The QuickBooks Online Experience

As one of the newest employees at Devine Consulting, I took my very first QuickBooks Online certification class in Downtown Houston led by MB Raimondi from Trubull, CT, and Michelle Long from Kansas City, Missouri. This is the first class of many I will have to complete to become a QuickBooks ProAdvisor alongside several other of my coworkers.

For those of you that don’t know, receiving the title of a ProAdvisor requires an individual to complete and pass several online courses and tests that pertain to all aspects of QuickBooks. Once you are certified, you become a part of an online support database that allows business owners and other professionals in your area to reach out to you for help and potentially bring in new business. Having ProAdvisors on your staff is not only beneficial to the individual, but it is also beneficial for the firm as a whole.

I will preface this post with some information about QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online. Being one of the most popular accounting programs, QuickBooks Desktop has been used by most small businesses at one point or another. While it is a great program, it has its limitations, especially with everything moving to the cloud in this day and age.

The desktop version and QuickBooks Online both serve the same purpose, but most everything is different, from the look and feel of the software to the way things are entered. QuickBooks Online, in a way, caters to the user because it links with your bank account and pulls in information directly from your bank so that you can match the information within QuickBooks.

Nifty, right?

While QuickBooks Desktop does have this feature, it is not as automated as QuickBooks Online, which leaves most users to enter everything manually.

The completely different look of QuickBooks Online took a little getting used to.

My favorite feature of the desktop version was the customizable toolbar. You can swiftly navigate around the program by customizing it to include your most used icons, whether that be the customer center, vendor center, reports, etc.

Unfortunately, QuickBooks Online does not have the toolbar, which was a bit of a problem for me as that is what I enjoyed most about the desktop version and thought I would just have to live without. I was ecstatic when the two lovely ladies leading the conference enlightened us with a trick to create your makeshift toolbar by using the bookmark bar.

Clever, right?!

I thought it would be a great idea to share it with our readers so that you all can utilize this trick. Follow the step-by-step guide below.

Creating QuickBooks Custom Toolbar

Note: I am using Google Chrome in the guide.

When logged into your QuickBooks Online profile, make sure that the bookmarks bar is not hidden. Do this by clicking the icon with the three dots to the right of the search engine bar, highlighting where it says “Bookmarks,” then click “Show bookmarks bar” or Ctrl+Shift+B.

Next, you’re going to bookmark the first action you want on your toolbar. I’ve chosen to add “Create Checks” on my bookmark toolbar. In the right-hand corner of your screen, you will see a plus sign next to the search bar. This is called the quickly create an icon.

Click the quickly create icon and then click “Checks” under the vendor’s column.

Once the page pulls up, you will add it as a bookmark. Do this by clicking the star at the far right of the search engine and clicking done to add the bookmark. The star will appear blue once a page has been bookmarked.

You’ve now got the start of your bookmark toolbar. Nifty, right? Next, I will show you how to create a folder within the bookmark toolbar for, let’s say, A/R workflow or A/P workflow.

Right-click on the bookmark bar and click “Add folder” on the drop-down list and create your “A/P Workflow” folder.

Once you’ve created the new folder, you will add the bookmarks that correspond to that folder. For A/P workflow processes, we will add “Bills” and “Pay Bills.”

From the Create menu, select “Bills.” Once you are on the bills page, you are going to bookmark the page just like I displayed earlier, but instead of adding it to the bookmark bar, you are going to click the dropdown menu where it says “Folder” and add it to the “A/P Workflow” folder.

You will then repeat the steps above and add “Pay Bills” to the “A/P Workflow” folder.

There you have it. Your very own toolbar in QuickBooks Online utilizing the features of your web browser. I suggest adding create customer, create vendor, and any other action you frequent in QuickBooks Online. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks in the future.

Regards,

Travis Herzog