them if you’d like and then it’ll tell you that if you want to turn them back on you can go up to Help here and look at the new features that way.

That’s a quick overview of how the Home screen works. You’re going to spend a lot of time on this screen so get really, really familiar with it.
We’ve got one more section in this particular module and that is Converting QuickBooks Desktop Data to the Online Version. I’ll show you how to do that if you’ll flip on over to section five.

Cindy McGuckin

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