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Kyla: Hello and welcome to QuickBooks Made Easy for Nonprofits and Charities.
Just a little bit about the ReadyTalk program that we will be using today,
in ReadyTalk you will all be muted. If you have any questions, whether or not it is about ReadyTalk
or whether it is for our presenter today on QuickBooks or QuickBooks Made Easy,
you can go ahead and type those questions into our chat box. And I will have a chat helper
on the back end who will be organizing those questions for me
and I'll be able to read those out loud to our presenter.
If the questions are specifically TechSoup related, we also have Nicole Haze
who's also going to be helping out with the chat questions.
If for some reason you do lose your internet connection at any time,
you can reconnect using that same link that was emailed to you.
So the same way that you got in this morning, you can get back in the same way.
And if for some reason, you can't get back in or you need any other help,
you can go ahead and call the ReadyTalk support line that's on your screen right now.
Just as a reminder, we will be recording today's session, and the recording will be emailed
to everybody who registered today later on today. You will receive a link
to the presentation, materials, and links. We will also be posting this recording
onto the TechSoup site and the TechSoup YouTube page later,
as soon as we get that uploaded.
So again, welcome to QuickBooks Made Easy for Nonprofits and Charities.
My name is Kyla Hunt. I'm going to be your facilitator today.
I am the webinar program manager here at TechSoup.
With us today is Gregg Bossen from QuickBooks Made Easy. He's a practicing CPA
with a full service accounting firm located in Atlanta, Georgia.
Since 2000, Gregg has been teaching QuickBooks seminars throughout the country
for various groups, and is considered to be an expert in this program.
Also, of course, assisting with chat is Becky Wiegand and Nicole Haze,
so you might see those names in your chat box.
With that, I'm going to go ahead and give it over to Gregg to take it away.
Gregg: Thank you, Kyla. Great beginning.
Hi, everybody. I am Gregg Bossen, and welcome to QuickBooks 2013 Made Easy
for Nonprofits and Charities. I don't know how many people have heard me teach before,
so chat up. Just chat me. If you've heard me before, say so.
I'm interested to see how many people have heard me teach before.
Anyway, if you have, here I am again.
And you are looking at a picture of me which is kind of grainy, from what I can tell.
I'm not that grainy in real life, I promise you, hopefully.
Well, I guess it depends upon your eyesight, but nevertheless, blah-blah-blah.
I promise we'll talk about QuickBooks in a second.
Again, as Kyla already said, I have an accounting practice in Atlanta, Georgia.
I've been in practice for about 25 years. I specialize in nonprofits,
and I'm an advanced QuickBooks Pro advisor. I teach QuickBooks all over the country,
and probably have taught over a thousand seminars. I specialize in my practice
with nonprofits, and then I also specialize training nonprofits how to use QuickBooks.
So we have a couple of training products. One of them is called "QuickBooks Made Easy
for Nonprofits: The Essentials." You can actually get that on TechSoup. It's normally $230.
It's a training CD that comes with a handbook, teaches you all the basics you need to know.
You can get it on TechSoup for much cheaper than that.
And then we have "Beyond the Essentials" which is a companion piece.
I actually am going to give you guys a coupon to get a discount off of that. I also offer tech support.
Actually, let me go ahead and share the screen here for a second.
Hopefully, you'll be seeing — this is a page on my web site, on the QuickBooks Made Easy web site,
and these are the two products: "The Essentials" and "Beyond the Essentials,"
and I'll have a coupon at the end for "Beyond the Essentials.
I also offer technical support agreements, and I'll give you a coupon for that
where you can call me for a year and ask me any question that you want to about QuickBooks.
It's normally $199; I'm going to give it to you for $100. We have a coupon at the end of the seminar
that we'll give you for that as well.
And then I teach live seminars as well across the country, and I have a little spot in there.
I've got to go back to the slides, and show you that I teach all over the country,
but these are four cities that I'm coming to: Dallas, Austin, Chicago, and Pittsburg,
two of them in March and two in April. They're all-day seminars.
So please check that out online. If you happen to be in those cities or near those cities,
then you can see me teach live. But you need to find out whether or not I'm any good,
so let's get onto the seminar.
All right. So this is the agenda. This is what we're going to cover. We only have an hour.
I've kind of broken it up into three little sections here. The first thing we're going to do
is compare the new version 2013 to the older versions.
Now, I will tell you that not a whole lot has changed that would be relevant for nonprofits,
but a big thing that's changed is the way it looks. What computer people call the "user interface,"
the way it looks, has changed. So if you've been using QuickBooks for a while,
it might freak you out, so we're going to talk about that first.
Then we're going to get into some basic setup.
By the way, that first section will take about 15 minutes, then we'll take some questions.
Then we're going to do basic rules of setting up. What should your accounts look like?
What should your classes look like? If you have restricted grants, I'm going to want you to use jobs.
We're just going to go over that, and those of you that are brand new, I'm sure you'll get a lot out of it,
but everybody's going to learn there. It's going to take about 15 minutes.
And then the product that I have a coupon for at the end is called "Beyond the Essentials."
We go over all kinds of stuff that nonprofits need to do and we give you ways to deal with them
in QuickBooks. One of them is in-kind contributions, and I'm going to show you
how that's done, live. Last year when I taught this TechSoup seminar,
we did special fundraising events. This time I'm going to do in-kind contributions
because people really liked it.
Before we go into it, I want to have you take this little poll.
How long have you been using QuickBooks? I think you can just click on the answer
and click submit right on your screen. Brand New means you don't know anything about QuickBooks.
Now maybe you've been playing with it for about three weeks,
but I mean you know if you're brand new, so put brand new there.
Then we have six months or less, six months to two years, two years to five years,
and then anybody over five years, you've probably been using a long time.
I'm looking at the responses now. Wow! All right. So it's like half the people are brand new,
and then the same number of people have been using it more than five years. That's interesting.
Kyla: That's really interesting.
Gregg: Yes, but that just tells you how challenging it can be to teach a seminar like this
because some of these guys have been using it for a long time.
But I promise you everybody is going to learn. I promise you.
All right, so having said that, I think I am — yes, I'm done.
Kyla: The next slide is the product links. We can show that now and you can go ahead,
and that way we won't come back to that.
Gregg: Thank you, Kyla. I haven't seen that. So this is the links to both
where you can get the "Essentials" product — not the "Beyond the Essentials"
but the "Essentials" product straight from TechSoup,
and this is where you can get QuickBooks. You can buy the program QuickBooks
from TechSoup as well.
All right, so enough about that. So what I'm going to do is we're going to start the seminar.
Well, I guess we've already started, but now we're really going to start. I'm going to share my screen.
All right. So right now, you should be looking at QuickBooks.
This is actually not QuickBooks 2013; this is QuickBooks 2012.
I'm doing this on purpose because the very first little section here we're going to talk about
is what are the changes between the older versions of QuickBooks and version 2013.
Now, in terms of the functions or the features, they didn't really change a whole lot.
They didn't really add a lot of new features that you can do, that are relevant for nonprofits
anyway. They did add some new features for those that have inventory, businesses
that have a lot of inventory. They also added some features that accountants or bookkeepers like.
There's a new feature where you can, if I'm in that line of a bookkeeper,
I'm a CPA where I can send journal entries to my clients. I mean, that's not something that nonprofits
necessarily care about, but accountants do. When it comes to nonprofit stuff,
they didn't really change a lot of features, but what they did do is they did change the look
of the software. Let me just kind of show you right now.
I'm in version 2012, and here it is. Now watch and look at the difference between 2012 and 2013.
Now let me just tell you something. If you're brand new to QuickBooks and you just started
and you're using 2013, this is the only thing you've ever seen. So this looks good to you.
No problemo. Well, let me tell you, the rest of us, we're freaking out, okay?
Because we're used to seeing this. The software has looked like this for probably five or six years,
and now all of a sudden in 2013 it looks like this. So I want to talk about that in this first section.
Let me just say this. What they did was they changed what's called the "user interface,"
in other words the way the program looks. The reason why they did that,
the intent was to make it easier for people to use the software
and to get around where they need to go.
The first thing I want to explain to you is that nothing really changed.
Everything looks pretty much the same. In 2013, this top bar is called the "title bar"
and it tells you what software we're using. We're using Premier Nonprofit Edition 2013.
This thin bar is called the "menu bar" and this is actually one of the ways to get around
in the program. If I want to write a check, I can go under Banking and I can click "Write Checks"
and a check screen pops up. This is check 1001. This third area here, this fat bar
is called the "icon bar" and if I click on "Check" the same check pops up, 1001.
I'm just kind of highlighting these are two ways of getting to the same place in the program.
And then this big section over here, this is the "home" page and this is also just another way
of getting around in the program.. I'm going to click "Write Checks" and there again, 1001,
same check. I just wanted to kind of teach you that because we've got a lot of people
that have never used the program, so when you look at the screen, this is what it is.
This is the title bar. This is the menu bar; that's one way to get around.
This is the icon bar; that's another way to get around.
And the home page, that's another way of getting around.
When you go back into the old version, it's the same thing. This is the title bar.
This is the menu bar. This is the icon bar, and this is the home page. It's in the same place,
but look at the change. For one, the fonts are a lot bigger. It makes it easier to read.
They're small here, but they're bigger here. They also did something that a lot of us
have really freaked out about, a lot that have been using QuickBooks.
They made the background black and then the lettering white on the icon bar and on the title bar,
and they did that to make it easier for people to read. But those of us that are used to seeing this,
when you go to a black background it starts to look kind of bland and stark.
So a lot of people were upset about it, but let me tell you, you get used to it after a while.
It makes things a lot easier to read, I promise you. The other things are any of the words
at the top of a window, they moved to the middle. In the older versions, they're off to the left.
QuickBooks Premier, it's on the left. The word Home is on the left, Vendors, Customers,
Employees, are on the left. In the new version, everything's in the middle:
Synergy, Home, Vendors. Let me use my little thing there. I'm real excited.
Vendors, Customers, Employees. So it's in the middle. So that whole little series
was just to calm you down if you're kind of freaked out about seeing a new version.
One more thing about this is what I call the Home screen, the first screen you see.
This icon bar, in the older versions, it was at the top and that was it.
You can't really move it around. In 2013, they have the ability — click on View — to move it to the left.
So now it's on the left. of course, it looks a little bit different on the left. But as a matter of fact,
when you first buy QuickBooks 2013, the icon bar is on the left, so that really freaked us out,
to go from there to here. So if you've been using QuickBooks for a while and you don't like change,
don't worry. You can go over here, and make it go to the top.
Now, but there are some advantages to having the icon bar on the left-hand side,
and I just wanted to take a second to talk about those. So I'm going to go ahead.
Well, the main advantage has to do with real estate.
When computer people talk about real estate, they're talking about the space on your screen,
your desktop here, that you can work in. In the older version of QuickBooks, the icon bar is big,
fat, takes up a lot of space at top, and then you've got this gigantic thing on the left-hand side
that you can't make go away. It's been like that for years in the older versions,
and there's not really a whole lot here that you need. In version 2013,
you still have that stuff on the side if your icon bar's on the top, but if you move the icon bar
to the left — I'm going to go over here and go to View and move it to the left —
that big fat bar disappears. Also, the icon bar is no longer on the top,
so you get more real estate. Well, you might be saying to yourself,
"Gregg, now you've got a big fat thing over here, so what the heck are you talking about?"
Do you see this little arrow right there that I'm pointing at with my arrow?
If you click it, it shortens that up. You can't really do that with the old icon bar.
So now you really do have a lot of space in which to work.
That's one advantage of having it on the side.
The other advantage — I'll go ahead and make it big again — is it makes it easier to see your icons.
Let me show you what I mean. In the older versions, these are little shortcuts that you create.
You can add them, subtract them, you can have anything on here that you want.
If you have more shortcuts, they're called shortcuts. If you have more shortcuts
than you have room on the screen, they cut off and then you have this little arrow here,
this little double arrow — a lot of people don't even know about it. But if you click it,
you'll get all the other icons that should be up here, but there's just not enough room for them.
Okay? So it makes it feel like these icons just aren't as important as those icons,
but in version 2013 it's a lot more logical. All the icons are on the left,
and there's a scroll so you can scroll up and down to find them.
So that's another thing that's kind of cool about it. If you want to customize, add your own icons,
you push this Customize Shortcuts thing right there, okay?
Now the last thing on the home page that I want to cover is the stuff over here.
I told you that when you put the icon bar on the left-hand side, this disappears.
Well, the stuff in the middle here, what they did — this is basically an advertisement.
It advertises some other QuickBooks services, which are good, but it is an advertisement.
Accept credit cards through QuickBooks. Well, they still have this if you have the icon bar
on the side. It's just down here at the bottom, which they're recommending something for me now.
There it is, right there. Accept credit cards. So it's not gone, but I don't know that you care a whole lot
about seeing that but what a lot of people care about is their account balances.
That's something that appeared in this window, and when you go to 2013
and you put the icon bar on the left-hand side, it seems to be gone.
Where do I go to get my account balances? It's kind of hard to explain,
but the stuff that is up here, these are your shortcuts. But this little square area right here,
this is what really appears and what you can do something with on this bar.
The stuff down here — do you see where it says My Shortcuts? Because this says My Shortcuts,
you're getting your shortcuts, your little icons that you're used to seeing in your icon bar up here.
But you have other choices of what you want to see up here. Do you see View Balances?
If I pick View Balances, then it changes from the icons to your balances, okay?
And just like the balances appeared here where you double-click and you get to your register,
same thing over here. You double-click and you get to your register. All right?
One more little thing and then we'll stop and we'll take some questions.
I'm going to go ahead and make this go away. That was pretty much what I wanted to talk about —
let me put this back on the top again — about the home screen and what changed in version 2013,
but the other thing is the transaction window's changed as well. I'm going to pull up,
well, let's start with the old way. Those of us who have been using QuickBooks for years,
this is what a check window looks like. Check this out in version 2013.
Whoa! Now that is hugely different from what it used to be.
Again, all they were doing was trying to make it easier for people to read, all right?
So the fonts are a little bit different in the newer version, but it's still the same information.
Pay to the Order of, that's where you put a vendor. Put your dollar amount there.
Put your expense there. Same thing over here. We have Pay to the Order of,
and we have the check number, and then we have the expense here. So it's the same basic thing.
By the way, all the windows have changed, all the transaction windows.
If I go to an Enter Bills window, that looks very different, too.
The thing that's really relevant about the transaction windows has to do with this big fat bar
up here which is called the Transaction Ribbon. The transaction ribbon
is a bunch of different things you can do with the transaction that is on the screen at the time,
and that transaction ribbon has been around but it didn't have very much on it before, okay?
All you could do in a check screen is go back and forth, using Previous and Next, save it, print it,
find a new check, and attach a document, if you have that feature,
which is actually a pretty cool feature. I wish I could teach it, but I don't have enough time.
But anyway, that was it. Well, say I wanted — I'm going to go Preview —
say if I wanted to delete this check for some reason. There's not a Delete button up here.
What if I want to memorize it so I can enter it again? There's not a Memorize button up here.
You have to just know in the older versions that you go to Edit, and here's where you delete.
Here's where you memorize. Here's where you void. That was something that we learned
that have been using QuickBooks for a while. In 2013, they said, "Let's make it easier."
So they put everything you could possibly do on this bar, so it's a lot fatter, okay?
So here's where you can delete. Here's where you can void. Here's where you can memorize.
Now you still can go up to the Edit menu and you'll still see the choices up here,
but for those newbies, everything is right here for you, all right?
And it's like that with all the transaction windows, actually.
So I think I'm going to stop and take questions. So let me get out of here.
So talk to me, people. What have you got?
Kyla: All right. We have quite a few questions already. We have one question from Leah
who's wondering, is it difficult to make a switch from using QuickBooks General
to QuickBooks Nonprofit, and saying that she's been using QuickBooks General for years,
but hasn't ever looked into using it for a nonprofit. So I think that this is two questions.
QuickBooks Nonprofit, is that an actual separate product as opposed to just using QuickBooks
for a nonprofit use? How different is using QuickBooks for Nonprofits
as opposed to using it in general?
Gregg: Okay. The first question — and what was her name again?
Kyla: Leah. It's L E A H.
Gregg: Leah. Okay, I don't know. I just wanted to say the name. Leah.
So, Leah, in terms of whether there is a nonprofit edition of QuickBooks.
There's also a regular QuickBooks Pro. You can also get QuickBooks Premier
in a regular version but then of course you can get it in the nonprofit version.
That's the one you can get from TechSoup. The differences between those programs are —
there's not very many at all. It's not different at all.
So in terms of when you get the new nonprofit edition, if you decide to do that,
you're not going to notice very much that changed at all, okay? Not really different there.
In terms of if you've not been using QuickBooks for a nonprofit organization
and you want to start using QuickBooks for a nonprofit organization,
it is a lot different, and that's actually what we're going to cover in the next section.
We're going to talk about how you need to set things up if you're going to tracking stuff
for nonprofit, but that's going to be true regardless of whether or not you have the nonprofit edition
or just regular QuickBooks Pro. Hopefully that answers your question. What else we got?
Kyla: Okay, we have a couple of questions about updating to QuickBooks 2013 for MAC.
Mark was wondering what limitations there are in the MAC version for nonprofit
compared to the PC version. Natasha is wondering if she is upgrading from 2010 on a PC to 2013
for a MAC, will she lose any information or can that not be done.
Gregg: Okay. Can you go from a Windows version to a MAC?
Yes. No, you won't lose any information. So that's not a big deal there. That's easy.
The first question, though, the gentleman — well, I think it was a gentleman —
Kyla: Yes, Mark.
Gregg: — was wanting to know what the differences are between MAC and Windows.
I will tell you that the MAC version is getting better every year, and most of the features are the same.
I can't think of anything in particular in the Windows version that's not in the MAC version
that you're going to need. I'm not so concerned about that. It's getting better every single year.
The thing about the MAC is that it looks a little different and some of the things
are in different places. For instance, there's all these little preferences that you can turn on
and off in QuickBooks, and in the Windows version they're under Edit. In the MAC version, I believe
they're under the File menu. They may have moved them again.
So you'll see differences in terms of where things are sometimes, but for the most part it's not —
I don't think there's anything that's a deal breaker. I'll put it that way.
Kyla: We also had a couple of questions about upgrading from your older versions,
like either from 2008 version to 2013 version, or 2011 to 2013.
They were wondering either what the benefits would be to upgrading to the current version,
and if it is possible to upgrade from older versions like 2008 to 2013.
Gregg: Well, you know, in terms of is it possible to upgrade, of course.
It's going to be possible to upgrade because they want you to upgrade, right?
So they make the version every year, and you can upgrade. In order, making it happen is really easy.
You just go to File and you click Open Company and you select your —
as a matter of fact, well, I'll just do this. You select the company that you want to open,
and even though the company has been opened in an older version, when you try and open it
in the new version, a window's going to pop up and say "I have to change this file
so it can be read in the new version," and it'll make a back-up of it first, and then it will change it.
Then you can read it in the new version. It's very easy.
That is true no matter if you're going from 2012 to 2013 or you're going from 2003 to 2013.
You're not going to lose anything. I promise you there.
Let's do one more.
Kyla: All right. Kathy is wondering, she's trying to decide if she should convert to QuickBooks
from Peachtree, and where do you recommend that she go to get information
on what system would work best for her small organization.
Gregg: Sure. All right. Should you go from Peachtree to QuickBooks?
No. Before I say this, I do not work for QuickBooks. I don't work for Intuit,
so I'm not trying to sell you on it. All right. Yes. You should get out of the land of Peachtree
and go into the land of QuickBooks. I promise you. About 89% of all small businesses out there
are using QuickBooks, and it's because it's just a lot easier to deal with.
Peachtree has about maybe nine or ten percent of the market. So I would definitely change.
It's very easy, by the way. When you set up a new company — I think I can show you this.
New Company. There's actually a conversion tool. Let's see — Other Options.
Convert Other Accounting Software, and I think it gives you — yes.
I'm not at the screen that I want to show you, but you can read about it,
but you can download a tool that will convert from Peachtree. I'm not seeing that on here,
but it didn't turn out the way that I wanted it to. Let me try this one more time.
I'll do the advanced setup because I know that it's here. It's weird.
They used to have a little conversion thing right here.
All right. Well, that didn't work the way that I wanted it to. They must've moved it.
But they have a conversion tool that will make it real easy for you to convert from Peachtree.
I'm trying to think if there's anything else I wanted to say about that.
No. I think that's it.
So I'll have one more quick question, and then we'll move on.
Kyla: All right. Let's see. We have Karen who's wondering,
she says she has the 2013 Premiere but not for nonprofit even though she works for a nonprofit.
Does it really matter?
Gregg: The answer to the question is "Not really." It doesn't really.
You're not going to find a feature in the nonprofit edition that you don't find in Premier
so it's not really relevant. I wouldn't really worry about it. All right.
But of course those of you that have not bought QuickBooks yet, or you have a really old version,
if you're going to upgrade, the smartest thing to do is to get it from TechSoup,
and TechSoup is going to sell you the nonprofit edition.
The reason why it's the smartest thing to do is because it's a lot cheaper than anywhere else,
at least for nonprofits, if money's an issue anyway, which it always is.
All right. So let's go on.
I see Carrie has a question. That's weird I see that hand raised, but that's okay.
We're not going to answer you, Carrie, but we do see that you have a question.
Anyway what we're going to cover in this next little section here, and this will take about ten minutes,
is we're going to talk about the basics of setting up.
Now those of you who have been using QuickBooks for a long time,
I know we've got at least 45 people that have used it more than five years,
hang with me because I think you're going to learn here, hopefully.
The deal is: what do you want out of QuickBooks? You want to get good reports, right?
You want to print out reports for the Board of Directors, usually.
The big one that you want is the Profit & Loss, right?
And so when you go to print out a Profit & Loss, you may be entering transactions all day long,
but when you go to print out the Profit & Loss it doesn't look the way you need it to.
The reason why is because you haven't set your lists up correctly.
You see, when people start using QuickBooks, they're real cool about entering transactions.
It's real simple. Here's a picture of a check. I'll just fill it out. Here's a picture of deposit.
I'll just fill it out. This is easy, you know. Well, if you never bothered to set the lists up correctly
to begin with, you're going to be in trouble. So I want to spend a few minutes talking to you
about how to set up some of the really important lists that QuickBooks has.
One of those lists is called the Chart of Accounts list and it's the most important list of all.
It's so important that when you set up a new company,
QuickBooks is going to give you a Chart of Accounts list automatically
based on your industry. You pick your industry, and they give you a Chart of Accounts.
That's not going to be the correct Chart of Accounts for you.
It might be close, but it's not going to be correct. I'm going to click on this. Here it is.
So you're going to want to change this thing around and make it look like you need it to look.
And the reason why this list is so important is because this list, the accounts on this list
are the accounts that appear on your financial statements. I'll use the Profit & Loss
as an example. Here we go. So here's a Profit & Loss. These lines, these are accounts,
and they came from the Chart of Accounts list. We have salaries, health insurance, rent.
Where did that come from? Right over here. Salaries, health insurance, rent. Okay?
So the stuff that's here determines what's on here. So if you don't like the way this looks,
we need to do something about what's over here, all right?
What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you what your Chart of Accounts should look like,
and the name of the game here is, do not use the Chart of Accounts to track everything in the world.
All right? I know nonprofits have to track a lot of stuff, and that's the mistake a lot of people make.
They use the Chart of Accounts to track everything in the world.
When somebody tells them they need to track something, they create a new account for it.
That results in a very large, cumbersome Chart of Accounts, and if you have that,
then your financials like your Profit & Loss is going to be large and cumbersome.
It's going to be printing on four and five pages. And when you print it out for the Board,
nobody's going to look at it because it's simply too large. Hey, maybe that's why you're doing it.
You don't want the Board to see it. I don't know. Are there any Board members here?
Chat "Board" if you're a Board member. I want to know that. You can tell me in a few minutes, Kyla.
Anyway, let's see, what am I talking about? So it's important that you set up your Chart of Accounts
so that there's not that many. If there's another place to track something,
I'm going to show you where to track it somewhere else. Having said that,
I want to talk about what your income accounts should be.
First, what I'm doing is I'm showing you the wrong way.
So let me go ahead and change the title of it there. I'm going to put right here, just to make it obvious,
"Wrong Way." For those of you that may not be listening to me, but just looking instead,
this is the wrong way, okay? Actually I'll do it this way. You see this account Restricted Grants?
Don't do that, all right? I know a lot of you have restricted grants and you want to track them.
Do not create an account called Restricted Grants in your income. Don't do it, okay? Why?
Number One, it doesn't track restricted grants. All it's going to do is
tell you how much you've collected in restricted grants. It doesn't tell you how much you've spent
of your restricted grants. We're going to show you that you want to use the Customer Job field
to track that. You don't want to have an account for it.
The other reason is it makes things messy. When I look at your books, if I'm going to do an audit
or do a 990, I need to see all your foundation grants together, all your corporate grants together.
Well, if some of your corporate grants are here and some of them, because they were restricted,
are up here, I can't see that easily, okay? So don't do that.
Then another thing that people do is, see this Green Truth Grant, United Fund Grant?
People create separate income accounts for every single grant they have.
That leads to a very long Chart of Accounts list, and it's not necessary.
There are other places you can go to see who's giving you your money.
As a matter of fact, you could just double-click on Foundations and it gives you a list of all the grants,
with the grantors there. So you don't need to have separate income accounts for that.
Here's what I think your Income Account should look like.
We're going to have one for Individual Contributions, one for Corporate,
one for Foundation, and one for Government.
And this is true for everybody on the phone right now, everybody, or everybody listening to me.
This is how I need it on an audit. This is how I need it on the 990, and this is a really good way
of seeing where your money is coming from, and the Board of Directors like to see it this way.
For the most part it's easy. Now that's your unearned revenue.
Then you want to have accounts for your earned revenue. Now this organization,
which is called Synergy Now, they have some programs that they run, so there are program fees.
So I created an income account called Program Fees. If you are a membership association,
maybe you'll have an account for membership dues. If you are a school,
maybe you'll have one for tuition. I guess it would be membership dues, well, I don't know,
for libraries as well. I don't know if they're, I don't know that you have to pay to be a member
of a library, but anyway I just want to acknowledge and say hello to the libraries that are out there.
Miscellaneous income and interest income is one I always like to add, but the point is
there aren't very many income accounts. There just isn't because there doesn't need to be.
So that's basically my suggestion for the income accounts.
As far as the expenses go, when it comes to expenses nonprofits have to track expenses
in two ways. The first way they have to track their expenses is by what I like to call
the "natural category of expense," which is another way of saying "the natural way of thinking
about expenses." That would be like salaries and wages, health insurance, rent, postage.
I mean these are normal expense accounts. I call them natural because if you were to go out
on the street and ask somebody to name some expense accounts,
they'd probably think you were crazy but they would come up with accounts similar to this.
That's how most businesses have to track things and have to report them on their tax returns,
but not 990s. 990s have to do this, too, but they have a second way of tracking expenses.
The second way they have to track expenses is by program. In other words, sure you spent money
on postage but was the postage for overhead or did it go for one of our programs?
What nonprofits do incorrectly — again, this is wrong — is to set up accounts for each program.
Now, Synergy Now is an organization that basically promotes environmentally friendly forms of energy,
so that they have an awareness campaign. They have an annual conference,
and then they have even a Guidance Center that you can go to and learn about solar panels,
fuel cells, and windmills.
People that are doing this wrong will set up accounts for each program.
Well, there are a couple of problems with that. One is, when I do your audit and your tax return,
I need to know for postage and delivery the total postage was for the whole organization.
Some of it might be here. Some of it's here. Some of it's here, so it gets a little messy.
By the way, people on the Board usually like to know how much you're spending on postage
and printing and certainly meals and entertainment, so they need to know it
for everything. It doesn't matter whether it goes to a program or not.
The other thing is that if you set up an account like this for a program,
you don't really see the details of what makes it up. The total expenses for the Guidance Center
was $987, but you don't really know what makes it up. How much is printing?
How much is salaries? So that's a problem, too.
Finally, people that do this, that use expense accounts both for programs
as well as for natural categories, they typically will only put expenses that are obviously
for a program there. Things like salaries, rent, these are things that should be portioned off
to the programs. Well, people that do this don't. They end up just putting it to salaries or rent,
and so all the stuff that should be allocated to programs isn't, and makes it look
like you haven't spent very much money in programs. That's a bad thing.
So we don't want to use our accounts to track programs.
What do we want to use to track programs? Why don't you guys chat me the answer and, Kyla,
let me know when we've got an answer.
Kyla: And just to let you know, we did have several Board members chat in.
Gregg: Really? All right. I'm surprised at that.
Kyla: Yes, a couple of presidents sat in. So we're seeing a bunch of responses.
People are saying Class, Class List. I see Class a lot. I'm seeing Jobs and Customer Jobs.
Gregg: I'm glad somebody said that. We'll talk about that.
So what you want to use is Class. I think I'm going to start this way. When you're entering a check,
there is a place where you fill out the check, who it's to, it's $100.
Down here, if you were to have a program as well as an account, then if it's postage,
well, that wouldn't be postage. We'll call that contract labor. If it was for a program,
you'd be stuck because you'd be like do I put it to this account or do I put it to the program account
that I created up here? Well, if you don't use accounts, then you just use the natural category
over here, and then I want you to use this Class field right over here and put your programs here.
So then you can put it to a class. Now I mentioned I was going to say this:
if you also need to track whether or not the money was paid for out of a grant,
then you want to set your grant up as a customer in the Customer List.
By the way, to get to your customers, you can just click on this Customers button right there.
Anyway, then you can put the name of the grantor right here. By the way, you can split this stuff up.
Half of it is for administrative and is not paid for out of a grant, so you can break this stuff up.
In order to use Classes, you want to set it up. Let me say one thing. The person who said Job.
Some people use the Customer Job field to point things to a program. I would prefer using Class
for that, and I'm going to show you why in a second. To set up Classes,
you have to turn the feature on. You may see that when you go into a check screen
you don't have a Class thing there, so to turn the feature on, you go to Edit,
and you go to Preferences. Preferences are little features you can turn on and off in the program.
There are so many of them that they are broken into different categories.
The categories are on the left-hand side of the screen here. I'm clicking on General.
You see all the general preferences. If I go to Checking, all of those preferences,
and then when I go to Accounting and Company, you'll see Use Class Tracking for Transactions.
Now when you turn this feature on, that will add this column on all of your transaction windows.
What you want to do is to make sure to classify every single transaction.
If you're going to use Classes because every transaction goes for either a program
or admin or fundraising, so you've got to classify every transaction.
If you use Classes to track your programs, you have this neat thing here.
"Prompt to assign Classes." If this is checked, it will prompt you if you forget to assign it to a class.
The person who's using Jobs to track your programs, you don't get that warning.
You only get the warning if you're using Classes. That's why I prefer to use Classes,
one of the reasons anyway.
The point is, if I forget to classify it. I'll just get rid of this, and when I click Save, it's going to remind me.
Of course, you could override the warning which a lot of people do,
but I would suggest not doing that. Anyway this Class column will appear not only on checks,
it will also appear on bills, if you like to enter bills before you ever get around to paying them.
Oh, I didn't even tell you how to add your Classes. Once you have the feature turned on,
go to Lists > Class List. Here are our classes. We have our three programs,
and whenever you're using Classes to track your programs,
you always need to have an additional one for Admin and Fundraising
'cause some of your expenses may not go for a program. They may be for overhead
or fundraising. To add a new one, you just go to the bottom left-hand button:
New and you just type in the name and there it is. Not only do you see it on the expense windows
like bills and checks, but you see it on the deposit window as well.
And I would tell you when you are entering your income, you want to point them to Classes as well.
If it's related to a specific program, then you'll point it to a program.
Maybe you got a grant for the Guidance Center. That would go to Corporate Grants.
If you have a donation that is unrestricted, individual contributions don't really relate
to an individual program, put those to the Fundraising. Don't try and figure out what program
you're going to spend it on. Put it to the Fundraising program,
and I'll show you why in a second.
Oh, I almost forgot. There are two ways to enter revenue. One is using this Record Deposit window.
One is using something called Donations. The person who doesn't have the nonprofit edition,
it's going to say Sales Receipt right here, but it's the same thing. As a matter of fact,
even in the nonprofit edition, when you click on Donations it still says Sales Receipt.
So that's what it is. But the Class column appears here as well so that you can classify things.
Anyway, this is the big finish. As a result you can get a report called a Profit & Loss by Class.
I will do this for —my data file which is in 2020 because we must stay in the future
in order to seem like we are on top of things. Here we are. So this is the year ending June 30, 2020,
and you get a nice little column for each program, and another one for Admin and Fundraising.
There are a couple of advantages. One of the advantages is not only do we put our expenses
to the different programs and notice how I allocated stuff like salaries, payroll taxes,
health insurance. We talk all about how to do that in the training products that I have.
In addition to that, if you put all revenue that relates to a program like the grants that we got
for the Guidance Center and the program fees that were earned in the Guidance Center,
if we put those all here and don't put the unrestricted there,
then we can see whether or not a program paid for itself.
I'm going to make this a little smaller here so it's easier to see.
Kyla: Just to let you know, Gregg, we've got about 15 minutes.
Gregg: I know. I'm almost done. We got $105,000 in income, and we have $119,000 in expense,
so we lost $14,000 on this program. This is great information to know.
You can also see how much of your expenses are Admin and Fundraising.
We have $55,000 in Admin, $20,000 in Fundraising. That's $75,000.
So of my $255,000 in expense, $75,000 which is about 30% is Admin and Fundraising,
which means I'm spending around 70% on my programs. That's important information.
Let's take a couple of questions here, and then we'll move on to in-kind gifts.
Kyla: All right, and we have a ton of questions. So if we don't get to any of your questions,
I'm going to be sharing a bunch of great contact information later.
Rob was wondering the best way to track annual fundraising campaigns.
Should there be a separate class for each campaign each year?
Is Class an appropriate way to track both the process of that being the fundraising campaign
or donation?
Gregg: I wouldn't use classes to track a fundraising campaign. You want to save classes.
I mean, I suppose that you could, but classes are when you have income and expenses,
and really probably what you're trying to track is just how much you're getting from each fundraising
campaign rather than running a Profit & Loss for it 'cause the expenses are nominal.
So I would use either accounts with subaccounts, or if you're using a sales receipt,
you can use something called Items to track it, and I don't have time to teach you now,
but it's in the training product. I'm going to give you Facebook link where all of you can contact me
on Facebook and continue any discussion that we started here.
What's the next question?
Kyla: All right, we had a couple of questions about importing Quicken info
into QuickBooks' Chart of Accounts.
Gregg: Okay. Just as you can convert a Peachtree file into a QuickBooks file,
you're going to be able to convert a Quicken file into a QuickBooks file as well. That's very easy.
When you go to set up a new company, there will be an option there to convert a Quicken file,
and it will make a copy and it will convert it. There's a little technical things about it,
like all of the names that are in the Quicken file will be in the Other Names List
when it gets into QuickBooks, and then you'll want to go to Activities > Change Other Name Types
and then you'll get this window where you can check off where you want each name to go.
It's real easy to do, to convert. What's the next question?
Kyla: Okay. We had a couple of questions about cleaning up or merging accounts.
Marian was wondering if you could merge the accounts if you've already made too many,
like if you've already gone ahead and created too many lists.
Gregg: Oh, yes, it's very easy to merge accounts. This is important so I'll show everybody.
Basically what you do is you take the two accounts, and I'll just take two that I want to merge.
There's two: Other Supplies and Office Supplies. Let's say I want to merge these.
You decide which one you want to keep. I'm going to click Office Supplies.
I want to keep that one. Then I'm going to click on the other one and I'm going to edit it,
and I'm going to change the name to the name that I want to keep, which is Office Supplies.
When I click Save and Close, you get this warning. "The names are already being used.
Would you like to merge them?" You click Yes, and when you do that,
it's going to merge not only the accounts but all the transactions in the past as well.
Okay, we'll take one more.
Kyla: Okay. This is a follow-up to that. Do you recommend cleaning up the Chart of Accounts
prior to converting, or cleaning up when you have converted?
Gregg: I love this question. I get people at the seminars all the time that I teach.
It's like what I'm going to do is clean everything up. So what do I do? Do I clean up and then convert?
Or do I convert then clean up? The answer is it's completely irrelevant.
It doesn't matter because all you're doing is opening up the data file in a new version.
QuickBooks is like, when it comes up with a new version, it's like a new version of Microsoft Word.
Do you need to edit your letter in the older version before you open it up in the newer version?
Not really. It doesn't matter.
All right. Let's go on. I hope I didn't sound smart with that. I didn't mean to.
Kyla: No, you didn't.
Gregg: All right. Cool. Good. Kyla and I have never actually met each other face to face.
I think we both need to change our pictures, by the way. They've been up there for a long time.
All right, so in-kind gifts. We're going to spend about five minutes on this.
I'm going to show you how to do it. It's going to be pretty easy.
I'm going to teach you a couple of things in the process.
In-kind contributions are basically gifts of stuff or services. It's any time your organization gets stuff
other than money, so it's either a gift itself, like bags of clothing that somebody gave you
'cause you have a battered women's shelter, or services.
This organization is called the We Love Crazy Counseling Center.
They provide counseling to the indigent, and so they do it for free, and the counselors donate
their time. Again, that's a gift of services. Those are what in-kind contributions are.
Should you book them? Absolutely. They're going to make your financial statements more accurate
because it's going to more truly reflect the costs of running the organization. So how do you do that?
Also if you get matching grants, some people get matching grants where they'll say,
"Hey, we'll give you $50,000 but you've got to match it with $50,000 that you raise,"
and they'll let in-kind gifts count towards the match. So you want to track it.
To do that, we've got to set up an account. Bottom left-hand button.
We're going to create an income account for this, and we're going to call it In-Kind Gifts.
We only have to set up the one account, and then whenever anybody gives you either stuff
or services, and you want to book it, you're going to use a journal entry to do that.
I know we all hate journal entries. That's why we're using QuickBooks
but this is really the best and the most effective way, the easiest way to record a contribution
of an in-kind service or gift. I'm going to go over here and click Make Journal Entry.
It's under the Company menu. Now I'm going to select my In-Kind Gifts account,
and that's an income account because I'm going to record the gift of counseling services.
If they had given us money and we turned around and paid them back, when they gave us money,
it would have been income, so it's income. How much should it be?
Well, if it's stuff that you're getting like bags of clothing, furniture, what-have-you,
you want to go with either thrift value from Good Will or you want to go with an appraisal
if it's something big, like a piece of furniture or a car. If it's a service, what should you value it at?
Now listen very carefully. You should value it at what that person would normally charge somebody
else, which bring me to the point. When it comes to the donation of in-kind services,
do not, do not book in-kind services that aren't specialized skills.
In order to book a donation of a service, it's required that it has a specialized skill involved
by someone who has that skill. If you've got somebody stuffing envelopes
or doing Admin help such as filing or something like that, we don't book those things.
I know you want to, but we can't. They may even count toward a match,
but the accounting gods say "Don't book." In this case, this is a counselor.
They normally charge $100 an hour. They donated ten hours of time for the month. That's $800.
We can even put the name of the counselor here by putting their name in the Vendor list;
maybe we write them checks once in a while, then you put the name there.
And then every journal entry has two sides: an income and an expense side.
The expense would be whatever the expense account would have been had you written a check
for it. So if we had paid the counselor for their services, we have an expense account
under Professional Fees called Counselors, and we would put it there.
I'm going to put this same name there. What Class or what program do we put it to?
This is for Counselors, so we're going to put it there, which brings me to another advantage
of putting in-kind contributions. It ups your program expenses
if the donation is related to program costs. So that's always a good thing.
I'm going to go ahead and Save that, but before I save, do you see what's happening here?
We're increasing an income account, and we're increasing an expense account.
What does that do to the Profit & Loss statement? Not very much. It really just stays the same.
Let me pop this up. All right. SO right now, we've netted $16,000 before I put in this entry.
When I put in this entry, the $16,000 is going to stay the same. It's still $16,000 but now —
this is never what you want to happen at the end of a seminar, but I must've put the wrong date
on the journal entry. Did I not record it? I don't know what happened to my journal entry, Kyla.
I'm going to enter it one more time. Read me a couple of questions.
Kyla: Okay, sure. We had a couple of questions either about the online or the mobile version,
wondering if those are sufficient for nonprofit use.
Gregg: The online edition is getting better. I don't know that it's 100% there yet,
but the reporting isn't near as strong as it is for the desktop version.
You'll notice they're pushing the online edition, and at some point in the future,
that's exactly what we're going to be seeing, is the online edition.
The mobile version is not really a mobile version. I think they're talking about the a
that you can access the version.
Kyla: Right.
Gregg: That application allows you to do very little. You can see your outstanding invoices,
and you can do an invoice to customers but it's not really for anything else.
So I'm going to go back here. Hold on.
Kyla: Also, Gregg, my chat volunteer Becky just said that you dated your journal entry 2019,
if that helps you find it.
Gregg: Yes, I figured it out and redid it. Now we have in-kind gifts of $800
and then I'm going to expand this so that you can see. Here's our expense for counselors
and our in-kind gifts. So it didn't change it but now total expenses that are program-related go up.
When you enter in-kind gifts is up to you. Some people wait until the end of the year
so it doesn't confuse the Board of Directors right before the auditor comes.
Some people do it every month. It's up to you.
What other questions do we have? Let's take a couple of questions before we stop,
and then I'm going to give you the codes to get the discounted products.
Kyla: Sure. Someone was wondering besides Class can you apply Tags
to have more ways to track, for example, tracking by employee.
Gregg: Okay, so she wants to know the different ways of tracking.
This person, I think, is pretty smart. We can use Account to track.
There is something called Items that we can use to track. Items point to Accounts
so you could have five items pointed to one account. That's a way to track.
So that's two things. You have the Customer Job field, and then you have the Class field,
and that's really it. SO you've got one, two, three, four, five. What's the next question?
Kyla: Okay. James is wondering for those of us that are new, how do you go back and edit old entries.
He is an intern but there were entries that were made before he got there,
so they may have been entered differently.
Gregg: Okay. It's pretty simple. You just find the transaction that you want to change something on,
and then you just change it. When you go to change it, you click Save and it's changed,
unless somebody's locked you out from changing things. So that's pretty simple.
Now the only thing I will tell you, and I know the people who have been a long time
using QuickBooks are freaking out now, do not change the dollar amount of a transaction
if it has the word "cleared" on it. That means it has already cleared the bank in that dollar amount,
and if you change the dollar amount or delete the transaction, it's going to throw your bank rec off.
You'll get a warning to that effect, though. I think we're done.
Kyla: Yes, and when we get to the slide with the coupon code, there will be a lot of ways
to contact Gregg on there, so don't worry.
Gregg: Yes, let me go ahead and I'm going to stop sharing.
Kyla: I already stopped sharing your screen.
This is really quick. This is just a reminder of who TechSoup is before we get to that.
Just hold on, everybody. We will be showing those coupon codes in a second.
I did just want to remind you guys that we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization
just like so many of you out there, and we are trying to help you get the technology
and technology resources so you can operate at your full potential.
I do want to thank Ready Talk who is our webinar sponsor for the use of our ReadyTalk account.
I also want to thank Gregg. I want to thank Becky.